Joyce Maynard and me

I have had a long-term relationship with Joyce Maynard. It goes back to the 1970’s. Joyce does not know me and has no idea as to who I am. Yet she has influenced my life and thinking for over forty years.

I first became acquainted with Joyce shortly after I graduated from Pitzer College in 1975. It was not long after I went to work at B. Dalton Bookseller when I read her 1973 book Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties, expanded from an essay that appeared in the New York Times Magazine. I felt an immediate and deep connection with her and recognized that we shared many of the same values about growing up, leaving home, and heading out into the world. The book touched me deeply as I was leaving the sheltered world of academia and figuring out how to buy my own groceries and pay my own rent. At that time I had no clue that she was the 18-year-old who had moved in with J.D. Salinger.

I was disappointed, therefore, to hear Joyce’s commentaries for the Spectrum series on CBS radio. Back in those days CBS radio had a rotating group of commentators who offered short audio essays on current affairs. Joyce always took the conservative perspective, very much at odds with her viewpoint in Looking Back. I was further disappointed, devastated, and hurt, I felt stabbed in the back, when I read a piece of hers, I don’t remember where, in which she wrote that what she said in Looking Back was not what she really felt but what she believed readers of the era wanted to see. Joyce, how could you?

In spite of this betrayal I paid attention when I saw her name, and I was compelled to buy and read her 1998 “tell-all” book about her life with Salinger, At Home in the World. I felt sympathy for her naiveté and ineptness, but she wrote nothing to heal the original betrayal.

Joyce resurfaced recently, when I turned the page of the September 9 New York Times Book Review and saw her name on a full-page essay. She notes that twenty years have passed since the publication of At Home in the World. She reminds me that we are very close to the same age (there’s only three months difference, in fact). She writes of being ostracized by the literary community for the perceived betrayal of Salinger in her book, and about how, after all these years and after all of the novels and other books she has written over the decades, she is still most remembered, by some at least, for her brief relationship with Salinger.

I feel a certain sympathy, even some empathy for her. But Joyce, you still betrayed me more than forty years ago. I should be over all that, I know. The truth, nonetheless, is that I hardly knew ye.

California Supreme Court contractor definition may affect independent editorial professionals

The California Supreme Court recently issued a unanimous decision on how an independent contractor is defined. The definition was not a ruling in a particular case, but was intended to provide guidance to lower courts in pending cases. There are a number of fields where an individual's status as a contractor is being questioned. These fields include ride sharing services such as Uber and Lyft, as well as other industries. Construction firms, for example, often bring in workers as contractors rather than as employees. The result is that individuals are deprived of benefits and state and federal governments miss out on payroll taxes.

While the definition was not focused on independent writers and editors, I certainly see an impact there, and this in a field where independent editorial professionals have in fact long been legitimately considered contractors. Certainly I have concerns about my own work, more on the writing than on the web development side.  

In order to bring on an individual as a contractor the supreme court definition states a business must show that:

1. the worker is free from the control and direction of the employer
2. performs work that is outside the hirer's core business
3. customarily engages in “an independently established trade, occupation or business.”

Numbers 1 and 3 are fine, but the kicker is number 2. I recently did a web site for an attorney, so no problem there. But last year I wrote a number of case studies for a corporate advocacy firm. Since that kind of work is very much the company's core business I would (so it appears) have to be an employee to do that sort of work for them in the future.

Here is the original story as it appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

The state of Massachusetts defines a contractor in an almost identical fashion, and I have seen a couple of anecdotal indications that there may have been a negative impact on independent editorial professionals there.

I'm not sure what the impact of this definition will be on the ability of writers and editors in California to get contract work, but it's not going to make it any easier.

 

finding the correct word (or phrase)

I wrote recently about avoiding words with fluid or ambiguous meanings. I focused on the word "fulsome," whose usage has changed over the decades and which has conflicting definitions across dictionaries.

