GoDaddy's InstantPage Thingy

So much for praising GoDaddy. It looked easy there, for a second. Silly me. GoDaddy has a starter page for each domain that they sell. It's all part of the trend of making registrar and host sites look simple and navigable to newbies and tech-impaired, while serving up adequate complexity under the hood to the techies among us. (It think we all know where I belong in that mix). The starter page can barely be said to "start" your site. It's a business card. The background is customizable and can be a photo background. The site does allow for several pages, so that's good. The page editor on that InstantPage® tool is pretty limited, but it could work. It was a problematic to use, with interference from the browser. One browser (Firefox) blocked access to the FTP, I guess. I couldn't upload a photo. The error was generic ~ unknown or unspecified. Thinking it was something I'd done, I spent several hours tweaking and re-editing photos, trying different formats, getting rid of transparency, compressing and checking file size, and changing the dimensions. Finally I opened a support ticket. (I'm not a support-ticket kind of girl, I usually avoid those things). Meanwhile, it did occur to me to try a new browser. I tried Internet Explorer. IE! Oh, groan, groan. The next few hours were dismal, dismal. IE did let me upload a photo, but it returned an ugly security error on every page, growling at me with each one. Och! That horrible growl. I continued in IE ~ I don't know why. A better course of action would have been to save the photo in IE, close the browser, and go back to Firefox. (Well, I'm sure you techies would say, a better course of action would be to install Linux!) I finally got the page saved, but then came the next horror: a DNS redirect error. It's tied to that InstantPage® thingy, so don't go away...

GoDaddy, Weebly, Blogger, Tumblr (Comparing)

I had a good post planned, but due to an exasperating number of petty pet peeves that happened to me yesterday and today, it went straight out of my head. Since I'm here, I'll give the latest update to my right-brain attack on the left-brain, algebraic world of creating a web page. Everybody said, go to Tumblr, kids are lovin' it, yah, yah, yah. So, I set up a silly little fun blog at Tumblr. I'm likin' it okay and thinking it does have possibilities. But Tumblr leaves it up to you to figure out how to edit those standard templates. No help there. Naturally, they want to sell their $50 premium templates, but I'd still be in the same boat, not knowing how to tweak the code without breaking it. Gotta tweak that code, mercy! 'Cuz if I can't make it "my" website, why bother? But, I'm having fun with the Tumblr blog (Vesta Higginbottom, in case you're just dying for it; no link, I'm not overtly plugging). Meanwhile, I've got a simple site up on Weebly, and certainly am not unhappy with it. It's limited, yes... but easy as pie. Now, I'm looking into GoDaddy, to which everyone says, "No! No! No!" Here's what I've learned so far. Phone-tech support was actually quick, polite and helpful ~ quite unlike what all the forums had warned. I also found that, contrary to the warnings being shouted by megaphonish bloggers, GoDaddy's DNS zone editor is not really a bear-trap. It just feels like it at times. My skeletal site, registered at GoDaddy but hosted elsewhere, is not chained to a block wall in some bleak dungeon, but is proudly displayed to the world at large. Yes, their ad-covered parking page, or landing page, was hard to get rid of; but that's because I didn't really know how to get rid of it. I had to be stepped through the process. Here's the deal: there are so many, many things to do and places to navigate on GoDaddy (and on every registrar, it seems), it is just confusing. Can't be otherwise, I guess. Sometimes I get maddening glimpses of a GoDaddy interface or intro page with "Launch" buttons, that looks easy and straightforward. But then I never can find it again. Dang their navigation! Ah well, what else is new? I did manage to set up email (MX-whatever); change my A-name and C-name records; set up a quick entry page with Website Tonight/Instant Page (albeit with a couple of glitches). True, I had to read a blue-million tutorials to get that done. I understand that GoDaddy's home page has to be navigable to geeks and newbies alike, but maybe they could stick a big, red "Easy" button up there for newbs, let them skip the GoDaddy Encyclopedia. I'm still open to the idea of GD hosting. I will say this. Once you identify and find the right GoDaddy tutorial for your needs, it is pretty easy to read. I have not yet tried their paid hosting. If I do, I'll start by sticking my little toe in the water... just some itty, bitty, not-too-important domain. Maybe buy in for six months or a year. Hard to say. Of all the hosts so far, Weebly has been the easiest. I'm still loving Blogger ~ just wish they'd give me a static page to go with it. Between the three (GoDaddy, Weebly, and Blogger), I've managed some fairly complex-looking sites. But I still haven't found that magic bullet...

