Getting Started

When I first did this page, back in like 2006? I used Microsoft Front Page. The page was still all about miniatures, dogs, and my love for TTRPGs, but from the point of view of 2000-2010 The Mad Devil.

Frontpage was a wysiwyg type program that was good enough. I don't claim to possess a good graphical design eye, so it was fairly rudimentary. It also took forever to upload pictures and there was a lot of formatting that I had to do "by hand." That is, I could point and click with the drop down menus and such and it would create thumbnails, generate hyperlinks, and create the HTML.

Somewhere along the way, Microsoft stopped supporting the product and I moved onto other things mentally. I kept the domain and at least once I made an effort to update the pics, but in the process lost a lot of the early work I had done. Enter frustration, and I shelved the concept.

I still painted miniatures. I still built dungeons and such with Dwarven Forge. I still played TTRPGs. I just did not really document it. Fast foward to the Covid years and I moved some of my hobby thoughts to Discord, in part to follow a kickstarter that Dwarven Forge was doing, and in part because Discord replaced yahoo groups for my gaming group. But Discord feels less like what I wanted.

Enter 2026. I have decided to update the webpage. You can still get a copy of Frontpage. It may even still work with my old website. I am not and will never be an HTML coder. It brings me no joy. So, hate me if you want, I am building and maintaining this site with the assistance of an AI tool. Specifically WIX.

The painting is still mine (for the most part). The DF builds are still mine (for the most part). The rants and screeds and musings are still my prose. But I am using WIX to automate the website creation.

It is not going well initially. It initially wanted to ladle too much crap into the site including some really bad prose "explaining how to paint minis" and a bunch of stock photos whose provenance I cannot ascertain. So these early efforts have been trying to set up things the way I want with my content. This approach results in the tool saying it cannot do things automatically including what should be simple things - like aligning text - and I am having to do things semi-manually again.

But it is a start, and hopefully, I will begin to learn how to coach it through to get the results I want. Could I hire someone to create a site? In theory, yes. However, to date, my efforts to find someone within my budget have proven fruitless, and since I want to manage the updates and not be dependent on a third party...here I am.

It will be rough for a while, but hopefully it will get better and I will add functionality as I master the basics.

TMD February 28, 2026