Sometimes, however, a word has a very specific meaning and is still used incorrectly. If you've seen the movie The Princess Bride you may remember the scene in which the Wallace Shawn character is told that he is being followed. He responds more than once saying, "inconceivable!" Finally one of his henchmen says, "I don't think you know what that word means, boss."

Even if one feels compelled to use jargon, most jargon terms have specific meanings.

I once had a manager nearly twenty years ago who picked up jargon like a chameleon adapts to its surroundings. We worked with a lot of engineers based in India and he picked up their the phrase, "at the earliest." That is a highly non-grammatical construct used by engineers whose first language is not English. It means, as you might surmise, "as soon as possible." Once in my performance review this manager used the phrase "just in time" regarding my providing feedback to an employee. That phrase has to do with the manufacturing process and getting parts to the factory right before assembly, and not any earlier, to save on inventory costs.

That’s obviously not what he meant. He meant I should provide feedback to this employee promptly, and simply stating "prompt feedback" would have made a lot more sense.

A little thought can frequently eliminate such simple errors.

 

words and their (sometimes elusive) meanings

Most people who love words and the English language are familiar with the book Alice in Wonderland and the character Humpty Dumpty. They are well acquainted with Humpty's arrogant perspective on words:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."

Most of us are not so presumptuous, but words can be tricky sometimes. I often think of the 2017 column about the word "fulsome" by Ben Yagoda in the Lingua Franca blog. Yagoda writes that the word at one time meant "excessive flattery," but has now taken on a positive connotation.

Indeed, the Merriam-Webster Unabridged online dictionary lists the first meaning as "very full and abundant," providing "copious" as a synonym. The second meaning is "notably or appealingly full or rounded in shape." Only further down the list do the more negative meanings appear.

The more conservative online American Heritage Dictionary, on the other hand, lists the first meaning as, "excessively flattering or insincerely earnest," offering "unctuous" as a synonym. The second meaning is "disgusting or offensive."

Confusing.

The the approach of the online Oxford Living Dictionaries is to take the middle road, offering "complimentary or flattering to an excessive degree" as the first meaning and "of large size or quantity; generous or abundant" for the second definition.

All three dictionaries include usage notes which discuss the changing and ambiguous nature of the word.

My approach in such circumstances: avoid the word altogether. I will find a different word that conveys more precisely what I am trying to express.

 

staying in style

I had the privilege for several months of writing customer success stories for an agency in Silicon Valley. I really enjoyed the work. It was interesting and it kept me on my toes. I also had to keep in mind which client I was writing for. All of the agency's clients except for one used the Associated Press Stylebook (AP). The one holdout client used the Chicago Manual of Style, which I prefer.

There are differences between the two styles. Chicago supports the serial comma and says to spell out numbers under one hundred. AP tells us to omit the serial comma and to spell out numbers one through ten.

There are other style guides, of course. The Modern Language Association has its own style guide, but that is followed mostly in the academic world and not so much in business writing. The Council of Scientific Editors publishes the Scientific Style and Format guide, which I am told states that numbers are never spelled out.

There is much that all agree on with respect to proper grammar and syntax. It’s important to maintain those standards. But not everything is set in stone. As I hear from many experts, the important thing is to be consistent within a given work. I am partial to Chicago, but I can write to AP and I do.

I admit to being something of a style and grammar nerd. But then I enjoy being a style and grammar nerd.

 

my dictionary dilemma

I wrote a while back about having subscribed to the unabridged Merriam-Webster (M-W) dictionary online. It made sense, given the freelance writing work that I am doing. But then the thought occurred to me: have I gone over to the Dark Side?

I have been an advocate of the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) for decades. I have long loved its more prescriptive as opposed to descriptive approach (though that is a serious oversimplification). The usage notes with the AHD usage panel can be very helpful. In my B. Dalton Bookseller days in the 1970s and 1980s I was able to singlehandedly skew the sales reports in the stores in which I worked, increasing AHD sales at the expense of the whatever-current-at-the-time edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. I would chortle with delight when I saw those reports.

