No, no, I haven't fallen off the face of the planet. Just launching a new site and a new service, both in a language I don't speak or understand. The good news is that I had a lot of help. The other good news is that the site is templated. This meant that every little last minute change could be run over the entire site, and voila, it was fixed. I love templates. Just love 'em. The thing validates, it's 90% stylesheets, works fine with javascript and images turned off, and meets some very basic accessibility requirements (for instance tab indexing, access keys). Now that the the basics are there (a solid site architecture and some nice, clean code) I have 3 months and a chunk of money to hire a designer to make it pretty and a translator to add a whole bunch more content.

I work with many non-webby people and usually don't worry 'bout it, because Greg and I alone have FTP access to the Branch Libraries' website. But then I get e-mails from colleagues saying that they wished our website looked like this or how happy they were to find this site. Both e-mails came from people -- senior managers, actually -- who head departments with significant content on our site. Sigh.

Christmas was a drag and I'm barely out of the accompanying depression. I didn't travel this year, and the darkroom was closed. Instead I spent my time off wandering around the apartment in my PJs, eating bad Chinese take-out, and feeling sorry for myself. For some extra torment I'd read my friends' blogs to see what fun things they were doing and then I'd wonder why I wasn't invited. Nothing quite as charming as a smelly Scorpio in a funk.