• drilsej.com
  • Main
  • Contact
  • About
  • Styles
    • Original Blue
    • Lite Blue
    • Circuit Red
    • Curved Green
    • Orange Pop
• Music
  • Compositions
• Programs
  • Mop of Destiny
  • DrilNES
  • Penny-Arcade Screensaver
  • Riositude
    • Main
    • Revisions
    • Download
    • Screenshot
• Links
  • Comics
    • Penny-Arcade
    • Mac Hall
    • PVP
    • Real Life
    • Sinfest
    • Megatokyo
    • Wapsi Square
  • Programming
    • Gamedev
    • Gamasutra
  • Games
    • Gamespot
    • Castlevania Dungeon
    • Longbow Digital Arts
    • Snes9X
    • Cheapass Games
  • Other
    • Rioworld
    • Newegg
    • Quiet PC

Long long ago, before the invention of such things as "color LCD monitors," "HDTV," and "air," I was in middle school (that's grades 6 through 8). Being a person with a low attention span (and having equally inattentive friends), we were constantly bored, and frequently invented stupid things (such as the game of Abstract Dots, which got me through many a science class). One such day, in a fit of just such a boredom, we were trying to pronounce our names backwards. Now, for some names, such as "Yost" and "Brown", this was an easy feat. However, my last name "Jersild," was a rather difficult case. Sure, it's easy when it's written down in front of you, but when you have no visual clue as to what it looks like, you tend to mess up. Somewhere along the line, one attempt at this pronunciation was "Drilsej." Somehow, this managed to get stuck as my nickname. Though frequently shortened to "Dril," the name has pretty much stuck ever since. Odd.

During my second year at Purdue University, I thought it might be a good idea to have a website. I didn't have a whole lot of content for it back then (just some music I'd written), but whatever. I created it anyway. Of course, it was an insanely hideous page, but I didn't know that then. I never quite stooped as low as having tons of animated content and scrolling text and all that crap, but it was still kinda ugly. Trust me. Anyway, originally I was going to register the page under the name "dril.com" but it was taken at the time by some drilling company. After performing the dance of sadness, I settled on the infinitely-more-difficult-to-type "drilsej.com." In retrospect, it might have been better to use "dril.net" as it was free at the time, but it's taken now. Curses.

So, I had this old ugly layout. Eventually, I redid the page in 2000, to make it suck quite a bit less. I added these dropdown menus to the top that, while cool, were very much hardcoded and impossible to change. Plus, I knew nothing about CSS back then. So modifying the menu or its attributes required tons of hot copy-on-paste action. This was unacceptable (okay, it was acceptable for over a year, but eventually I got sick of it), so I redid the page again. However, my JavaScript abilites reverted a bit, and I found myself unable to get the menus working in any browser other than Internet Explorer. So I had a nice looking website in IE, and a rather interface-challenged page in Netscape. But I didn't care all that much.

Recently, I switched browsers to Mozilla Firefox (though it was known as Firebird when I made the switch). It was then that I realized something: I could no longer easily use my own page. I had shot myself (and many other users) in the foot in 2001 by using Internet Explorer-specific features, and it took two and a half years for the signal to propagate to my brain. So finally, I decided to completely overhaul the page. First up was making menus that worked in all four major browsers of which I am aware (including Opera). With the help of some handy tutorials, I was able to do so. Thus, the new layout was born!