I’m often criticized for taking a lone ranger approach to life, and while it’s true that I’ve always been a loner, I’m not against looking for help when I really need it. I knew if I wanted to build a successful blog that I was going to need some kind of support to help me get going, and one of the things that held my site back in particular has been this irritating problem where the footer just wouldn’t stay where it belonged. It kept jumping all over the place and screwing my sidebars up, so as a temporary fix I removed the sidebars from most of my pages. That wasn’t really a solution though, so I started checking around for blog designers I could hire to fix the problem for me.

If I could tell you how many emails I’ve sent out to designers that never got returned, you’d never believe it. You’d think they’d want my business, but I guess I’m not enough of a lucrative prospect for them. Snobs.

Finally, one designer got back to me and worked on my site for a couple of hours, then gave up. He also left one of my sidebars crooked, but promised to look into it, as well as look into a javascript solution I suggested to him to fix the footer. I didn’t hear back from him again until almost a week later, where he sent me a “Dear John” type email suggesting that I’m better off going with a complete revamp of the site. Sure, what’s another 800 bucks or so to destroy the months of work I’ve put into my blog and replace it with whatever crap they had in mind?

Man, when you want something done…

That weekend I rolled up my sleeves and went to work on the blog myself. I only had a rudimentary understanding of CSS, javascript and whatnot, but I kept at it for the whole day and by some miracle of God, I managed to pull it off. The footer issue was finally resolved.

I spent a few hours more banging my head on the keyboard, trying to get my sidebars looking right across different browsers, but without much luck until I started using Firebug, which is quite possibly the greatest web development tool ever invented in the history of mankind. I was able to test and check the results of CSS modifications I made in real time, rather than saving the file, uploading it, reloading my browser, and repeating as necessary ad infinitum. It also helped me locate what file was causing my site to take forever to finish loading, and after I got rid of that it was like I had a new blog all over again.

Deal with THAT, you cheapskate freelance web designers.

Seriously, I learned a lesson here. One, that God is merciful. Two, that people suck big monkey balls. In the end, I realized my project here was going to be a solo operation after all. But I do faith that whatever I can put my mind to, I can achieve, not because I’m so talented and all, but because God is capable of opening up my understanding, and within His will, I can “do all things through Christ, which strengthens me.”