For one, I'm never going to be as productive, gifted, skilled, or even as capable as I'd like to be.  My web design skills are and will forever be stuck in 1999.  I'm learning to deal with this fact.  Secondly, I'm never going to be able to devote the time I need to get anything decent put out on the World Wide Web.  I'm busy with writing articles to publish, a dissertation and all kinds of awful stuff like that right now.  The Web is no longer a priority.

So, what to do?  I've got a rapidly decaying website that I built using Mambo.  It's got a ton and a half of functionality, a reasonable design, but really it's tiresome and a nuisance to mess around with.  I haven't updated a thing on that site since January, and it's a shame.

At the same time, I was messing around with iWeb, an application that should be called "Web Design for Numbskulls," for use of our new photo galleries (I could never ever really get the Stopdesign ones to work, much to my chagrin).  I put together a really really dumb new dummy site with this program, but I feel so limited (and juvenile) in design and function that it makes me want to scream, even if it looks pretty sharp.

Do I really need the functionality that my mind is complaining that iWeb lacks?  And really, so far as I can tell, hacks are pretty much non-existent for iWeb since it's so pedestrian that anyone capable of making a hack probably stays far, far away from it.

If I could just combine the two... I'd be able to make millions.  Alas, my programming skills are capable of little beyond creating a snazzy little interface that eliminated non-contiguous variables in a climatological GIS for my masters thesis.  Trust me, that sounds way cooler (and far more advanced) than it actually was.  It only took about 75 lines of code, whereas real programs taks hundreds of thousands (if not millions).

So, I am again frustrated with my options for web design, and I don't know what I will end up deciding.  Granted, the web is far more easy to get onto today than when I started (1994, bizitches, which means I'm an old fart in web design) and even better off than five years ago, but I guess we're still maybe five years from getting to the point that us "tweeners" (people with mediocre-to-decent design and management skill that demand more functionally but don't care enough to make it a career and so want it super-easy) will get a serviceable platform for development, with the ease of iWeb and the functionality of a Joomla combined with Movable Type.

In other news, I'm also working right now to come up with a couple of ideas for road trips for my road trip class.  I was told to do this by the orientation program coordinators (and the dean of the college) in order to seek funding for such an adventure.  I've plugged in several trips to my budgeter Excel file, including Niagara Falls, Detroit, and Gettysburg, and nothing works yet.  Time will figure this one out, I guess...