Even today the AHD sometimes includes details not found in the M-W unabridged. When looking up the word "bake-off" for a piece I was writing both M-W and AHD capitalized the phrase and said that it was a Service Mark. But only AHD added the note that it was sometimes used lower case and generically. Similarly, the M-W unabridged does not list "podiatric," while AHD does list it as an adjective under podiatry.

The problem is that it is not clear to me how much in the way of resources are being put into the AHD these days and whether we'll see another edition after the current 5th, given that its publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is a struggling firm. M-W seems to have effectively made the transition to the digital world and appears to be healthily surviving if not thriving.

Yes, I paid for my subscription to the unabridged M-W and that was the Right Thing to do given the work I am doing. But I can't shake the feeling that I am cheating on a long-time faithful lover.

 

compiling a dictionary: an art, not a science

I have been enjoying Kory Stamper's new book Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. She writes about her life as a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster. The book is thoroughly delightful.

Stamper quotes an article discussing a fundraiser held by Barbara Streisand at her home. The article hyphenates "fund-raiser." Kory writes that this is an example of the transition of a phrase from an open compound to a hyphenated compound.

But wait. I always thought of fundraiser as a single word. I confirmed that by checking out my go-to dictionary, the American Heritage. One word. Then I checked the free online Merriam-Webster, which is based on the M-W Collegiate Dictionary. It showed only the hyphenated version.

hmmm....

I had occasion to sign up and pay for the full, unabridged Merriam-Webster, not on account of this quest, but because of  of the work I was doing for a client. I looked up the word in the unabridged. It is an interesting entry. The main spelling is two words. The second spelling is one word. The third spelling is hyphenated.

This reinforced for me something that I have long known but which I often forget. Dictionaries are not created by some omnipotent Language Being. They are compiled by real people making human decisions. While each dictionary publisher has its own rigorous rules and guidelines, producing a dictionary is an art, not a science.

 

in defense of tautology

I get an email each time the folks at grammarbook.com publish a new blog entry. The pieces are often interesting and I have the opportunity refresh and review my knowledge of various grammar rules. Sometimes, however, the people there can get just a little too fussy and stuffy. Such was the case with a recent discussion of tautologies.

A tautology is, of course, a needless repetition of words. The Grammar Book crew tells us that we should eliminate all tautologies from our writing.

Some tautologies we can clearly do without. "Forward planning" is a good example. Can you plan for the past? However, the article also cites phrases such as "each and every one," "above and beyond," and "vast majority" as forms to avoid.

The piece admits that tautologies will always exist in spoken language. (When I was in the food service business in college the cook would say that he was going to "steam off" the vegetables. The unnecessary "off" is part of the rhythm and cadence of spoken English.) The story then goes on to say, "Careful writers, on the other hand, have the time and the will to infuse their linguistic diets with protein. They cut the sugar and carbs that add calories without nutrients to their thoughts."

What the Grammar Book people fail to acknowledge is that 1) cadence and rhythm matter in written English as well as spoken and 2) the longer version can have a different shade of meaning than the simpler form.

To cite their examples, both "each and every one" and "above and beyond" have a cadence that a stripped down version would be without. They also offer a form of emphasis that would be missing in a simpler version. There are instances where "vast majority" is indeed appropriate. Fifty percent plus one is a majority, but not a vast majority. In a recent ballot initiative in the City of Lake Elsinore, California, the No vote was 3,320, while the Yes vote was 446. In this case, the vast majority of people casting their ballots voted No.

Here's another phrase the blog tells us to avoid: "invited guest." Again, there are times when "invited" might be appropriate. If you are driving down the interstate and are getting tired you might stop and check in at a motel. You are a guest at the motel, but not an invited guest. However, if you receive an invitation to a formal banquet on linen stock with raised ink and then are treated shabbily by the host, someone might write in your defense that you were, after all, an "invited guest."

