Five Dollar Wrench

About The Website

Shouldn't the opposite

of Rich Text be Poor Text?

— Plain Text

I designed this website in plain text, and I wrote the code by hand. In a text editor. Old school.

That's how it's done. Right?

Actually, no. I do not recommend doing it this way.

Ugh.

I was sitting in the doctor's office, waiting to have my annual physical, and of course the doctor was running late.

I was bored, so I opened the notes app on my phone and started sketching out the layout for this website. Well, typing. Not sketching.

When I got home, I started writing the code.

For the record, I suck at writing code. A web designer could have whipped up this site in an hour. Oh, who am I kidding? Make that ten minutes. It's all just text. I'm not going to admit how long it took me, but there was a lot of cursing.

It was a fun project though.

I wanted the design to be as minimal as possible, which was a challenge because I wanted site navigation and novel-page navigation, and I wanted to post some some non-novel stuff. And I wanted the site to be flexible, because eventually I'm going to post bonus material from the novel, including a bunch of deleted scenes. And, and, blah blah.

This website is not a theme, and it doesn't run on Wordpress or any other content management system.

A content management system would have made this so much easier, but I built the website the same way I wrote the novel. I did it by hand, the way I wanted to do it.

And, y'know what? I'm glad.

I enjoy being able to say, "I made this."