The Devil and the DNS

Yesterday. Sigh. Where shall I begin? True to type, I waited till the last minute to check into the verity of the DNS-Changer virus (2012's equivalent of the Y2K thingy). I'd had the fear tucked away, a faint glimmer at the back of my mind, waiting for its chance to wend its way into the actively working part of my brain. But it had a long line of more pressing thoughts in front of it, so it patiently waited, passive thing that it was. Now, I know what you're thinking: "You got hit by DNS, neener, neener, neen-er!" But you're wrong. I assumed I would, and the DNS is the devil if it's not working properly. By the time I came around to trusting that the DNS-ok site wasn't, itself, a scam, and went there ~ the site had already shut down. But it didn't matter, for if the DNS devil had struck, it'd be too late for me, and I'd just be fried. Time for a new PC anyhow.

Now, also true to type, my main brain was focused on bigger things. Me and my tunnel vision (my TV and I) were focused on site building. I typed on till midnight. I was hard at work building a blog, organizing its pages, linking my sub-domains, structuring the links, and, yes, writing the posts; for I am known as a multi-tasker. It won't do for me to go about a thing the simple way. Gotta be complicated. Now, with half-a-dozen open web pages, including Blogger's builder, several files, and Notepad (three unsaved bits of a post, well-written, I thought) ~ the last thing I needed was an old-fashioned power outage. But, there you go. Right in the middle of my intense concentration and type-o-rama (my fingers were flying) ~ CLAP! The screen went black. While I was page building, a storm had been building outside, and our nearby power line was the recipient of its wrath. (Dang the dang pine beetles, there's hardly a tree left standing on the mountain. The only thing holding them up is our power lines). I find it highly ironic that I was by-passed by the DNS devil, only to be humbled by an old-timey, Huckleberry Finn, wrath-of-God thunderstorm. So, I felt my way downstairs in the dark. One consolation: I found it rather gratifying, in a hot-chocolate-and-midnight-feast kind of way, to tuck myself up in a cotton blanket, point a flashlight at a paper page, and proceed to indulge in an old-fashioned, tea-and-crumpets, Miss Marple mystery. Some things never change.

Hold That Thought

Ummmm, hold that thought.

http://www.wikihow.com/Tell-the-Difference-Between-Nerds-and-Geeks

http://southernmuse.com/temppages/permalink-amaya-example.html

Okay, the parallel between these two pages (above) should be self-explanatory. But it probably won't be (since my thinking seems to be unique); so...

That first article just tickled my funny bone ~ but it was also unexpected. The author of it did seem to consider the question with some seriousness. The second page (which I'd finished just a couple of seconds before finding the first) was the working scratchpad of my attempt to design a page using Amaya, as well as my attempt to explain the experience of using Amaya to design a page. I found the first while searching for more information about the subject of the second (how to use Amaya).

The very sad thing is that, when I uploaded my page on Amaya, I discovered that I had, indeed, already completed another page using that page editor ~ and only two weeks ago. What does that say about my memory? Well, I knew I'd played with the editor. I just didn't recall making a finished page.

It's nearly 4 a.m., and this won't make sense to anybody but me.


C'est la vie.

