When I was 16 or 17, I remember smuggling books into class and reading them under the desk in boring classes: usually the ones I was ‘forced’ into doing because my school didn’t have enough people who wanted to do final-year drama as a subject to justify a drama class, so the two of us got to do ‘Art Design’ instead. We didn’t actually get put in a design class, either, just stuck in the back of Miss Boyd’s print-making room and left to our own devices, which probably explains how I ended up getting a C in design.

Anyway. One of the books I remember reading in such a clandestine fashion was Molly Holzschlag’s Guide to Designing with Stylesheets, Tables, and Frames, which must have been very new out then, and was really my introduction to the crazy new world of web design. Back then, we didn’t even have an internet connection at home, but that didn’t stop me fantasising about, and endlessly redesigning, my own personal web page.

This is mostly relevant to this post in two ways. Firstly, that I haven’t stopped fantasising about, and endlessly redesigning, my own personal web page. I think I’ve had three or four designs that have actually made it live, and probably ten times that many that maybe made it to the templating stage before being abandoned. This site has consisted of a ‘coming soon’ page for a good three or four years; before that, an older version (which I won’t link to here) is still floating around the tubes somewhere, despite my having ceased subscription to the hosting provider at least five or six years ago.

I think the main reason I haven’t just got something up there has been that I have been looking for a way to package every aspect of my (rather complicated) life into one neat little box, including anything and everything I’ve ever done on the Internet. One thing I realised at Webstock this week, though, was that nobody cares about the past: at least, not in the way I mean it here. Little bits of code I wrote for long-dead computers, cartoons referencing student politicians from bygone eras, ‘news’ articles about a toothache I had this one time: they’re all completely irrelevant to anyone who isn’t me, so why am I wasting my time archiving when I could be creating and contributing?

I’m not sure how this bold ‘do something NOW’ approach will work out. For example, I’m using a theme for this blog I haven’t customised at all, and for the first time since I realised you could use software to run a web site, I am using somebody else’s software out of the box, which scares me a little (although I did make sure I could customise it first). I just wanted to start doing something, and worry about the details later.

The other reason my little anecdote is relevant is that Molly was one of the speakers at Webstock. I was really excited about hearing her speak (along with some of my other Web heroes like Dan Cederholm and Kathy Sierra), given what an influence she and her books had had on my formative web years; what I never expected was that I’d get a chance to tell her in person at a Wellington Bar after the closing dinner.

She seemed really touched. Unfortunately, she also seemed really drunk, and so now my Webstock Story™ is about exactly how many of my shirt buttons Molly Holzschlag thought should be undone. Which, I guess, is just proof that we’re all human. But she did leave me with one piece of advice: “Have a beautiful, beautiful life”.

I’ll do my best.