The past two days have been an interesting experience for me. Normally, I am very much a loner when it comes to the creation of websites; my modus operandi is to hole up in on overly-warm computer room with part of a bottle of wine, some music to yowl with, photoshop, and a text editor. Many hours later, either plunging blood sugar or an overwhelming need for sleep will drive me from my computer chair for sleep or sustenance.Once succor is obtained, I take a short brain break, then return for more. This continues until the process of creation is finished, at which point I save off a high-quality .jpg of my work and mail it to the person who I’m doing work for.

Except that I’ve been tempted into doing it a little bit differently this time, and I must say that the results have been quite—surprisingly—encouraging. A friend of mine waved a thoroughly fascinating project under my nose a few days ago. Never fear, I’ll talk about it more once it goes live, but for now suffice it to say that it was intriguing enough that I pushed everything else aside for a couple of days to help get the project off the ground.

This involved working side-by-side with someone else to build a site. I’ve never conducted the building of a site solely through instant messaging before. It’s odd, having someone to talk to while you’re working out a stupid error in your (select one: javascript, CSS, html, PHP, perl) code. It makes your silly errors all the more embarrassing, but at the same time, when it all works, there’s a shared feeling of triumph that you don’t quite get when it’s just you facing the screen, alone.

I got the last vital script working about five minutes ago, after several hours of hunting down an elusive little bug. It works. I can’t believe it. It really and truly works. I’m thrilled, I’m shocked, I’m flabbergasted…

…and most of all, I’m tired.

I’ve literally done almost nothing else but work on the site in question for the past two days. Jeff had to remind me to eat dinner tonight. In the haze of a weekend full of nothing but code-fu, it’s easy to forget those basic, yet important, precepts. (Come to think of it, I think I need a stingingly hot shower…)

For now, suffice it to say that I’ll fill you in on the project Real Soon Now—what it is, and why I thought it was so neat that I made a point to drop everything for 48 hours to see it through to completion—but for now, I am in desperate need of sleep. Apologies for the lack of depth and coherency in this post; I realize that after a few days with no posts, you’re probably expecting a bit more from me, but it’ll just have to wait until my brian congeals again. Hopefully, tomorrow.