DuckDuckGo: New Search Engine

Having a little fun with DuckDuckGo, a new search engine I just learned about. I had searched Google for "unfiltered search results" (kind of ironic, if you think about it). So, I found this DuckDuckGo, which promises to let you escape the search bubble and find all the stuff that Bing and Google have kept hidden from you. First off, let me tell you ~ I love the little duck! What a cutie, cutie, cutie! And perhaps I did get unfiltered results... Anyhow, I got a lot of results, and that's something. The results were different than the ones from Google and Bing. I must say, though, the results page made me flash back to old Jeeves (now Ask.com). All of the results looked suspiciously commercial, which kind of reminded me why Google gave us filtered results in the first place. But the results were relevant, sort of like early Jeeves, before the butler got to be such a greedy pig. A search of a particular city on DuckDuckGo turned up real businesses in that city, not the sell-a-rama that used to come up on Jeeves (or the, ahem, the plethora of broken links that Jeeves retched up after the Y2K crash, which goes to show that favoring paying sites might not be the best idea for configuring a search engine). Bing seems commercial, too. Well, hey. Go figure ~ it's Microsoft. I haven't compared Bing and DuckDuckGo to see who does what, but I'd say the little Duck guy is worth checking out from time to time. Get to see the little duck, anyhow. Besides, I might want to see how my sites compete in unfiltered search... get my drift?

Success with GoDaddy

Having maligned GoDaddy not too long ago (because their DNS manager had gotten harder (yes, harder), I now have to say that I had a bit of success in setting up a couple of my domains. I don't know why it's so difficult. I think GoDaddy saw my multiple domains and stuck me into the "advanced" manager. Go figure! No doubt GoDaddy is meant for techies who know what they're doing, and those techies need lots of complicated stuff to make really fancy websites. But I'm tech-retarded. I just want to try different plans. To me, the DNS manager and Zone Editors still seem tricky. I really had to play hide and seek to find and set up email. I still had nagging doubts about the changing of A names and C names. GoDaddy had some great tutorials, as did Weebly and Google. Once I had the hang of it, changing an A name and a C name wasn't so bad. GoDaddy does do the 'big sell' on their hosting and other plans, but they don't prevent your changing hosts (as some bloggers claimed). One thing's for sure: buying a domain is a heck of a lot easier than managing one once you've bought it.

Changes

You know... what's more disturbing than downtime is that GoDaddy seems to have changed their entire DNS interface. Ch-ch-ch changes. The whole thing looks much harder than before. The learning curve is an understatement. Ever seen the W Road up there on Signal Mountain? Yeah, that road. The curve really is a "W." Same here. Forget everything you learned yesterday (and I do mean, literally, yesterday). Today, you gotta relearn it, a whole new way. And now all those tutorials out there (with screen shots) no longer match the screens you see on GoDaddy. They're really pushing hosting these days, so the whole thing may be designed to make it harder to map your domain names to some other hosting site. Can't be sure of that, but ~ looks like a duck; quacks like a duck... We'll see. It's always a scary thing to deal with a whole new interface, unlearn and relearn everything. That, too, seems to happen just about the time you hand over your wallet. Just Murphy's law, I guess. You bought it yesterday; today it's broke. Or, in the case of all things Internet: "upgraded." (Translate: broke).

Par for the Course?

I guess it's par for the course, in the world of website hosting... GoDaddy has gone down for scheduled maintenance, or so it says. Nothing on their blog mentions a scheduled-maintenance period. But this I know, scheduled maintenance seems to happen at those crucial times when you really need to get into your account. Scheduled maintenance never happens when you're just wasting time, surfing the 'Net, playing a game. It always happens just about the time you hand over your wallet. See ya, bye! Scheduled maintenance. Maybe it's just that time of day. Lots of times these websites do maintenance at odd, late hours. Let's hope things look better in the morning. Oh... it is morning.

John and Yoko Farming Beef

And another thing. Only since the advent of the Internet have we felt compelled to waste countless hours in the trivial pursuit of seeking out trivia ~ seeking the meaning of obscure song lyrics and the like. Take for instance I Do the Rock by Tim Curry. One verse of that song always puzzled me:

John and Yoko farming beef
Raising protein quota
Sometimes they make love and art
Inside their dakota
Rodney's feeling sexy
Mick is really frightfully bold
Me, I do the only thing that'stops me growing old
I do the Rock
I do the Rock Rock
I do the Rock Rock Rock 

