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

What, alphabetical?!

Sigh. It seems that, before I had even bought my domain name, the rest of the world was already clued in on a fact that I hadn’t dreamed of: that there’s more to picking a great domain name than just having a name that sounds nice. It's got to be alphabetical.  Apparently, alphabetical placement plays a part in the proper selection of a name.  Somewhere between the time that I bought SouthernMuse.com and the time that I had to migrate to a new host,* Philip, formerly of MiningCo and now of About.com, told me about the importance of having a domain name that began with "A," or another letter close to the top of the alphabet. Some search engines listed results alphabetically, he said. What a let-down!


*Host migration: yeah, I suffered that indignity, to be discussed later…

The Annals of Southern Muse

HTML Worries

I must've been feeling pretty cocky when I bought Southern Muse. Just what, in my Angelfire and FTP experience, had led me to believe that I could actually build a site from scratch, without any web-shell tools? Why, little Webmonkey, of course. Angelfire's web shell and directory structure had been difficult to learn and a nightmare to keep up with, but building the pages had been a piece of cake (at least compared to having your feet dipped in hot oil, which was what most of my technology experience had seemed like). Angelfire had provided some simple readymade page layouts (just fill in the links), with blanks for HTML, if you felt so brave and foolhardy ~ and, they gave you the sweet little Webmonkey to tutor you on simple HTML code. I was mighty grateful to that little monkey. He made it seem easy. So easy, in fact, that I now felt like a HTML-writing diva. Thanks to my Angelfire experience, I had learned to upload an image (assuming that I had one) into a directory, and write a bit of HTML code telling the browser to locate and display it. Yeah, by then I knew what a browser was ~ some kind techies among the smartasses on various forums had filled me in.

Now, for all I can recall at this late date, Icom may have had web-shell tools, they may have had some readymade pages. But by then, I was in control-freak mode. Yessir, I wanted a layout with my own personal style. No ads, no banners, no geeky-looking airbrushed jet streams in the background. That's why I'd bought Southern Muse. I wanted it to be me.

The annals of Southern Muse