About "Doug Loves Sarah"

History, Reasons, and Future
+ quasi-F.A.Q.

The first question that I feel the need to address is one that might occur to any red-blooded American male that views this page: Did a guy really make this? And the answer is a straight up yes. Keep in mind, though, that this is what I think my wife would want. This is the sort of colors and fonts and images that I see making her giggle. In other words, I wrote a website for one person, and hopefully others will enjoy it, as well.

For those who feel this is just "too cute": Heh, sorry, there isn't much I can do for you. My wife likes really cute things. You're just lucky that I didn't put pictures of red pandas on here.

History of the Page

This page started out as an idea for a scrapbook. The original intent was to make about twenty to thirty pages of material, weave in pictures and poetry and anecdotes and snippings of stuff and glue and paste it all together. And, at that time the project was going to be called Sequence, because the pages were going to be numbered with the Fibonacci sequence. There was no reason to do this, besides the two of us are geeks. When I did start the page, I retained that for several of the earlier posts (but dropped it later).

The whole point of the thing was to give it Sarah on October 26, 2006 (our second anniversary). Instead, I got the domain and prepared a couple of pages to browse and posted it. On our anniversary, I showed her the link and she adored it.

That version of the page (which you can see under the link marked [The Old Page] to the upper right) was an amalgamation of the original scrapbook concept and a lack of time. One of the issues with me working as a Manager at a bookstore, and having relatively little time at home to sit down in front of a computer and do anything that did not involve Sarah potentially looking over my shoulder, was that it was hard to sit down for the hours needed to tinker things out and get something of interest going. I figured I would try it in a blog way. I did not want it to seem to be just a copy of my main website, so I decided to eschew most stylesheet conventions. I wanted to keep it simple, and succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

It was to include one post a week for 52 weeks, give or take a few. It was going to start with an early history of our relationship, then digress a little, then fill in some of the middle, and then digress. It was, had it went according to plan, scheduled to end about the third anniversary and then be left up for all to see. Nothing went to plan.

The problem, or a problem, was that it was hard to keep together an outline for a website in my head over the full year. I was never sure what I wanted to do next. I found myself wanting to move around a little too much at times, and repeat posts a little much at times. I got frustrated with certain aspects of it, and it came to an unglorious end. The very last thing ever written for it was "24 posts left to go, or something like that".

This Version

In March 2008, I started reeling in a lot of my social site presence and concentrating on getting my own page up and running smooth. There were a lot of things I had posted to it that required some maintenance and editing and all sorts of tender, loving, care. In the middle of this, it naturally occurred to me that I should spend some time working with "Doug Loves Sarah" as well. As it was, it was mostly a plain white page with cheap formatting tricks and some various cute stories and random rambles. It had its friends, but really, Sarah deserved better than that.

I postponed doing any work until about mid-April 2008. I wanted to get the one website down and done with it, or at least to a stopping point. I also wanted to sit down and make the new page cute, attractive, distinctive, and set up for long lasting character.

April 19, 2008. I sat down and started working through some shapes and colors. I spent something like 6 hours working out style and layout, and doing some basic image editing. It was important to me to do the images myself. Even if they sucked, I wanted the site to be all Sarah and myself. I used Gimp and the pencil tool with some fuzziness to draw out images in what I call "the Crayola style". I tinkered with colors, fonts and layout. And I came up with this. Which I consider excellent. At least a little.

And that is pretty much this website in a nutshell.

The Future

Who knows what the future will hold? I eventually will have to let the domain name expire, I imagine, but I will fight it for as long as I can. This domain will stand as a simple "shrine" to our marriage.

Oh, I guess we could get divorced. I suppose then I will replace it with the word "BITCH".

quasi-F.A.Q.

No questions yet, but there may be some in time.