'Tis the Gift to Be Simple
May 7, 2021

In spring, a young man's fancy turns to love. Being middle-aged, my fancy turns
to simplifying my life--everything from cleaning out the closet to dumping cruft
on my hard drive. Over the past few weeks, I've been thinking about simplifying
this website, making it cleaner, leaner and more easy to read.

Believe it or not, I code all the html for this site by hand. As a result there
are a couple of quirks that the average reader can't see. For example, when I
created the header for one of the older versions of this site, I just threw
together some formatting inside a set of <code></code> tags at the top of the 
page. When another, later, revamp expanded the website from one page to four, 
rather than creating a CSS style-sheet and linking all the pages to it, I just 
cut and pasted the header formatting into each page. This, of course, now means 
that if I want to change the header on my web site, I have to do it manually--four 
times over.

In creating a simpler site, the easy thing to do would have been to go back and
create a CSS style-sheet, then change a couple of lines of html in each of the
four pages. Five minutes and I'd be finished. Of course, that's not what I did.
I spent an afternoon looking at the internet's stone age--the mid-to-late
1990s--and reminiscing about the days of text-heavy websites. And in the
process, I stumbled upon Justin Jackson's essay "Words[1]," which became the catalyst
for this update.

I'm hoping that this new version of my website will be both easier to read and
help readers focus on content rather than formatting. Feel free to have a look
at the source code if you're interested, and please do contact me to let me know
what you think about the new site.

[1] https://justinjackson.ca/words.html

(c) 2021 by Andrew Gudgel 
email: contact [at] andrewgudgel.com