Now, the other references weren't that obscure: Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger... pretty obvious. Edith Sitwell (from a previous verse) I'd heard of, and it wasn't hard, from there, to find "Satchie" (Sacheverell Sitwell, her brother). Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, I already knew.  "Baby" (Babe) Ruth, Knute Rockne, and O.J. were easy enough, as people who "wack" balls with great velocity ~ albeit O.J. is more famous, now, for wacking people. Likewise, Solzhenitzin, Nietsche, Einstein, various celebs, and world leaders posed no problem. I didn't bother to look up every ref, I got the drift of it. But somehow, John and Yoko just weren't associated with the farming of beef in my mind. The Dakota, sure; but "farming beef"? And "raising protein quota"? Was it a strange reference to child-getting, I wondered? Checking several sites that analyze obscure or unintelligible lyrics, I found that most of them included the song, but none had answers, or even guesses, about its meaning. Searches for John and Yoko and "beef" or "protein quota" all led to sites that mentioned the song, but had no insight into the lyrics. I learned that the Lennons bought a farm in Virginia and thought that I'd solved the mystery. But looking further into it, it didn't seem to be that kind of farm. It was an historic estate, not a cattle farm. Continuing to search, I found that John Lennon did a song called 'Beef Jerky.' Aha! I thought. But no, it was an instrumental. The one string of lyrics (Beef jerky, beef jerky, beef jerky) provided no enlightenment, and I did find a site which mentioned that Tim Curry dropped that verse in one live performance. Also, oddly enough, I found a father-and-son team, John and Sean Lennon (of no relation, apparently, to the famous ones) who farmed cannabis. And I found a Vanity Fair parody, in which a 70-year-old John Lennon (had he lived) went bounding about a dairy farm with pails of milk.

Not one to give up (and this song nagging, as it did, every time I thought of it), I kept plugging away on Google. And finally, voila! Something clicked. I began to find references to Yoko Ono's investments in cattle, references to a "$250,000" ($250K) cow, and various opinons as to Yoko Ono's genius for investing (or lack thereof); for she was (or wasn't) brilliant as John Lennon's financial manager, and made investments in cattle and organic farming. Thus, the most likely solution to the odd lyrics? Either Michael Kamen or Tim Curry picked up a stray tidbit from the entertainment news of the day.

So, here are the clues that led to my conclusion: 

From Beatles Photo Blog came a forum conversation betwixt "Alex of Bronx," "Tammy," and "Jo." Alex mentioned the Virginia farm, but Tammy and Jo provided my first clue about a $250,000 cow (somehow tied to Yoko Ono). Subsequent searches on Yoko, investments, and $250K cows turned up this: 

While Ono managed John’s money, John becomes a house husband, devoting his time to baking bread and raising his son Sean. John and Ono became worth hundreds of million of dollars, partly because of shrewd investments made Ono, who made a fortune in New York real estate and with dairy cows.

                                                                                                          ~ Facts and Details (Japan)

Ono became Lennon's business manager, and invested his money in real estate and organic farming. 

                                                                                                         ~ John Lennon, from Simple Wiki

His personal fortune was estimated at $150 million by the fall of 1980, before his death; most of his investments were in real estate and organic farming. (Tarot reader John Green asserted in Dakota Days that Lennon's actual fortune was far less, and the rest was hype on Yoko Ono's part.)

                                                                                from What Was Lennon's Net Worth 

And finally, this from a Yoko fan (perhaps her only):

Yoko, by contrast, was and is financially brilliant.  In All We Are Saying, she compares investments and financial transactions with chess.  The woman made millions for the two of them off of investments in cows.  Cows!  Dammit, I want her handling my money, too!

                                                                               from article on ImaginePeace.com

So, regardless of the verity of any information found, the "fact" of the $250K cow obviously got about among Yoko fans, critics, or the general public. And for me, I've solved the mystery of the "John and Yoko farming beef" lyric, at least to my own satisfaction. And yes... we spend w-a-aaa-ay-y-y too much of our life seeking out the significance of obscure song lyrics...

Still Struggling...

