Jeff Blogs

Social networking has gotten a lot of press recently. As the Internet continues to mature people try to understand what it can be used for and how it might add value to their lives. One niche that began with the younger crowd but soon reached mainstream was the blog. Blog which is short for weblog began as a way for someone to maintain a log of information on the web. It was just a few short years ago that if you interviewed the typical person on the street they would have no idea what a blog was let alone tell you that they had one. People were still getting their feet wet on the Internet and having a web site made up of a few static pages was seen as a luxury for the rich and technically advanced. I remember when I first built Now Hitting. It was primarily a series of static pages that I hand coded with individual styles. I had what would probably be classified as a precursor to a blog that I called “Diary of a Diehard”. This was again hand coded but allowed me an area where I could write small entries about baseball and specifically the Arizona Diamondbacks. This was one of the more popular aspects of Now Hitting and drew by far the most visitors to the site. It was also one of the more painful areas to maintain as I had to create a new page per entry and I was coding each of them by hand. Not really the most efficient use of my time but I could definitely see value in it.

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Just over a year ago I began planning the migration and updating of Now Hitting. This was necessary since the Arizona Diamondbacks had decided to change their colors from Purple and Teal to Sedona Red, Sonoran Sand, and Black. I’m not going to get into my feelings on the subject of the color change, those have been written about ad nauseum on Diary of a Diehard. The point was that I was faced with the task of updating a system to change the color scheme and potentially the layout. In a Web 2.0 type of world, this wouldn’t be a problem. You would simply open up the cascading style sheet (CSS), make a few changes to the color values and wha-la, a new look and feel with minimal effort. Yeah, that’s great but unfortunately Now Hitting has been in existence since 1998 which predates much of the internet technology including CSS. Ten years would place the original Now Hitting somewhere in the Mesozoic era probably in the Triassic period. I was definitely dealing with a websiteosaurus of epic proportions.

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