Sometimes I forget that people

Sometimes I forget that people actually read this site. I tend to make my edits and changes to this page live as I do them. Staging servers, at least in my mind, are for work projects and complicated things that need a lot of testing.

So I get an idea to try something here, and I’ll take my page down for a few minutes or an hour or something. Or I’ll leave it up for a little while, even knowing that the layout is broken. That was kind of my rationale for playing with the whole Zeldman "upgrade your browser, dammit!" thing, and I got sidetracked so it ended up staying on my site about a day longer than I intended.

Now obviously my page isn’t standards-compliant and I’m not much of a zealot about those kinds of things in general. But I got a couple of emails and IM’s, ranging from pleasant to just plain rude, and my reaction to all of them was suprise. Not so much because of their content, but because someone noticed at all.

Does this mean I should start testing changes and I’ve got to make another page when I just want to play with a new idea? Guess so.

P.S. Note to Netscape 4 users who were inconvenienced: I’m sorry if I offended. I appreciate you coming to the site and checking things out. I just hate your browser. Nothing personal. It’s just that most people still using Netscape 4.x are doing so because of some bizarre pseudo-philosophical objection to Microsoft. If that’s the case, go get Mozilla or something. It’s worth it.