So, How's the Site?

Alll righty, things have been getting weird around here. I need to vacate this current apartment very soon; my roommate has plans in motion to head for New York and I have no visible means of support remaining. Whether I'll even be able to stay in Austin depends very heavily on the miracle factor of finding a better than minimum wage job around here, on which the odds are dropping with each passing day of the empty gmail box.

In an effort to impress some potential employers to whom I've sent resumes, I spent most of the last couple weeks sharpening up The Devil's Virtue, which had a fair amount of opening-day blues: after the first draft got posted it became apparent that some of the image links were broken, and the file-structure was fatally flawed as well, so I took the opportunity to streamline it a bit -- tightening the graphics and arranging it so that each page used the same table with only slight modifications, and making the file-structure somewhat more logical.

Of course, immediately after posting the 'corrected' draft I finally started researching CSS and realized that there's a truckload more that can be done to improve the site. Converting the whole thing from tables and big huge clunky HTML assembled by Kompozer over to a smoother CSS setup and tighter code composed by hand ought to cut loading times, make updating and adding pages easier, and make me look a good clip more professional to potential employers.

But I'm afraid that upgrade is going to have to wait until after I move -- to wherever the hell I'm going to end up -- and even then may be considerably delayed by concerns of more basic survival. For the moment, The Devil's Virtue is on a 'good enough for now' status, but I am cooking up the CSS update when I can find the moments. Right now, though, my prime concern is getting this apartment cleaned up and cleaned out, and packing my stuff for a move which might have to happen very quickly in the next couple of weeks. I'm already down to very little more than the things I most want to keep, and if I can't salvage anything else from this situation, at the very least I really don't want to end up losing all my possessions this time.

In the process of packing I've finally gone through my file cabinet and boxes of unsorted notes, and sorted out a fat accordion file of everything pertaining to the projects which already have slots on the Projects section at TDV, so I've got lots of material to add to that section -- once I have time to convert it all over from handwritten notes, and find a scanner for the miscellaneous sketches. Again, though, it may be quite some time before any of that arrives online. In the meantime I hope folks enjoy what's already available on the site, and for that matter, I hope anyone shows up to enjoy it in the first place.