It's The Last Day Of The Year

It's December 31, and all in all it has been a good year. I finally got The Upper Krust web site (www.theupperkrust.com) up and running after four years of thinking about it and learning Html, Javascript, ASP, Photoshop, and other assorted applications and software.

I always had several goals in mind for creating the site. First, I simply wanted to learn how to build a site from scratch. While this goal probably contributed to the length of time that it took me to get the site up and running, it has certainly proven to be as rewarding as I had hoped it to be.

The second goal was to see if I could generate a discussion or even a debate around the topic of pie crust. There are a gazillion recipe sites already out there in Internet land, with many of them being quite spectacular. The world really does not need another recipe web site. So I decided to create a site and content around a niche subject and audience. Within this audience, I wanted to target two groups of people. The first group would be made up of people who have never baked a pie crust in their life, thinking that it was just to hard. I believe that they are the poorer for not having tried and to that end, the site is dedicated to getting people to at least give it a whirl once in their life. Then there are those who know everything and hopefully will sign up to tell me the errors of my thoughts and ways as it relates to making that perfect crust and pie. Within this discourse, I want to be proven wrong or right and hopefully learn a thing or two myself.

Then there is the humor of it all. The idea is to poke fun at those of us who would actually take the exercise of baking a pie crust just as ridiculously serious as we take ourselves, our work, and our place on this earth way too much of the time.

Finally there is the more wacko goal of trying to translate all this into "a way of life". For those that have no knowledge of the book "Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", you are going to struggle with this concept. Trying to find the perfect pie crust is really just a way of thinking that focuses on trying to move toward something that is beyond ourselves. Just as humor can strip away our bluster, never reaching, but always continuing toward and searching for pie crust perfection properly puts things into perspective, at least for me, as to where we truly stand in the bigger picture of life.

So there you have it. I have created a web site and a path toward true meaning in life all in one web project. As I said, it really was a good year.