Weaving Nightmares

I am sick and tired of working on websites. I knew the work I was doing with Dreamweaver 8 wasn't going to amount to much. I knew that it wasn't going to be compatible with Blogger. I knew all that, but there was a small part of me that believed it would. I hoped that all the hours I invested in this blasted program was going to produce something great.

It's very likely that I don't have a clue what I'm doing with the program. I'm not taking advantage of any of the intermediate or advanced features, mostly because I don't know how. What I am doing, creating style sheets, linking them to my HTML document and formatting my CSS in the HTML page takes some knowledge. However, Dreamweaver is not doing all the heavy lifting, I still am. I'm still hand coding the vast majority of what I'm doing and that doesn't seem right.

This is the problem with WYSIWYG's, what I see in Dreamweaver, is not what I'm seeing in the browser. My XHTML validates, my CSS validates, and I have cross-platform compatibility, yet there is one tag that affects the page in Dreamweaver, but doesn't affect it when I preview the page in a browser.

Later this afternoon, when I realized my design wasn't going to work in Blogger, I looked into WordPress. Many of the better-designed blogs out there use it and so I thought, if it works with them, I can see it, in the end, working for mine. The first thing I needed to do was create the template for my blog. I began reading about how to do that. I continued reading, and read some more, then more. While I loosely understand the concept, there is little out there to solidify my knowledge. Then I got lost when I realized I needed to use PHP.

I tried to learn PHP last year by buying one of those horrible 900-page Behemoth XLs (read: books) that ultimately teach you how to create the Internet. It was an attempt to make my website dynamic and I got lost at page 27. I'm sure I understood the underlying concepts and even the syntax but it was putting it all together that twists my brain into a knot.

What doesn't help is that I never start small. I always figure that if I'm going to do it, I want to go for the gold. So, I have the very complicated design that I need to shoehorn into WordPress using templates and PHP and CSS and XHTML and all other acronyms that I only have a rudimentary understanding.

For the next couple of weeks, I'm going to try and study and work on getting a firm grasp on everything I need to learn. If your thinking about me taking a college course in this, stop. They don't offer one. They offer one about Dreamweaver, and I may in the future begin taking that, but that's not what I want. I want to know how to do it the hard way before I start doing something the "easy" way.

Are You Reading Me?

It's weird to learn that people other than family and friends have read my blog. It's an uncomfortable feeling that my opinions are out in the Internet ether for the entire world to read and comment. Regardless of how uncomfortable it feels I've placed myself out there for a reason; I wanted an open forum, a street corner on the Internet where I can stand atop a soapbox and talk about anything I wanted.

It's interesting, if I were out in public, standing on a soapbox, rambling on about the Barry Manilow concert I attended, I probably wouldn't get much attention. However, on the Internet someone is willing to stop and listen to what I have to say. I'm surprised to tell you that that is exactly what happened. Someone stopped and listened while I rambled on about my Barry Manilow experience.

I was checking my "Google Juice" on Google yesterday and came across Barry Fun: A positive, fun blog, about Barry Manilow. One particular post had links to different reviews of the Portland Barry Manilow concert including mine. In addition, the blogger used my concert ticket graphic, which would have been a point of contention if the blogger were stealing bandwidth by hotlinking. Plus, it's a Barry Manilow site, I had a scan of a Barry Manilow ticket; it's all good.

Then I found that "James Doogin", a friend of mine, Dugg my post called "First TV Show to DVD". It was then Dugg a few more times by other people. It never gained critical mass to make it popular, but this blog is so diverse that it's unlikely going to make me famous, unless a lot of people really like hearing about showers and sandwiches. I'm sure there aren't many out there.

Me vs. NetSol & Yahoo!

Some things are best left alone as I discovered the hard way today and it all stems from the switch to Blog*Spot. Let me give you a little history on the subject. I purchased my domain name, justjason.com, from Network Solutions (www.netsol.com) then the Small Business web-hosting package from Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com). Yahoo! completely tied justjason.com to the web-hosting package, as they naturally should. This is where Blogger (www.blogger.com) would be publishing my blog.

Fast-forward to present day where you find me wanting to convert my blog to Blog*Spot. Blog*Spot is the service that Blogger uses to host peoples blogs for free. I mentioned some of the reasons in a previous post entitled Welcome . . . again. Now all I needed to do was point justjason.com to my Blog*Spot address and everything would be fine.

I visit Network Solution's website and purchase a service that will forward justjason.com to my Blog*Spot address. The service costs $12 a year and I currently use the service for my three other URLs which all point to files hosted on Yahoo!. I'm very hesitant because DNS (domain name server) settings need to be changed in order for the forwarding to work, and anytime setting changes need to take place it all becomes very complicated very fast.

Against my better judgment, I purchase the service and point justjason.com to my Blog*Spot address. A few hours later I check my website and everything that could have gone wrong did. Not only did my website not come up, but none of my websites did and none of my Mom's websites did. All the connections that connected my domain and my web host were broken, completely interrupting service.

So why did everything go down if the only change was to justjason.com? As I mentioned earlier, Yahoo tied justjason.com to my web-hosting package. This means that all graphics and html pages hosted by Yahoo! had the justjason.com domain attached. Since Network Solutions changed the DNS settings for justjason.com it was no longer pointing to any of my files on Yahoo, therefore nothing was being displayed.

I manually change the DNS settings on Network Solutions back to Yahoo!, but then decide to call Yahoo! and have them reset the DNS settings as well. I call Network Solutions and cancel the web forwarding service. I hope that sometime within the next three days everything will be back to normal.

Welcome . . . again.

Welcome to the newer Just Jason, a blog devoted to everything about my life. It looks almost identical to my previous blog, as it was meant to, except this time I'm having Blogger host all the posts. I decided to finally go this route so I can take advantage of some of their new features, like Labels.

Labels are exactly like categories and in order for me to easily use categories; I needed to make this dramatic change. What kept me from making this change sooner was the confining HTML editor. I didn't understand how I could edit the HTML to incorporate my design. As you can see, I've done a pretty good job. However, there are a couple of nagging things that aren't worth worrying about.

This is the first of my blogs to make the switch, but I am working on transferring all my blogs over. But, there are some downsides to this; I lose all my previous posts. This isn't as bad as it sounds; I have them all backed up but you won't be able to access them anymore. I was thinking about starting this blog over anyway, to begin fresh and not weighted down with history.

That's the story so far. I hope you stick with me as I attempt to breathe new life into this old blog.