Category: site
New Design (aka Sounds Familiar)
I can't say I have been pleased with the events of what transpired regarding the redesign of this site. Everything looked fine in Firefox and I wasn't using any code that was tricky, unreasonable, or shady. In fact, the design was built upon framework software which in theory was more compatible than many of the other CSS development platforms available today.
As it turns out, it wasn't the frameworks fault that site was invisible in IE, it was my fault. I tend to put many comments in my code as I tend to forget what something does if I haven't worked on it in a while. I, of course, did what any programmer worth his/her salt would do, I cut and paste comments so I didn't have to completely retype the comment with every use.
HTML comments follow's a syntax that closes a comment with "-->". Too late to notice, and after considerable time spent on a redesign, I found out that I had closed my first comment with "--!>" and had copied and pasted that incorrect syntax throughout all my code over multiple pages. Firefox was still able to decipher the page with the incorrect syntax while other browsers choked and puked.
Lesson learned, use the crappiest browser available to test a site, those smart ones will deceive every time!
Please let me know if anything else is borked. It probably is, but I've worked through everything I can find.
Posted: 05.06.2009Site Redesign
Honestly, I’m not sure there is anything I like less than having to completely redesign an old web site. Much of the reason I haven’t been posting was a direct result of the unhappiness with the appearance of the site. I’ve committed myself to get something new up, and while much of it will remain unfinished and under constant redesign, I will make sure I’m not really unhappy with it.
The temptation for me is to try and keep as much of the old stuff as possible because I think back to the amount of work I put into some of the modules of the old bird. One of the things I think of when tempted with such traditionalism is the accounting concept of “sunk cost”. The concept in a nutshell says that the amount paid for something in the past has no relevance to a current financial decision. The only thing that matters is what value that asset brings to current operations.
Change has come, and that as someone I intensely dislike has said over and over again “is a good thing.”
Posted: 04.30.2009EngineHosting
I have been having problems with my site hosting for close to a year now. Dreamhost had been a solid provider of hosting services before then but then things change. For me, most of the issues had to do with small mistakes which would render my site unusable. Such an incident happened a few days ago when a borked PHP config file caused the Dreamhost server (and therefore my site) to stop parsing PHP files and instead offer them for download. I wish Dreamhost the best, but they need to get their config issues reigned in to have a chance at maintaining their customer base.
I’ve moved to EngineHosting and am so far pleased with what I see. What I find refreshing is that they seem to do things a bit differently than traditional hosting companies. With most hosting companies, they offer minimal direct contact with support staff and a large control panel to allow the customer to do most of the work. With EngineHosting, they offer a modest control panel, but a very responsive staff that handles the mundane config and setup requests. In overall experience, the difference in philosophy reminds me of the difference between self- and full-service gasoline with one big difference: the hosting is the same price.
While all the pages are working, I still need to have EngineHosting support staff initiate a domain registrar transfer and setup one cron-esque process for me so the latest tracks will regularly update. Other than that, the move was not as painful as I had anticipated.
Posted: 04.17.2008Dreamhost Issues
I think the tags say it all…
Posted: 04.15.2008