I didn't think it would be as difficult as it could have turned out to be. If it weren't for a friend who gave me his code and then stuck around answering questions, I'd still be coding and swearing.

Here's the deal. You can embed the journal itself pretty easily. You copy some code in Javascript and paste it into your source code, and the journal obediently shows up as part of the web page. The problem is that it shows up looking exactly like the original journal page, which kind of blows that seamless-integration idea out of the water.

The only way to do it is to write a separate journal style in BML, which stands for Brad's Markup Language. In other words, learn as you go.

I don't know how long it would have taken me. But my friend made a few quick changes to the code and sent it over; I tweaked it a bit from there and it worked. Unreal. It's not perfect and it's not done (it's all a work in progress) but I think it's cool. Huge props to T and his mad BML skillz.

On the other hand, there appears to be no simple way to get my archives transferred and formatted. Current estimated completion date is Christmas 2005. I get depressed just thinking about the archives.

But I'm making progress here, which is all kinds of cool. The site is coming together in a very organic and unplanned way, with photos chosen almost at random and text doing what it does. I'm not an artist. I'm just an observer.

Which makes me sound like Sybil. I'm not. I feel a little strange and disconnected working on the site because I don't have a plan. It feels a little like skiing a mogul run at speed, making decisions on the fly, relying on instinct. But I understand sports. I don't understand art. Good thing code isn't dangerous. I won't break my legs if I forget to close a paragraph tag.

But some of the best things in my life have happened because I didn't have a plan, or because my plan went wrong. Things happened, I improvised. I just rode one wave to the next.

The archives will not happen on their own, though.