Robert Manners

Jesus Christ in a Sidecar

Have you ever started a little web project, a cute idea to fill in those moments at the office where you have to stop your work and do something else before your mind snaps and you turn into a gibbering idiot? And has that cute little side-project ever gotten completely out of control, growing exponentially the more you try to finish it? Has that out-of-control monstrous side-project become so consuming and complicated that you end up back-burnering the real-work project from which you were only supposed to be taking a "little break"?



I always have to have such side-projects when I'm trying to write meeting-minutes... after poring over my slapdash notes and trying to encapsulate the random and often completely unrelated comments of our executive body into a coherent description of the discussion, I then have to write that encapsulated description down in a way that is both readily accessible to the meanest intelligence and mentions no names... well, you'd go nuts, too, if you didn't have something else to do at the same time. Usually I blog, or shop online, or play cards, or something... it keeps me from pulling my hair out and climbing a clock-tower with a rifle.



This time I thought I'd do a little web-design, using some of the nifty little gizmos I discovered in Miscrosoft FrontPage while working on my office's website. It has long seemed to me that my readers and other casual passersby might enjoy a gallery of the beefcake pix I use to punctuate my posts. A nice idea, no?



No. First of all, I have over 500 images stored on my web domain. And then I couldn't just randomly throw those images into galleries... first I had to classify them: a lot of them were Abercrombie & Fitch catalog pictures, and I had a lot of Versace ads, too. But that only took up two hundred of the images... the rest had to go somewhere, so I thought out three more categories, Fashion (for all the images from fashion ads and layouts), Vintage/Fine-Art (for the ones that were painted or old), and Physique/Erotic (for all the rest of them).



And what about my own pictures, me and my friends and all of that? And what about these galleries with hundreds of pictures in them, shouldn't I break them up so they'll load some time during the course of a human lifespan? Soon my five pages became fourteen pages, all indexed and cross-linked. And what about logos? What about tables of content? What about page-titles and indices all that jazz?



So here I am, four days later, completely sick of this project and having to stop or go even more insane than writing the meeting-minutes was making me. Some of the galleries have room for more additions, but I am not going to add to them anytime real soon (unless I have something worse to avoid in the office).



Anway, for your delectation and entertainment, the newest feature of Mannersism.net:

The Galleries!

Let me know what you think. After all that work, I require a little praise.



Hugs and kisses!