I’ve been working my bippies off. I’m not sure what bippies are, or how much or just how many are actually left, but I’m pretty sure I have a whole lot less of them.

It’s the website thing. I’m designing websites. And this is what I’ve concluded. Why in the world would someone have a website that, when they want it changed, every page need fixing, when there are these content management things, and when you want a “new look,” poof everything changes in a flash.

I decided that if I’m going to design websites, it would look pretty silly not to design my own website. Missy Chabot of Chabot Web Design, not only designed my website, way back when in the year 2004, but she also became a really good friend. So do I feel like a heel? Yup, I sure do. But if I don’t want a website designed by moi, than who else would possible want one? And besides, who better to practice on than myself.

What I discovered, I never really thought about this, is that I have 24 pages on my website. That’s a lot of pages, there’s no poof on that one. The Newburyport Blog, I see, now has more than 1000 pages. That’s really a whole lot of pages. And I say to myself, “Can you imagine changing 1000 pages one by one, when poof, 1000 pages can change like that?”

I’m working away on changing my website, I’m currently on page nine, there’s a ways to go.

The other thing that I’ve discovered is that I have “Safari,” and everything I design looks pretty good in Safari. But when I go and take a gander at whatever it is that I’ve designed, in Internet Explorer, it looks like crap. Plus all the IE versions look different. Things look different in IE5.5, in IE6, in IE7, I mean really different. I’m trying to make friends with IE, but sometimes I’m starting to think of IE as the enemy.

I have a “draft” of a website, that’s based on old photographs of Newburyport, MA, that are in the public domain, courtesy of the Archives at the Newburyport Public Library, here in Newburyport, MA. When Mary Baker Design goes live, folks can download the website with the old Newburyport photos for free. A sort of giving back to the community thing.

I don’t know if my friend /enemy IE is completely happy with the draft yet, the wrestling with IE providing me with a lot less bippies. But I’m willing to let folks take a peek at the upcoming free Old Photos website from the upcoming Mary Baker Design (currently in beta version).