While there are plenty of situations in which tautology is best avoided (don't you hate those signs that read "ATM Machine"?) tautology is nonetheless one of many components that makes English the rich language that it is.

Use it when appropriate.

 

a victory for the Oxford comma (and for grammar nerds)

Grammar nerds are delighted at the news story this week that the Oxford comma decided a court case. Being a grammar nerd who loves the Oxford comma, I got caught up in the excitement.

The Oxford comma, or serial comma, is the final comma right before the conjunction in a series of words. Some style guides favor it, others say to omit it. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage says not to use it. The Chicago Manual of Style tells us we should use it.

Here is an example: "I had eggs, toast, and orange juice." If you omit the final comma (I had eggs, toast and orange juice) the sentence could be read as telling the toast and orange juice that you had eggs for breakfast.

In fact, eliminating ambiguity is one of the strongest arguments in favor of the Oxford comma. Take this example: "This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God." While this was probably never really a dedication in a published book, I love it nonetheless. The implication that the author believes that his parents are Ayn Rand and God really strikes my funny bone.

And the court case? The court case was all about ambiguity. In Maine a group of dairy delivery drivers believed they were entitled to overtime pay. Their employer said they weren't. The relevant statute states that workers involved in the following activities are not eligible for overtime:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:
(1) Agricultural produce;
(2) Meat and fish products; and
(3) Perishable foods. 

Note the missing comma before the "or." Because that comma was not there, the court read "packing for shipment or distribution" as a single activity, when in fact "packing for shipment" and "distribution" were probably meant to be understood as separate activities. Nonetheless, the judge sided with the (missing) Oxford comma and ruled that the delivery drivers were eligible for overtime.

Here's to the Oxford comma!

 

different styles for different situations

I just finished my second time through the Great Courses lecture series Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths of Language Usage by John McWhorter. It's an enjoyable and fascinating set of lectures about how language is used. Given that McWhorter is a linguist, he is as interested in how language is actually used as he is in how it "should be" used. (Yes, I do seem to have a fondness for linguists.)

In his lecture on texting he suggests that the practice is not as harmful to the language as some people might want to think. He points out that the same questions arose when the use of email first became common. He also suggests that the abbreviations used in texting do not carry over into everyday speech and formal writing. He uses the examples OMG, LOL, BFF, and WTF.

It seems to me, however, that sometimes people do say "o-m-g." It's a nice alternative, perhaps, in polite company to using the the complete phrase it replaces. Someone might also say "b-f-f" I suppose. But people certainly don't go around saying "lol" in everyday speech. In fact "w-t-f" might be a useful euphemism to introduce into casual conversation, but I've never heard anyone say it.

In any case, I think that McWhorter is correct: texting has not had an adverse effect on other forms of communication. He sees four boxes, as he calls them:

• Being a good conversationalist
• Having great formal writing skills
• Making a compelling and effective speech
• Crafting oneself as a "maximally clever e-mailer and as an aggressively clever texter."

McWhorter tells us, "Cultivate your four boxes."

That makes sense to me.

 

automated proofing tools and their limitations

I have a long history with automated proofing tools. That history goes back to about 1990, when I experimented with a couple of grammar checkers while working at a small software company. To put this in context, at that time the only people who used Microsoft Windows were those who used graphic or desktop publishing tools that required it. The rest of us used the command line with the C prompt to start our programs, which, you may remember, we had to use one at a time. It was not until 1992 with the release of Windows 3.1 that the graphical interface came into common use.

The results of the testing I did with these proofing tools were disappointing. Things that should have been flagged weren't and things that did not need to be flagged often were. Sadly, twenty-six years later in the world of Windows 10 little has changed.

