Work in Progress

How many personal websites have you seen with that old phrase Work in Progress or Under Construction plastered on the front page, possibly for months on end? Or maybe embellishing that with a yeah, I'm not dead, site will be updated soon... notice? It's a lot, isn't it? And now my contribution to the WWW is just adding to that heap of abandoned websites.

Yes, we all start with a vague idea of what we want to put on My First Website, fire up some godawful WYSIWYG webpage writer like FrotPage, and quickly arrange the fonts, colours and background images so that they look juu-uust right, and then... 204 No Content. At least, nothing other than the three photos which necessitated the creation of the site in the first place. So, slap a Work In Progress banner on it, and leave it till there's something to write about.

Or maybe the maintainer has got bored of all the tired old joke pages that have been there for months, and after removing them you realise that there's very little of any substance left. Again, uploading something no more extravagant or timeconsuming than a hi-res image of black-and-yellow stripes and the immortal words Under Construction will remove the need to exercise the imagination.

And so it remains, its pre-stylesheet HTML becoming slowly obsolete while still appearing as if it could have been written yesterday. The owner loses interest, and the vicious circle of procrastination begins once they realise that their lack of updates has lost most of their audience. (This may be confirmed by whatever hack of a hitcounter is still on the page. A visitor will feel quite disappointed when they see that the count has increased by exactly one since the last time they looked.) Yet it's still absolutely unthinkable to remove the site completely and put up with Page Not Found or the webspace provider's placeholders, and a page containing links only to a CV, last year's holiday snaps and three friends' websites needs something extra to make it worthwhile.

And this is exactly what's happening to my site. Having got bored of most of the pointless content, but still having a few very minority-appeal sections of it I'm not willing to part with, I find myself transporting it all from my Uni space to a more permanent home, with the intention of not actually doing much to it. It will remain poorly-organised with needless bits all over it. It will go weeks/months/years without any update outside of the tech sections. (I don't want to write a weblog - the only time I want to write about something interesting that happened to me, it tends to go on the rants page.) I might get around to upgrading to yet another new standard from W3C, I may add more photos When I Finish The Film, but the frontpage is always going to be nothing more than index.html - a list of the bits that are of some use. And that list probably won't need much changing.