HTML, my secret love

Back in my freshman year of college (which was not so long ago) I took an IT 103 class: generic html, make a website, learn some nonsense about bytes and get overly familiar with Microsoft 2007. Needless to say, it was boring and I hated it.

Flash forward to now, my senior year, and I am in an Electronic Literature class, which requires a website. So I revamped the one I made for IT 103 and discovered my secret, well buried love of HTML.

I've been writing for quite some time--poems, essays, flash, nonfiction, fiction, etc. I made a chapbook and will shortly be making another. This kind of creation is satisfying but familiar. HTML is exotic. I can type seemingly nonsensical code (after all, what is an "a href," really?) and then, after some mystical magical uploading, that code becomes a link, a picture, a table, a button, color, anything really. It is not hard and there are countless books on the subject. Mine was by Kamalajeet Sanghera--a name I know by memory because it is so wonderfully odd. it was tedious at the time and the work I was posting on the web was dull and semi-low brow for me. The topic did not interest me and thus HTML slipped through my hands.

That is different now. Now I know the subtleties of tables and borders set to zero. I know how to bypass the need for templates and create links to nowhere just to be a smart ass. My pictures are links to other pictures which may very well link to a poem. I have embedded video and fiddled with creative commons. I have photo manip'd (however badly) and saw my codings and tags transform from gobbledygook to glory on a screen. I do not know java and am by no means an HTML master (if anything, I am an apprentice--this is as nerdy as I will get, I assure you) but I have rediscovered the glory of learning and creativity--of design and html ingenuity. Throughout my college career (which is rapidly coming to a close) I have lost my wonder. Quite frankly, I am not even sure this mysterious "wonder" survived elementary school. But it has reignited and I am awed by my education. Should someone ask me the one thing I learned in college, the one thing I took away from my four years, it will be recapturing my imagination--even if I had to harness it in HTML.

I am an English major with a minor in history, in love with an art that has a tenuous connection to my field at best. But this is fine, I have the whole world of electronic literature unfurling before me--a new media (well newish anyway) gaining a foothold among those who matter (those mysterious "those" who determine your curricula for instance). Perhaps, my primitive HTML skills will not go to waste.

College, college everywhere

So for my final year of college I am finishing off my mandatory requirements with 1 class I do not like and 2 classes I do like. I also have random electives, but I don't really find any of those interesting.

Anyway, of the 2 I do like one of them is called "Electronic Literature" and I find it to be fascinating. The class text is written in Sanskrit and class time itself is so-so but the projects give me endless entertainment. I have rediscovered my lost love: html. I had forgotten how absurdly pleasing it is to write coding that looks utterly like gobbledygook and turns into colors and text and buttons etc etc. I created a website my freshman year of college for an IT course and have since added an ENGL 344 section. It will be hosting some of my old works as well as some originals. Check it out if you get the chance :)