In her marvelous Great Courses lecture series, English Grammar Boot Camp, Anne Curzan shows little love for the Microsoft Word grammar checker. She says that it often gets things wrong, and sometimes the rules it tries to enforce are often not even rules. (For example, on not starting a sentence with "and."  She quotes Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage on this point.)

I certainly have my issues with Microsoft tools. The Word 2013 proofing tools failed to flag a repeated "the." The grammar checker in Outlook wanted me to lowercase "give" at the beginning of a sentence (perhaps because it was preceded by "p.m.") and failed to catch a "you" instead of "your" when I used the phrase "your money."

Microsoft is not the only guilty party, however. The proofing tool for my personal blog has its annoyances. It asked me to replace "thyme" with "time" and "adobo" with "adobe." I guess it doesn't have much of an interest in cooking.

The bottom line: Don't put too much trust in the tools. Proofread carefully. Better yet, get someone to proofread your work for you.

 

a holiday language laugh

I hope you are enjoying the holiday season.

I follow a blog entitled Language Log, which offers interesting and sometimes amusing insights into language. This week Mark Liberman shared a few cartoons that poked some fun at the intricacies of English grammar at the expense of A Christmas Carol.

In one, the "Ghost of Christmas Future Imperfect Conditional" says to Scrooge:

I bring news of what would have been going to happen if you were not to have been going to change your ways.

There are a couple more as well. Take a look.

Happy Holidays! I plan to be back in the new year with more notes on writing and the web.

 

resources for online education

Whether you are looking to improve your web skills or your writing skills there are a lot of resources available online. You will find a lot of variation in pricing, policies, and processes. I thought I would share with you some of the resources I've used.

udemy:  This is the best of web sites, this is the worst of web sites. It is the worst because prices can vary wildly and because anyone can upload a course. It is the best because there some excellent courses by qualified instructors and because sale prices can be very good. The best advice is caveat  emptor: buyer beware. Pay close attention to the course ratings and wait for the course to be on sale.  I have taken some highly valuable courses on udemy. I used the techniques in Jonas Schmedtmann's responsive web design course to build my own site.

udacity: There are a lot of good things to say about udacity. Courses are developed by engineers at companies such as Google, IBM, and Amazon. They are free unless you enroll in a nanodegree program. The videos are professionally produced and include a dash of humor. Tests allow you to gauge what you have learned.

edX: edX is different from udemy and udacity in that courses start on specific dates rather than being on demand. Courses are provided by academic institutions worldwide and taught by instructors affiliated with those institutions. New lessons are made available on a regular basis. They are reasonably priced. I have only taken one course from edX, and that one was inferior in my mind to what I have taken from udemy and udacity. I may simply have taken the wrong course.

I would be remiss if I did not mention Lynda, now owned by LinkedIn. Lynda does have some very good courses, but the meter is always running. Lynda charges a flat monthly fee. If you take a lot of courses this could be a good thing. Otherwise, you have to be disciplined in your course-taking to avoid having your money go down the drain.

Whatever your preferences, there is an online education option for you.

 

the passive voice

I recently came across an article I had saved from the first quarter 1991 issue of Technical Communication, the journal of the Society for Technical Communication, or STC. The article by Kent Porter is entitled "Usage of the Passive Voice," and is a hilarious spoof on the use of the passive in technical communication.

The passive voice, of course, is when the subject of the sentence becomes the object. The sentence "He clobbered me" is in the active voice. "I was clobbered by him" is in the passive voice.

Although most of Porter's article is funny only if you have either been a technical writer or a user of technical manuals, the author provides a couple of tidbits that any student of language can enjoy. First, he re-writes Shakespeare:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, your ears should be lent to me. … It is intended that Caesar be buried, not praised.

In another example he writes:

Jane was asked to be married by Robert through a romantic proposal.

Both great examples of why to avoid the passive.

Of course, there are times when it is appropriate to use the passive. Anne Curzan, in her video course English Grammar Boot Camp, writes about starting a blog entry this way:

I have a new favorite mug. It was given to me by graduate students in the English and Education program.

