This is the spot where I say thank you to the giants whose shoulders I am standing on, and grouse about a few technicalities of web design.
I learned web design in the early 2000s, during the first big push for web standards, which are what make it possible for this site to look more or less the same in most browsers. Do things ever change: now, this design I developed in Firefox “just worked” in Safari, Opera and Chrome. It was like opening a china cabinet to get out a platter and finding the Holy Grail stacked on top of it. Unfortunately, things also stay the same: Internet Explorer is still buggy, but now there are three new versions with new bugs to make me bash my head on the wall. No two versions of IE will display the same code exactly the same way, and IE6, bane of web coders everywhere, refuses to die. If you’re still using IE6, please replace it or demand that your IT department does. Please.
More progress: this site uses real fonts (Juergen Italic for headlines, and Delicious for body copy), thanks to @font-face embedding finally being practical. Web design whippersnappers, there were only 6 fonts that could be counted on until just a few years ago, when SIFR, Font Burner, and Cufón were mercifully invented. Today I can use anything with less fuss, and for free.
I can also run a much, much better site thanks to WordPress, Thematic, Flickr, and the Flickr Photo Album plugin. Between them I can have a large and complex yet consistent site with functions far too complicated for me to program alone, and images at any size I need including “enormous”, all for $60 Canadian a year. And if it happens to get a lot of traffic, another two plugins make big differences to the speed and reliability. WP Minify makes the site load faster and easier, and WP Super Cache keeps me from crashing the server if get too popular.
Keep the wonders coming, programmers! We love you!