I'm frequently amused to find that something I need will appear just about when I need it. The engineer in me knows that it's just coincidence, and that the fact that it happens A LOT doesn't change the odds of it having happened or happening again. The engineer figures that it's probably just that I notice more when I magically find what I need than when I don't. But the mystic side of me thinks that's flawed. After all, it happens A LOT. Something I don't have I go looking for, and the web being what it is, I usually find what I'm after pretty quickly.
But I'm talking about stuff that COMES TO MY DOOR, so to speak. It happened with the logo-fade-over thingy, which wasn't really an immediate need, per se, but suddenly the solutions shows up in my RSS reader just a few weeks after I thought about it. Tivo-ed serendipity, but serendipity nonetheless.
I just helped my church build a new website these past few weeks. It gave me the opportunity to stretch my CSS skills just a little bit. The design, done by a very talented member of the church, didn't really require that much by way of CSS-fu, but it was another lesson in what works on which browsers, and how to fix others (IE, we really need to talk, ok?). I was having a problem with the rendering in Opera (by all accounts, the most standards compliant browser), but with no clear way to selectively target just Opera, I was resigned to just ignoring it. Opera, after all, accounts for just 1% of our visitors. Then this nifty little css browser selection hack showed up unbidden, and two lines of code later, Opera is fixed. See, serendipity.
I'm also working on a project for a friend who wants to add an e-commerce-esqe feature to her Wordpress-powered site. I looked around and determined that everything already out there is either not well supported or way too well supported (read: way too many features for her minimalist needs). None were a very good fit. So I start crafting a plugin for her, and the biggest problem is that I really need to create a new type of post that she and her guest authors can use to enable the e-commercy stuff she needs, but in the simplest way possible. It's an uphill struggle, then serendipitously, Wordpress 3.0 (and stubbed in 2.9) offers up exactly what I need. Just that quick, I'm back on track and soon to release the plugin. (I'll link to her site in a future entry when I get her upgraded and the plugin installed.)
This blog is run on a blogging platform called, um, ready?... Serendipity. But all this work on Wordpress of late has me thinking I may have to change over. It's serendipity, I think.
