So, earlier this month, a group of friends and I were gmail-conversation arguing the merits of Stuff White People Like (okay, so maybe I’m a stick in the mud, but I just don’t like it), when someone jokingly suggested we go completely contrarian, and start stuffnobodylikes.com. My very entrepreneurial roommate had the domain bought within the hour.

Luckily I purchased the deluxe (ooh fancy!) hosting account when I started this little website a few months ago. By 4am I had the domain linked to hosting, Wordpress downloaded (I’m suddenly becoming a pro at this), and the first post, #1. Herpes, was born (there is something truly disturbing about “herpes” and “born” being in the same sentence).

Twenty-four hours later, my verbose (and very talented) friends had posted 22 entries.

One week later, we had 20,000 hits, were posted on metafilter.com and I was being interviewed by NPR. Whaaaaaat?

I don’t think I ever really understood the power of the web until that week. My webmastering was relevant enough to warrant an NPR interview?! Surely not. But I suppose we now live in a world where any of us can get our 15 minutes by starting some internet meme or publishing a video of our dads dancing to “Superman Dat Ho.” (I haven’t posted the video yet, but by god, I will someday!)

Anyway, this webmastermistress thing is new to me. I’m sharpening my .php skills, and learning just a teeny tiny bit about MySQL databases. Yippee!

So, it is without further ado that I introduce you to my new unexpected child (it may be the only grandchild you’ll get, mom, so learn to love its whining): StuffNobodyLikes.com.

This past Saturday/Sunday, from 1am-1am, I participated in an HTML/CSS writing contest, namely, the CSS OFF. The purpose of the contest is to use the given .psd to create a super-cleanly written website, in 24 hours. I can’t even remember how I heard about the contest at this point; I’ve been doing so much CSS-related web browsing in the past few months, it all runs together.

I decided to do the contest because of the great feedback the judges give you. Not having gone through school for web design puts me at a disadvantage when it comes to knowing the most current and “correct” way to do things.

I used microformats for the first time! and I’m looking forward to using them in the future. It may be said that I have a slight geeky crush on Tantek Çelik (this started after reading Zeldman’s web standards book, where he talks about Çelik’s work on IE5/Mac. I found out about Zeldman because of my slight geeky crush on Doug Bowman. Okay so maybe I have a slight geeky crush on all of them…this post is getting off-topic. The point is I think all this web standards stuff is wonderfully important, and these guys are the professors. I can only begin to hope that I pass.)

Check out my competition entry at www.aliglia.com/cssoff. I’m most proud of the way it handles text resizing. Things that could be better:

-microformats were missing some class names (specifically for links)
-a 1px-off problem with the nav in Safari (rrrrrggggg)
-should’ve made a rollover on “Get a Free Inspection”
-should’ve made “Contact Us” in the bottom-right a link
-too much space between the content and the footer
-could’ve made the footer a gradient

I’m totally out-of-control anal. My kindergarten teacher wrote on my report card: “Alia begins projects with a very unique enthusiasm, but has trouble completing them.” Uh oh. Something to work on.  I think 24-hour contests are right up my alley.