I’m a freelance web designer who prides herself on the fact that I care about web standards as well as design. There are lots of people who go on and on about the fact that that’s just a load of hog-wash (they probably don’t believe in Global Warming,either). So they load up Microsoft Frontpage 5.0 and churn out tons of td laden, boxy pages and people pay good money for them.
Oh, what’s she ragging about,now?
We are now in 2008, shouldn’t your site look like it was made in at the very least 2006?
But the way a site looks is actually the least important thing.
To me the most important aspect of being web standards compliant is that the site will render properly in a variety of browsers. It’s reassuring to know that what a visitor sees using Opera is close to the same as a visitor using IE.
There’s a bit of a kerfuffle going on over writing code as water tight as a duck’s ass. I waver because there has to be a line drawn somewhere and for me it’s all those hacks.
Hide from IE 5 mac for crying out loud. Are there people using IE 5 on macs?
I tend to get cross eyed also thinking I should set up a seperate style sheet for print, then for media hand held devices,then for Braille. Braille? You got me there.
If someone can set up a site that someone can read in Braille, pay them 2500 bucks!
They’ve earned it.
Continue reading What burns my britches.
Category: Personal Blog
Kicking against the pricks
Why must everything be such a hassle?
Hassle One: My new account with Powweb is totally bolloxed. I was twiddling my dainty thumbs for 2 days waiting for some mess to clear up with how CGI gets enabled for new accounts so that I could get going setting up my dad’s new site just to find out a minute ago that it was enabled improperly.For the record,when a new user signs up a new account with powweb the 1st thing they ought to do is click a little button that enables CGI. Why it isn’t the first thing bang in your face upon activating your new account-I have no idea. It ought to be right there as soon as you login like:
Hello username, would you like to enable CGI on your account so that you might be able to get stuff to work?
Sigh, but that would be too easy. I had to find this out in their community forums…It isn’t top of the list in the knowledgebase,either. It’s also not an easy button to find from the control panel. Whatever.
Hassle Two:The administrator of the domain I need pointed to another nameserver is being…difficult.
I clearly stated what I needed him to do and he wrote me 2x today telling me to “get it together” and send him the info. Which I already had. I gave up getting it transferred to me and just asked him to point it for me. But now that Powweb has decided to poop out I sure hope the domain doesn’t end up pointing toward a website that isn’t set up at all.I have to be able to install WP in order to set things up and I can’t do that until Powweb “gets it together”.Yikes.
So by tomorrow am that website better be working because I am going to have to act super fast to make it ready…if the guy ever does the DNS stuff for me, maybe he’d rather just keep the catty emails coming.
It’s weird when people don’t trust me.
As a web designer I’m forced to be privy to my client’s private information that, trust me, I’d rather not have to have.It’s sensitive stuff ranging from ftp info and all the way up to master logins for servers running 20 domains and up to PayPal info so that I can set up a shop for them when they’d rather not do it themselves…Yes, Paypal which is akin to having access to their bank accounts.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the trust my clients have in me.
But then I’m a trustworthy person.I worked in retail for almost 6 years handling money daily and never taking so much as a dime.If a store clerk hands me back too much change I will tell them
because I know it might have to come out of their own pocket at the end of the day.
I can’t help it-I was raised to be honest.
There were some filching incidents as a small child that still give me the guilts.
So tonight when I called my dad’s domain name registrant and asked him for the account information so I could get the domain pointed to my dad’s new host and he prickled and said (rather testily) I’m not going to give you access to all 800 of my domains! I was taken aback.Well! How was I to know that he had 800 domains? Why would anyone even want to have 800 domains? A domain name parker,that’s who. Sniff.
Domain name parking is when you perceive that someone might one day want that particular domain name so you buy it in the hope that they will want to buy it from you. I sort of remember my dad’s landlord going on about this way back in the day…how he planned to make a ton of money by parking a massive amount of domain names.
This is a man who has known me since I was a little kid! It’s not like I’m a stranger… but fine.I didn’t know he had control over that many domains so when I asked for that domain’s info I didn’t know it would give me access to all of them.I only asked to do it myself because I want it done yesterday.Now I have wait for him to point the domain to the new nameservers and it pains me.
I’d like to know what exactly he thought I would even do with all of those silly domains? Hijack them for porn spam? As if, Jenny.
Website still down
I could swear I edited this post.There’s a hex on me or something.My own site has been acting twitchy these past few days…maybe the joke is on me?Maybe powweb and purehost are related? Maybe even the same company?
There’s irony here. I praise powweb but bash purehost a lot.
Here are some coincidences:
Both sites had a scheduled maintanence on the exact same day, Jan 8th.
Both use the same software for control panel.
Both use the exact same verbiage on their sites almost word for word.
Both offer Shopsite and Sitebuilder.
Ok so wasting time being paranoid isn’t helping.But still it would be funny if they turned out to be the same company!
The Website I was having trouble with came back online today around 1pm.
Albeit with some serious issues:
In order to have pretty permalinks on IIS I have to use the IIS admin console
to set my custom error page to use wp-404-handler.php. After the server went offline(that’s what they said caused the redirect to go flooey on me) they managed to fix it but disabled my use of the IIS admin console so I can’t set my custom error page anymore.Goodbye pretty links hello ugly. I had included a lot of manually entered links using dom and h2 id’s to direct site visitors to the exact place on a page I wanted them to go to.Yep,all with pretty urls.So I had to take those out and now I am figuring what to put in in their place.This blows because I was really happy with they way the home page used to look and thought I was done. I’m just doing a quick fix and tossing in some photos where all those links used to be as a compromise.