With a Little Help From My Friends

I am sure there have been people who learned all of this on their own, from books or Web sites. People who never had the opportunity to share a URL with someone and ask for help. They never got the chance to sit at Chipotle or Barnes&Noble with a friend or colleague and say, "Okay, walk me through this like I'm nine." Strictly speaking, learning it all from books or Web sites involves at least one other person who authored the material, but let's leave that for the moment, as I struggle to make my point: There may be people out there like this, but I have never met one, and I have been doing this since 1993.

Molly Holzschlag worked with me, during an evening or two when we both worked on the old, dead GEnie network, and then again in a series of Saturday morning online chats when we both worked at The Microsoft Network, msn. It wasn't just the two of us—Molly has always been very generous with her time and there were several of us in both instances, but it is after all my story, here.

I owe a lot to Molly and Elizabeth Castro. I owe a lot to Eric Meyer, who unravelled the mysteries of CSS several years later, when we all moved away from tabled-layout designs. Along the way, I have asked for and received help from Jeffrey Zeldman, Steve Champeon, Rachel Andrew, Larry Ullman, Patrick Delin and countless, anonymous posters to the Webdesign-L or CSS mailing lists.

In every case, I have met with a spirit of "I won't do it for you, but I'll show you how" which left me richer after every encounter. I have tried to hold up my end of the bargain, as well, answering questions as soon and as well as I could. And of course now I am teaching half a dozen workshops of my own. But we can't all write to Eric or Molly. We can't all even write to me. And that's why it's great to have a resource like the UNL Web Developer's Network, WebDevNet.

In a group the size of WebDevNet, there may not be two people who use the resources available there in quite the same way. We meet on the second Tuesday of every month, face-to-face, or "sharing meatspace" as the kids say. You are welcome to bring a problem (or a solution!) to these meetings, and they're a great way to meet new people who can help you with Dreamweaver, HTML or the Templates. From actual experience to lofty theory, I can't remember a time someone asked something and got back "I dunno." But there is much more available. You can discuss issues in real time via a special IRC channel. Or you can leave a question in the Bulletin Board and come by days later to see the response. There is a Wiki, there are e-mail contacts and phone numbers.

And you might recognize someone you regularly pass in the hallway, too. It's nice to have someone new to share lunch with. I'm a fat man. I know these things.

WebDevNet meets at 2:00pm every second Tuesday of the month. Usually, we're in the City Campus student union. Check the web page to be sure, but plan on joining us. We might even put you to work on the next design!