Scruff (no, that’s not his real name) is a very good friend of mine. He contacted me years ago with a letter about a play-by-mail game we were both involved in. I replied* and we found out we had a lot of common interests. The letter writing became more frequent and we were writing long letters to each other every week or so.

Scruff is currently working as a chef, although that’s not what he wants to do with his life. He wants to make money from art, mainly cartoony type stuff for ... well, anything, books, t-shirts, cards ... anything. I’ve helped him before with his attempt to reach people - printing out text and covering letters for him when he had no PC - and I promised to help him again.

Now he has a PC and internet access he’s wanting his own website and since he knows nothing about HTML, I offered my help. It’s here that things get a little tricky. What I want to do is get the basic site up and running with templates and the like and enable him to do anything else he wants. Keeping that in mind and getting his site to look the way he wants it to look (and helping him by rubbishing his stupid ideas ) has been a hard task.

We’re now at the stage where he knows what he wants and (hopefully) we’ve discussed it enough so that I know what he wants and in a form which allows for future messing from him, not me.

It’s been a long road getting here and I know on more than one occasion I’ve delayed and dragged my heals getting us to this stage. I feel I now have to get my arse in gear for a change and get working on this. Hopefully it will get him work, enough to quit his job and live the dream (not the one with the dolphins).

* Somewhere along the way I’ve lost the ability to write letters. I used to write them all the time. Last year I needed to post something and bought a pack of 1st Class Stamps ... I still have all but one of them.