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It’s the Little Screens That Kill

(Who wants science? You do! You do!

That’s “sexay” as in “sex chromosomes”, not actually, you know, “sexay”. Still! There’s plenty of hot stuff to see about X-linked inheritance, so go have a peek. I won’t tell anyone. Promise.)

I try to be lazy around here. Really, I do.

I only write here once a week lately (whether the internet needs it or not). The site’s had the same look and feel, more or less, since 2006. And outside of shutting down various sleazy spam attempts — and then complaining about said attempts for weeks on end — I don’t really do any site maintenance. The whole site is probably Heartbleeded. Or Confickered. Stuxnetitated?

Why be lazy? Mainly because just about anything outside my usual post format — three dick jokes and a tagline, surrounded by fourteen paragraphs of nonsense — takes way more effort and time than I expect. Because I’m not very good at things.

Case in point: back in January, I made a resolution.

(Late January, of course. Because laaaazy.)

I resolved then to finally finish reformating the articles I’d written for ZuG.com, and get them live on the site. I’d already tinkered with a bunch of them, but had lost steam. So I drew a line in the sand — by April 1st, the two-year anniversary of ZuG shutting down, I’d get everything working. I had more than two months. I was motivated. I dove in and committed to the job, eyeing April 1 on the calendar.

And continuing to eye April 1, as it loomed ever closer.

Aaaand eyeing its ass running away as it passed by, mooning me in springtime mockery.

That’s okay. April 1st was always kind of a jackass.

Still, I did persevere and — only three weeks late, give or take a long weekend — I did, finally, just last weekend, finish the entire series of Zolton Amazon review articles, to go along with the Zolton Facebook prank series I’d recombobulated earlier.

And I was stoked. It was a little late, sure, but still a win. And the best part — I could go back to simply writing again, in relatively-lazy bliss, and not worry about any sort of formatting or templating or other back-end nonsense for… well, hopefully forever. That was the plan.

My “forever” lasted two days.

On Tuesday, Google implemented a search algorithm change that basically ignores any site that isn’t mobile friendly. This site was never mobile friendly — hell, it’s often not anything-friendly — so that was a problem. Only four and a half people come to read shit here as it is; I can’t have Google turning three and a half of them away because my nonsense doesn’t look pretty on their Blackberries or Palm Pilots or whatever the hell kids are shoving in their pockets these days.

That meant making changes, and that meant screwing everything up six or eight times before getting it right, because let’s face it, that’s really the only working model available for someone in my situation. The only one that doesn’t involve lots of gasoline and a convoluted blog insurance scam, anyway.

And I’m not doing that, because it sounds goddamned complicated. Lazy, is what I’m telling you.

Sadly, when I was choosing website software a decade or more ago, I backed the wrong horse. I picked a platform that was popular at the time, but soon moved to a pay-only scheme for new versions — and who’s doing that? Later, as so many half-assed American ideas, products and celebrities have done, it caught on in Japan, while everyone in this hemisphere moved on and forgot about it. Except me, because yadda yadda lazy.

Long story short, making a “simple” mobile-friendly site involves moving the entire gob of content into a completely new form, recoding templates, updating stylesheets and four dozen other things I haven’t even figured out yet. All for some yutz in Peoria searching for “Alton Brown quotes” on his iPhone 2.5, who’ll take one glance at the mobilified site and say, “meh, I was looking for the good ones“.

This is the torture I’ve chosen. Feel free to weep, if you like. I know I will.

All of this is to say that — or apologize for, really — the site is going to be pretty horked up for a bit, while I nail everything back in place. Links may go nowhere. Formatting will be higgledy-piggledy. I see that double spaces between paragraphs — which you’ll see in this post, where they’re quite pretty — have been stripped out of the previous 2,100+ posts. So that’s nice. (Update: got ’em back! Score one for the big fella!) And I’m sure there’s more. My “lazy time”, brief as it recently was, won’t be coming back any time soon.

But hey. At least that asshole in Peoria can find me on his phone. Yaaaaaay.