Curzan points out that the passive is useful here because the focus of the second sentence is the mug and not the graduate students.

In The Elements of Style Strunk and White state:

The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive. … This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.

The pompous H.W. Fowler states in Modern English Usage that the passive "sometimes leads to bad grammar, false idiom, or clumsiness." Note the "sometimes."

The bottom line, then: give preference to the active voice, but use the passive when appropriate.

By the way, if you are a technical writer or a user of technical manuals you might enjoy Porter's original article. It's here in PDF format. Note that the article starts halfway down the page.

 

double negatives

My entries to date have all been about the web. It's time to talk about writing, or in this case language in general.

I got a good laugh when I saw this cartoon on Facebook. Judging by how many different places it shows up in a Google image search, it has certainly made the rounds. And I am one of those who would initially agree with the perspective of the jurors.


Many experts in the English language would disagree with this interpretation of the defendant's statement, however. They point out that English is not math or logic, and a double negative can be used for emphasis.

In her video course English Grammar Boot Camp, the instructor, Anne Curzan, discusses double negatives in detail. Curzan says that while there are sentences in English where the negatives do in fact cancel each other out, a double, or multiple, negative is also frequently used for emphasis. Similar to “I didn’t do nuthin’” she uses the example, “We don’t have nothing to hide.” She says it is clear that the meaning is “We have nothing to hide,” and not “We have something to hide.”

Curzan points out that double negatives used for emphasis can be found in Chaucer. She tells us that you can find double negatives used for emphasis in Shakespeare as well. In As You Like It, Celia says: “I cannot go no further.”

She says that she has two answers when someone says, “But when you multiply two negatives you get a positive,” to support the idea that two negatives in a sentence cancel each other out.

1. “Language is not math.”
2. “OK fine, let’s do math. If you have two negatives in math and you add them, what do you get? You actually get a bigger negative.”

So if we listen to the defendant on the witness stand saying “I didn’t do nuthin’” I guess we’re actually going to have to acquit after all.
 

the dominance of mobile

My last two entries were about ways to create your web site. I wrote about using a cloud-based service to simplify the process and I said that you can still hand-code your site if you so choose. The cloud-based services take care of optimizing your site for mobile devices (in some cases requiring you to do some tweaking). I wrote that if you do your own coding you need to take advantage of free tools out there to make sure your site displays properly on mobile devices.

We all know that mobile devices are ubiquitous, and if you don't use a mobile device yourself you nonetheless constantly see people out in public focused on their iPhone or Android device. How dominant is mobile? One study says that in December 2013 desktop computers had a 47% share of digital media time. By December 2015 that had decreased to 35%. In the same time period mobile's share increased from 53% to 65%.

The study says that most e-commerce transactions still take place on a PC, but if you have a web site to create visibility for your business or nonprofit, the odds are better than even that a visitor is going to get to your web site using a mobile device.

Some experts use the phrase "mobile first." I'm not sure that I like that mindset. I believe that it is essential for your web site to be attractive and usable on a desktop or laptop. At the same time mobile needs to be integral to your web design strategy. Your site needs to be responsive: accessible on any device of any size.

Whether you choose to use a drag-and-drop cloud-based service or whether you elect to hand-code your site, it's important to keep mobile on your mind all the time.

 

another approach to creating your web site

My last entry was about using a cloud-based service to create your web site. When you take this approach you can create a beautiful web site with little or no HTML knowledge. The service will also optimize your site for mobile devices.

Perhaps you are a get-under-the-hood kind of person, however. If that's your style you can certainly code your site by hand. There are a lot of tools out there that will help you in this task. There is a cool open source editor from Adobe called Brackets. I have come to really like it and to rely on it for my web site.

