When Paul and I first had the idea to do this site, we both had an extensive background in how the Web worked by nature of our extensive downloading of pornography. We thought that if lecherous swine like the kind whose Web sites we frequented could engineer a site, any moron could. And we decided that we were just the morons to do it.

Armed with a "what you see is what you get" HTML editor, a graphics editor, dark senses of humor, my college journalist’s knowledge of newspaper layout, and ready access to alcoholic beverages, we dauntlessly proceeded to screw up all over the place.

Here's a list of things we initially posted with the site back on April 1 which seemed like a good idea at the time, but just contributed to the frustration or premature blinding of many of our readers:

1. As Web-savvy publishers, we innately understood that whatever we saw shot onto our 14" Super VGA monitor by our Windows-compatible 3D graphics card and translated by Internet Explorer version 4 was what everyone in the world would see. At least until I looked at the site through a friend's circa 1995 Macintosh and discovered that our font size was so small, purely theoretical subatomic particles would have to squint to read it.
   
   
2. Our sidebar navigation menu buttons were designed to, when a reader placed his or her mouse pointer over them, fill slowly with amber and play a pouring sound like they were being filled with mellow, delicious beer. Instead, they silently and instantly turned a shade of yellow so garish that you could hear our readers' retinas pop as far away as Malaysia.
   
   
3. We originally planned a carefully designed form to allow readers to input their e-mail address and quickly and simply join our mailing list. We had to delete this when it became apparent that the form was converting our users’ addresses into some unholy word that caused the site to collapse in terror. This happened because, until recently, we thought a CGI script was a list of stage directions for the cast of a syndicated television program.
   
   
4. Our instructions and attached HTML code which should have allowed readers to place a link button to our site on their page instead allowed users to have a nifty button that did nothing sitting invisibly on their hard drive and useless code in their web site. This is like having a cherry ’57 Chevy with no back seat to get laid in.
   
   
5. We were using a powerful multimedia tool to present a wide variety of plain-old text and pictures. As one friend told me: "It's funny, but it's boring as hell. It's like having a prime time TV show where they film Time Magazine."
   

Let’s face it; neither Paul nor I are Web designers, graphic artists or able to use many kitchen utensils. We write jokes. Before trying to produce this site, all we knew about the inner workings of computers was that somehow, using only silicon and the numbers 1 and 0, they allowed us to blow up virtual MiGs. We could then hunt down the pilots who were parachuting to safety, in total violation of the virtual Geneva Convention. The rest of this stuff we’re learning as we go along.

And we are learning it, rest assured. I have spent more money on books about web design and programming this month than I have spent on whiskey, and believe me; that’s some serious coin.

So we've learned enough to make some changes to make the site more user-friendly and functional. We've increased the type size, gotten rid of the hideous yellow buttons, and changed the frame layout. We actually tested the forms this time to make sure they work, having learned that computers are like housecats: they seem nice, but they secretly hate you. We've thrown in some animation for the retarded and others with limited attention spans.

Most importantly, we've continued to publish the hideous, vile and dangerous humor we at The American Jerk are so damn proud of. And we’re still doing it under our real names, scaring our parents and pleasing the lawyers who circle us like manta rays with hemorrhagic fever.

I got involved in this project so I could reach people with my humor without having to drive to comedy clubs all over New England, so maybe I could have more of a life. Now, I come home from my day job and sit at my computer for five hours to do all this stuff, and I am still not getting laid.

At least here I can sneak a look at porno while I’m working; it tends to be distracting when I’m working the clubs.

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