After dropping my 15 year old at drivers ed, I drove around listening to classic rock and landed at the library.
Before I forget, Bob Seeger is an underrated pop ballad writer. I’ve got to say, “Turn the Page” is clearly less heady than Rush’s “Limelight,” yet surprisingly more poetic than Jackson Brown’s “Running on Empty.” Plus “Turn the Page” has simplicity on its side.
So here I am at Warwick Public Library, one of my earliest “big time” website design jobs and a place I hope to get some work done, like writing to you now.
I was referred for the design job years ago by an amazing, well-positioned friend. Over the course of a few months, I built a comprehensive website and trained a team how to maintain it. As usual, I aimed at perfection, but came in instead with a beautiful, functional, but messily-coded final product. But what else is new – have you looked at this blog?
My trusted business advisor had also told me not to take the job – that it was “not worth the hassle.”
I was pregnant, and did it anyway. Sweat poured off me in my meetings with the library director. My pants were tight with baby bump, and my chemical composition was all wacky, making me lumber up stairs instead of climb them.
So, I tried to look cool and pretended my in-meeting coughing fits were “a little tickle in my throat,” not full-on panic.
Later I realized that delivering on that job launched my business to a new level. After launching that website, no one questioned my capability, even if the IT person must have wondered why I built a WordPress site atop their Windows server (Answer: I didn’t know better until I had the job 80% done).
Love and vision means more than perfection
I love libraries1 and all that they stand for. And I just kept thinking that I wanted to make something online the public could utilize and value too. Not by brick and mortar, but by constructing a collage of code, design, text, databases, content, plugins, and hyperlinks, with a notable dose of “Open Source2” to keep the finished product aligned with the public aspect too. If someone could get online, they could access a treasure trove of quality literature, information and access.
And is the best of what the web can do: build online portals – accessible to the public – to real and valuable things. It’s a generous place, originally built for knowledge, not commerce.
I still feel like building websites is a gift to all, including people stuck at home. Bringing value to them, FREE. And bringing value to the host as well, in the form of operational savings.
In the case of libraries, I sought to help pique a new audience’s interest, so they’d like to find their way to the front door, participate, and help build communities in place too. Websites can do that when they are built like that.
The Talk to Oneself Zone: creative output as confirmation of self
I arrived at this library just before the doors opened, and people were already lined up to get in. An older gentleman, now typing to my right, a grandmother with grand-kid, a genderless college-aged person, and a few others. My heart was happy to see this crew, and we waited until the interior doors opened to storm this lovely, book-loaded zone.
My seat is near a window and artist biographies, far from The Quiet Area. This is because I occasionally talk or mutter to myself when I work. Hearing my own sounds helps me know I exist. Sound also helps me catch myself in surprise lest I lose myself in writing, and wiggle my body to my own embarrassment. Dignity matters.
Perhaps this is what some neurodivergent people do too? Catch themselves in physical feedback loops like rocking or tics, or witness their enthusiasms in the form of work, which helps them ground their sense of self into their bodies with enhanced situational awareness?
Figuring this out would be an interesting research project.
For now, I need to close this out. I’ll reread and tweak the text above, and keep working on the craft of my next chapter.
Turn the Page.
classic rock road songs
FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT 😉
- Sometimes Libraries Love You Back. ↩︎
- Open Source feels aligned with what libraries are all about – plainly and transparently sharing the workings of productive minds. A book is a portal to the author’s inner workings, after all, and libraries give us all access to it, freely and without censorship. This is key.
The website was developed with WordPress, but hosted on their IT Person’s windows-based server. This wasn’t great. There were loads of fails and technical hiccups as WordPress prefers Linux. But I pushed and hacked, migrated and managed to make the website work from the public’s perspective– this was the only perspective I really had at the time. ↩︎
