Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned. It’s been almost two weeks since my last blog post. I’ve been building a new website for our tea bar.

Building websites is a good experience. I always have mixed emotions. Excitement and enthusiasm on one hand, frustration on the other. Things always take longer than I expect them to, and there are always little glitches in the code or the formatting that I spend far too long figuring out how to fix.

My greatest frustration, though, is with Microsoft. I do my web design on a Macintosh, creating standards-compliant web pages. I test as I go using Firefox and Safari, and then check the pages on Opera and Chrome before moving over to Windows. Inevitably, I can fire up Firefox, Opera, and Chrome on Windows and the web pages will look just the same as they did on the Mac. Four different web browsers on two different operating systems — all is well.

Then I open the site in Internet Explorer. *sigh* As much as I try to remember all of the Microsoft glitches and they way they flout standards, I inevitably miss a few things. Then I begin the slow and painful process of figuring out why my site works on every major web browser in the world except that cursed IE. You’d think after all these years, they could have fixed the box model bug and all of those other little problems. Oh, yeah. I forgot. Standards are for everybody except Microsoft.

At the moment, I’m wrestling with a picture that just flat-out disappears on IE, and a menu that inexplicably doubles in height. All of the code behind the scenes works beautifully. I do have another week or two of taking pictures, filling in descriptions, and coding up a few extra pages I think the site needs. I’m actually looking forward to that. At some point during that time, though, I’m going to have to fix the aesthetics on Microsoft Internet Explorer. I’m not looking forward to that part.

As a side note, I’ll also be splitting this blog in two: one for tea-related stuff, and the other for everything else (but mostly writing). I’ll post more details on that shortly.