In the month-or-so that I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve gotten the impression that a lot of people on it are geeks, a lot of them are early adopters, and a few are “regular folks.” And I wonder if some of the angst I’m feeling is that I’m more of an early adopter than a geek.
I define geeks as the people who create the latest technology and early adopters as the first people to use it. I have read geeks’ writings and conversed with them on the Internet, such when I participated in the newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html in 1996. I learned HTML and CSS by reading, asking questions, and eventually answering questions. I became one of a handful of people in the world to publish a web page in HTML using CSS in August 1996. Yet I didn’t become a professional Web developer. I didn’t become a recognized “expert” in the field (unless you count being interviewed by Wired in 1998). Why? Because I’m not a geek. I don’t take well to sitting for hours in front of a computer screen hacking code. I don’t know any of the languages it takes to write CSS that can render properly in any web browser; i.e. I can’t use JavaScript to insert “browser-sniffing” code that delivers CSS written for each browser’s idiosyncratic (read “faulty” or “noncompliant”) way of rendering CSS… But I digress.
My point is: Continue reading