Of course you need to make sure that your code is optimized for mobile. That is essential. I took a marvelous course from udemy entitled Build Responsive Real World Websites. (Responsive, of course, means making your site viewable on any kind of device.) The course is clear, complete, and comprehensive. The instructor includes a useful PDF manual and directs you to a number of free tools to assist you with web design in general and making your site responsive in particular. (By the way, I'm not getting any sort of kickback on this. I simply found the course extremely useful and well done. I used the principles in the course to build my web site.)

For HTML reference, the W3C HTML/Elements listing is the definitive source. However, I find the independent W3C Schools HTML Element Reference much more accessible. It is my go-to source when I have an HTML question.

Creating your site by manually coding it can be challenging if your are not an HTML expert. At the same time it can be a satisfying process to build a site from the ground up with your own hands.

 

creating your web site

When I first set up my web site in 1996 I was given a UNIX account, space on the server, and was told, in essence, "Knock yourself out." I was very much on my own and had to learn what I could from the sources I could find.

Much has changed since then. In the following years tools proliferated, from the simple and free to the complex and expensive. Some required strong HTML knowledge, while others, like Dreamweaver, provided a graphical user interface.

Today the landscape is very different. In this era of The Cloud there are many online services that not only host your web site and provide a graphical interface, but which offer drag and drop tools for creating your web site. I just finished launching a web site built on Wix, which allows your to build a complete web site via drag and drop. I was a little reluctant to give up control over the underlying HTML code, but I was doing this for a nonprofit and I wanted them to have an environment where a non-technical volunteer could update the site if they decided to go that route. Wix pricing is also reasonable, and it was easy to claim the organization's desired domain name. Both very helpful for a nonprofit.

Wix has a few limitations, but there are generally workarounds. I was able to accomplish everything I wanted to on the site. I was pleased with the results I achieved for the Student of the Month program.

There are other services that do much the same thing. My cousin is a freelance marketing consultant. He has been using Squarespace for a number of years and is very happy with it. He has also used Virb for a client and was impressed with that service.

Whatever route you choose, creating your web site today is much easier than it was in 1996.



   

the evolution of the web

I have been involved with web sites for a very long time. I acquired my domain csquared.com in 1996 and immediately started creating a web site. I have worked with web sites in one form or another ever since then.

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. HTML is the language used to create web pages and web sites. Standards for HTML are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C for short. You can find their web site at w3c.org. While the basics of HTML are unchanged, the standard has evolved to allow for the creation of more powerful and useful web sites. The current standard is HTML5, along with CSS3. CSS stands for cascading style sheet. Cascading Style Sheets provide the formatting for web pages.

Most web browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, etc.) do a great job of maintaining backward compatibility, so you can continue to create web pages using older versions of HTML and the page will display properly. But you are missing out on a lot of functionality when you do. HTML5 and CSS3 also provide the framework for more efficient and logically structured code.

When my corporate career ended and I started looking at the world of freelancing I began taking online courses on HTML5 and CSS3. I was astonished at how much more powerful, efficient, and elegant the current standard is compared to the older version I had kept using out of habit and laziness. (The HTML reference manual that still sits on my shelf covers version 4.01 and has a copyright date of 2001.) You can learn about HTML5 and CSS3 on online learning sites like udemy, udacity, and edx.

Of course, you may not need these skills at all. Companies are popping up that allow you to create beautiful web sites with no knowledge of HTML and CSS. I'll talk about those next week.

 

it's a small world

I was a denizen of the high tech world of Silicon Valley for many years where I spent sixteen years working for a Fortune 100 company. I now live in Southern California on the eastern edge of what is called the Inland Empire, itself east of Los Angeles.

During my high tech years I worked on a variety of global distributed teams. From Silicon Valley I worked, at various times, with team members in Houston, New England, the United Kingdom, Australia, and almost always India. Even though I am no longer in a corporate environment, with broadband Internet access, Skype, and email it's easy to work with anyone anywhere from my spot in Southern California.

If you have a project I can give you a hand with please do let me know.