I'm still struggling with some of the technical aspects of setting up sites, mapping domains to them, and all that. I always have questions, and they're not always answered by the help section. Slowly but surely, I plug away at it, and am getting another site set up. But even now, my old site could use an extensive overhaul. I just can't do it. Just doing the main pages is hard enough. I mean, I had the danged page w3c compliant, and already, that has changed. I don't think I changed anything. And the page is not completely to my liking. Either I misunderstood certain aspects of HTML 4.01 Transitional, or I understood it, but cannot do what I need to do. Table widths. What, you can't use them now? Or do you just put the width elsewhere, such as within the "colgroup" tribute. I don't want to be doing this at all. I'd rather have WYSIWIG. When I've used those in the past, though, they've either been buggy, terminally slow and sticky, or quickly out-dated and obsolete. You know, those horrid broken pages that worked just yesterday. Or was that ten years ago? I forget. I have spent w-a-aaaa-y too much of my life trying to be w3c compliant. The 4.01 instructions are rather terrifying, by the way. I can't even understand the sentences. Heck, I can't even navigate the outline. I downloaded Amaya today. Not terrible, so far, but not pleasurable, either. Another one of those editors where you have to know the code to use the code. No drag and drop, that's for sure. Sigh.

Having Done The Deed

"Well, that wasn't so bad," she said, having done the deed. That was before she heard the whistling sound of a two-ton safe hurtling through the air, aimed right at her head. Actually, the safe hasn't fallen, and may not. As it turns out, the instructions for managing DNS and changing a cName record are much more horrifying than the actuality of changing a cName. GoDaddy provided some decent, easy-to-follow instructions for setting up a first alias ~ the "www" alias. Their instructions for adding a second subdomain were more confusing, but I think they were explaining a slightly different scenario than what I wanted to do. I saw other lost souls asking "my" question, but none of the answers hit the nail on the head. My intuition (after reading 100 forums) told me that it should work exactly as it did for setting up that first alias, "www." One guy, "Nitecruzr," had posted instructions that seemed to match my uneducated guess. I was beginning to suspect that a mistake wouldn't be permanent ~ If I messed up, I could delete the record from cPanel (I hoped). So, I went to cPanel, chose "add new record" (cName), pointed it to "about.mydomain.com" ~ and mapped it to the same host I'd used for my first alias: ghs.google.com. Then I went into Blogger and used the advanced settings to set the subdomain name for that second blog. Simple. Just had to trust this unknown "Nitecruzr," ditch the complicated instructions, and take the plunge. It seems to have worked. Right now, my subdomain name does point to my second blog. The only confusing thing now is that I have two blogs with similar titles. I'll have to keep 'em straight.

A Fearful Geek Looks Under the Hood...

Flash back to the year 2000. Then, I was agonizing over whether to take the plunge and invest in my own domain name. Looking back, "invest" is a poor choice of words. "Splurge" might be a better one. Buy a gold brick. But "invest" I did, and for twelve years now, have been the proud owner of an obscure little site that struggles as I do. Southern Muse is now filled with a big pile of pages, interconnected in a fairly disorganized way. My idea for Southern Muse was way too broad for a first web site, or almost for any website. Some of the subsections would do well to have their own site. So, twelve years later, in an effort to divide and conquer, I found myself in the same position: agonizing over whether to buy a domain. And yes, I bit the bullet. I bought one. Not one, but several. And (sigh) much to my regret, I find that the industry of domain registration hasn't changed that much. Oh, the Web has changed. It boggles the mind to see how far web design, blogging tools, CSS, Flash, scripts, and all the other things have come. But the world of domain-name registration is as horrifying as it ever was. It seems a fraudulent, deceitful industry. Registrars have learned the art of selling, there's no doubt about that. Their front pages cover a full range: begging, pleading, boasting, arm-twisting, flirting, and occasionally professional seeming. Ah, but underneath that front page! Horrors. All roads lead to Hell. Professional? Sweetie, you haven't found out what products and services weren't included in that deceitful oversell. You haven't tried to dial that much-touted but non-existent 24/7 support hotline. Cheap? Ha ha ha! Don't be delusional. Shopping carts are for filling. Yours will quickly fill up with add-ons you hadn't thought necessary, but suddenly realize the scary implications of not buying them. Easy. My dear. Have you gotten a look at cPanel? Domain registration, transfer, and web hosting, my friend... those devices were devised purely to inflict torture. They are still housed in the swampy, stagnant, backwaters of some Tim Burton-cum-Steven Kingish sci-fi nightmare. We never should've let the Web be created by children who grew up reading Swamp Thing.

