Moving from the confines of a Flash website to the easy-going world of HTML is exciting. Don't get me wrong, I liked my Flash website: all self contained and polished; typography set in stone as vectors; even animated in parts. Trouble was, it couldn't be viewed unless you were sitting upright at a desk, or had a laptop on your lap on a train journey or something. Quite a niche site, I suppose. (Imagine: you were in an emergency and needed to view my site? Say, if you were on a remote mountain track, with both legs broken, miles from the nearest desktop computer or laptop, with a powerful phone and wifi signal. What then?).

But this oversight wasn't by design when I was building the Flash version six years ago. I found this out later when everyone suddenly had smartphones and tablets and my website was kind of obsolete. How humiliating that I couldn't publish my site on request in a social situation, to everyone in the pub with their phones at the ready, a captive audience. So instead, I found myself describing it: It starts off with this cow but it's like a butcher's diagram, with the cuts of meat described on it, but instead of forequarter and rump, it's 'typography' and 'backlist'. And if you run your cursor over the cow, the sections light up in different bright colours. You'd love it, you really would.

But that's not good enough. It just didn't cut it.

(I could convert most of it to HTML, but it wouldn't sport the fancy bits like animation, and the type wouldn't look the same. Plus, I'd have to remake a lot of things and, well… that's just boring. Even reading about it is boring.)

So HTML it is. Now, I have to deal with knowing when to stop updating, adding, changing, correcting, and altering on a whim. It's all too easy. It's distracting even. There's even a blog function. That's what you're reading.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the transition to this super-easy, user friendly DIY site is that one can not use typographer's quotes. But you may not have even noticed that. I shouldn't have mentioned it.