Technical Blog – Page 57

Web Pages That Suck

Every now and then I go to Vincent Flanders’ Web pages that Suck to get a dose of shame,learn and scurry to fix my offenses.Luckily I labor in obscurity well under any radar!
To date: I struggled with the header as a clickable link issue often.
I’ve read it isn’t allowed. I’ ve read it is allowed to the point of being a big sign of suckage if your header banner isn’t a link to your home page.

It gets confusing,all these rules.But if you want folks to pay you for web design it’s pretty important that you make up your own mind and hopefully you make it up on the winning side of the semantic fuss.
I’ve decided it’s a damn good idea.

Mr.Flanders is a harsh critic and thankfully I haven’t made more than 3 points worth of mistakes,myself.
Since I hand write most of my own stylesheets I don’t get the Frontpage suck he seems to deem the worst offense of them all.
But he himself uses tables in his design which to me in my little unknown opinion is one of the major signs of suckability in web pages today.

Tiny Mysql Success

After all of my fear and I know that at least some of you can relate to this, I finally just went and ran my first tiny script that required a mysql database connection.
It all started…ok I will spare you my longwinded rattle which is super boring to anyone but me.

But I was avoiding it so hard that it had to be tackled.After all, there comes a time when you just can’t keep sidestepping mysql…much as you’d like to.Not if what you want to do is help people set up their own sites as like a job,you know?
I spent a good part of the day browsing Sourceforge looking for this and that.Which I can do for hours on end…I find it exciting,that is what a geek I am.

I’d downloaded a comments script that hadn’t stated outright that you needed mysql(which is good because I wouldn’t have downloaded it).

My host had given me my own mysql databse and db connections specs and I had run a connectivity test just 2 weeks ago but that was all.So I just followed the directions of the install and poof.I have comments.I have moderated comments,too with ip banning and a search form and the time and date and everything. wow.

If you’re playing fast and loose with the stylesheet.

Make sure you check the page in at least one other browser.I usually do except sometimes even miss perfect forgets.
A day ago I was all like look at my version of a tables-less css gallery! and then I checked it in internet explorer and my wacky padding hijinks had all my content overlapping,obscuring other content, running down the center of the page in a thin strip…in short a total mess.And it was so nice in firefox,too. sigh. I fixed it.

My blog died.

My simplePHPblog has died.It is full of errors and warnings and I can no longer login.

I was working on a mockup of a dvd site(for adults) yes I know–what a whore–but anyway I wasn’t going to be the one putting in the smutty pictures.That was going to be the job of my boss.I could’ve just used my other host old crapface purehost…but it takes for ever to do anything there.Even lowly html pages creep creep creep when loading.
Oh,today was not a good day for me and the webdesign-y.

I was using quickcart(not sure how those opensource folks feel about their stuff being used to load blue materiel…but the web is full of porn,right?What’s one more site?
I like porn so it isn’t like I’m going against my principals or something.
So I was trying to get rid of something and I messed up.So I deleted that file I screwed up and then tried to reupload the unf**cked one via filezilla.And that was when my ftp access to that host went kablooey.

I couldn’t delete,upload or do nothing.Well, I could do nothing.

I backed off from there after I saw that my blog also decided to go splat on top of my ftp permissions.Obviously, there could be no more work getting done over there.
So I go to craphost and try to struggle with the ancient mollasses in january style they like to rock and wonders of wonders my craphost decided to get even crappier!
.php files started coming up as zip files when I tried to load a page!

.html files simply politely loaded blank white pages.I got internal server errors warnings.I got the connection to the server was reset.I got problem loading page.I got nowhere!
Oh my.I am now the Job of the web.

I wrote to my other host and aksed what could it be.
I prolly messed something up.I’m good at doing that.Luckily it was just some lame mockup that wasn’t really working anyway.Sigh, I now hafta go burden my angelfire account with a lot of activity because I seem to have royally fried every other option I had.