The Dreary World of Missing Drivers

I've decided to dust off the old blog for this one. Tonight, I'm pretty proud of myself. I searched for, found, and installed updates and drivers for two devices and three browser plug-ins all by myself. The missing ones were causing my PC to be unstable. It only took seven hours, twenty searches, six-to-ten websites, six or seven downloads, three installers, and two wizards to do it. I didn't curse or cry, I was that determined. I feel like Annie Sullivan, when Helen Keller finally folded that napkin...


Maintaining an old computer is worse than maintaining an old Ford. In fact, I liked my old Ford. I can't say the same for my old computer.

The Ford was a '72 LTD. I can't even say what the computer is. According to the System Info, it's an MSI. I've been calling it an AMD ('cause that's what's on the label). Call it a sooner or a mutt. One thing's for sure, it's a dinosaur.

Dinosaur Humor & Siderail to Varityper...

Clearly, I got sidetracked. Eight months since a dinosaur blog post, and I thought I'd let someone else do my talking today. I found this blogger by accident, but was amused at his updated take on outdated icons. Outdated by decades, apparently, and soon to be non-recognizable by kids...

Hanselman: The Floppy Disk Means Save and 14 Other Old People Icons...
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheFloppyDiskMeansSaveAnd14OtherOldPeopleIconsThatDontMakeSenseAnymore.aspx

Yeah, I used one of those big, black, eight-inch floppies once. (More than once). It really was floppy, too. I was always worried about creasing one (never happened); and getting a magnet next to one (sadly, did once happen). My machine of choice (or rather, of necessity back then) was a Varityper phototypesetter (4500, as I recall, and stepped on up to the 5400). Had little film fonts--hence, "photo" typesetter. Uh huh, it used film to develop fonts on photographic paper. But Varityper was uptown--it used film discs! So much easier than stretching celluloid on a reel-to-reel, as on the old Compugraphics...

Varityper on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/AM-Varityper-Phototypesetters/93607261216

Temporary... oh, so temporary

Interrupting the previous train of thought... I just posted (elsewhere) a post about ephemera, and how paper seems to have taken over my life. How so, in the day of the grand white screen? Why, oh why, haven't I filed everything in the electronic file bin? Ah! This electronic beast of so-called permanence, it seems, is in itself temporary. Computers crash, websites fade, dashboards disappear, software upgrades, interfaces change, corporations merge. I cannot find my blog, I cannot find my dashboard. My database, wiped out at the drop of a hat or a sneeze, all by some silent, faceless entity, which this moment, perhaps, has decided to merge, or disband, or go bye-bye in whatever form or fashion pleases them; barely a blink, a nod, or an email ~ leaving me and my ephemera to fend for ourselves. But supposing, just supposing, I could trust today's host to be there tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Then I'd still have to digitize my ephemera to save it. Photos, papers, cards, scraps: files cabinets and bins and baskets full: these things, I have. But to scan them, to transcribe them, even to make brief extracts, would take another lifetime or two. So, this Lord of all Human Knowledge, this Information of the big "I," this electronic file cabinet ~ this wonderful, much-touted savior of humanity, the computer, the Internet ~ 'tis all merely ephemera. And so it goes...

Moldy Old Blogs

Ah, moldy old blog, here am I, wiping a thick layer of dust off of the old blog-orama, and finding, already, changes, changes, changes. Behind the scenes, Google has redone the whole blog interface, and my poor brain, grown crusty like an old, dry sponge, must once again dampen itself with left-brain thoughts and locate the tools which allow me to talk to myself. If I could just reach that oil can... Tin Man... ah, there we go. The rust loosens. I now find that the "post" option, that handy little tool, has morphed to an orange button. And there I had gotten so used to ignoring orange buttons. Funny how the eye sees not that which it would not see. But, the button being found, and as I now look over this confusing mass of changes, I find that I'm going to like this new interface. And so, we progress into 2012...

