Working with Natalie Myers on her in-depth 693 project was a sometimes frustrating but ultimately rewarding experience. It often felt like the blind leading the blind -- I'm sure Natalie expected me to be more technically proficient. But she gave me some great material to work with, and I think the result was satisfactory.
We hit any number of snags along the way. There were long stretches of time when Blogger apparently went into hibernation. Another issue was that we had a few different sets of instructions floating around, some old, some updated, but none 100% reliable as far as I could tell. This was nobody's fault; it's just that we kept making new discoveries every day about how best to deal with Blogger's eccentricities, and no one had time to thoroughly update our manuals with every new discovery.
I'm beginning to feel more comfortable with the ins and outs of HTML code. Even though much of it is still gibberish to me, I like the idea that I can just punch in a formula and voila! I'm a web designer. More often, though, I would miss a back-slash here, a quotation mark there, and a grotesquely deformed window would pop up instead of my video clip. I hope to write in more detail on my personal blog about some of these horrible mutants, such as the zombie bar graph, the leprous video clip, and the incredible shrinking window.
Overall, the fact that it was such a slapdash, trial-and-error process only heightened my enjoyment of the experience and my satisfaction once it was done. It felt more like a process of experimentation and discovery than a dry, pre-determined exercise.
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