Category: Technical Blog

I rescued some important files for this blog last night and it’s a good thing I did because I think my host erased my account today!

I haven’t had to do a whole site transfer before and today I transferred 2 sites. It taught me not to put in the whole url of an image or a file;just put in the path.Because even though most folks won’t switch hosts and change domain names while you’re working on a site it can happen.

Learn from my mistake:
Save yourself the tedious job of fixing all the urls. I get a big old duh,right?
ha.

Hopefully soon All of my various pages will be under one roof and hosted by one host.
I have had to leave my “temp” host.I was asked to do so after asking him to set up a friend with a paid account.He said he didn’t want any more clients and that I should pack up my files and find hosting elsewhere,too.

Luckily for me he did have the name of a very good host and I went and signed up with them.That was the easy part.I have a dud site located on the angelfire network.I don’t really care about this site
at all.

I just want the domain name I registered with them.I’ve always taken any bad press with a grain of salt but a little googling did turn up some other folks who’d had a problem transferring their domains from lycos(angelfire is lycos). I am officially registered with Melbourne IT but they aren’t much help,either.I filled out a form is all I know.

I have to change the nameservers to my new hosts’.Bleh.So techy.
Then when that is all done I have to redirect everyone from those other sites to my one site.Bleh again as I am not sharp on the webmaster side of things.And this was what my former host meant when he said it would be a good learning experience for me.
I admit I was lazy before when I had the chance to learn about all this when my old host set me up.I was supposed to point my old angelfire address to the address he made for me but I didn’t.
I may end up having to reregister with Pow Web but they charge 15 dollars and I still have about 5 months left on my old domain…I think.

Yesterday I gathered my courage and also mananged to supress my usually procrastinative nature and I signed up with a new web hosting CO.
I couldn’t get over how cheap it was:70 a year.&75 databases &a whole bunch of one-click installations.Joomla,Mambo,Wordpress & etc.I love having the option to install these big name products even if their innards kind of scare me.I fiddled briefly with Mambo and just backed away from it. I didn’t have to “get” it so I didn’t do much more than peek at the files.I did not find it brimming with userintuitive interface at all.
After I loaded all my files to the new host,
I had to enable CGI for my scripts to work but apart from that and changing paths to files it was really easy to transfer to Pow Web.I cheated and called customer support who walked me through the whole thing and even took the time to explain how to point a domain to another registrar or whatever it’s called.

I got a bit of a buzzkill when I first pasted in my new URL and got an error message…
I though crap! Now what? But I went to the forums and found out that it was just a matter of clicking enable CGI and waiting 6 hours for everything to update.Now my site looks just like it did. Which is total crap! I suck! Just kidding.I only say this because this past 2 weeks have been CSS bootcamp for me.
I have gotten a lot better at making stuff look the way I want it to.
A big source of inspiration was the website for the creator of SmoothGallery.
Naturally he’d have a kickass page.

I’m breaking off from prepping my files and finding where I stashed all my tools
and collecting and optimizing images for the new site. I have to go walk the dog before A. gets home and biitches at me for neglecting him. And since we already had one fight today I’d like to avoid another.
The weirdest thing: the new job’s site is hosted by Purehost…I’m not sure if this is so great.I know I can’t use mysql there.I know Purehost’s foibles all too well after working on another site hosted by them. ‘m still that site’s webmaster and so I keep pretty up to date with what I can and can’t do there.Pretty much anything that has session start will load super slow.
But even html files go slow sometimes or take a long time to load

I’ll write more about it later.I’m going to be really in the weeds for a long time til I get my framework figured out.But I’m happy to be doing a new job. After twiddling my thumbs for a week I’m ready to work.