Content and Page Design

Content. I had it all planned. My content was to be my artwork. I wanted rows of paintings with descriptions under them. Naturally they were to be presented in nice, tight layouts. (Layouts, I knew, having worked in advertising ~ and having had an interest in page design since I was a kid). I would finally get to use those elegant fonts I loved so much (!) I could show off my graphic design skills. Like everyone else, I still thought of web pages as ~ well, pages. Book pages, magazine pages, that could be designed into layouts that would stay put.

Another Logo

Naturally, a new web site needed a logo. I was ready for it this time. I'd navigated the learning curve of image technology by cutting my teeth on Bugbones, the little cartoon guy. Southern Muse needed a more serious logo. But I'd been reading up. Banners were the thing. The Web gods had decreed that 468 x 60 pixels was the ideal size for banners (perfect, back then, for the 8" screen). Might as well go that route, they said, 'cause sooner or later you'll want to swap banners with somebody. So I did. And Webmonkey had taught me to do the Gif thing. In playing around with one of my art programs, I'd developed a little flower that turned out surprisingly nice and compact. With a little tweaking and a periwinkle-blue border, that made a nice logo. Also it would be quick, and I was already tiring of making logos for pages that had no content. Might wanna get some content. Just a thought...


The Annals of Southern Muse

Non-Techie: x + y = (Get Me the Hell Outta Here!)

Starting on the subject of SEO is getting ahead of myself. Back then, I'd never heard of SEO. My biggest worry had been choosing a name, parking a domain, getting a host, and researching InterNIC fees. Seems as if the dreaded InterNIC fees turned out to be about $70, a one-time fee. Not too horrifying, I suppose. The decision to park my domain at Network Solutions, on the other hand, would come back to "bite me in the butt" many times over. Network Solutions' web page may have been a techie haven, but it was a horrible, unnavigable mess to the unitiated (me). Their site wasn't for newbies. It was a geek site through and through. I was used to Yahoo and Angelfire and CuteFTP (which really was cute, after you got over the hump of configuring it to work with your host). These sites were user friendly, despite the learning curve. Apparently I'm the sort of person that "icon-based Internet" was meant for. Network Solutions didn't go in for little blue icons that look like mailboxes. They didn't have names like "angel" and "cute." Network Solutions used terminology from the cold, hard book of IT science. Navigating the N.S. menu was like working my way through a horror-house maze, like solving an algebraic equation without any givens. I hadn't had algebra since ninth grade. My most vivid memory was of Mr. Leonard chewing on his eraser and chuckling as he devised yet another hellacious problem. (Mr. Leonard wrote his own tests. He just made up problems in his head as he went along.) Science wasn't my strong suit, either. In physical-science lab, my job was the hander over, like the head nurse to a surgeon. Someone says, "Hand me a beaker." I say, "Here."


The Annals of Southern Muse

Chicken, Egg, or Southern Muse?

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? It's a little fuzzy to me as to whether I bought the Southern Muse domain before I found out about the About.com name thing, or after. Miningco had changed to About, Inc. in May of 1999, according to Wikipedia.* I purchased my domain on February 1, 2000. Clearly, About.com was first, but that doesn't mean that I had heard of it back then. Even if Philip had talked to me before I picked out SouthernMuse, I probably wouldn’t have let go of the name. I was already emotionally attached to it by then. At some point, I know that I did begin to think of domain names beginning with “A.” Was I really thinking of buying more domains? If so, avarice was at the heart of it. Tech forums were buzzing with talk about the importance of top placement in search engines, and any time the term SEO popped up, it was accompanied by excited gossip about the possibility of making gazillions of dollars. Big money aside, I would be happy to have my domain pay for itself. When I tested my own placement by performing searches I found that Southern Muse was not exactly at the top of the heap. In searches for "art," or "genealogy," Southern Muse came up about 5,999,999 in the results. I wasn't on page one ~ I wasn't even on 101. How would anybody ever find me?


*"About.com." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 16 Dec 2008, 05:07 UTC. 24 Dec 2008  
URI: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=About.com&oldid=258295629