Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Saturday, July 24, 2004 The Pitch: It's like The Brain Eaters meets Hackers! One of the great ironies of God's green earth is that I somehow ended up the webmaster of Comix Experience's website. There may have well been a point long ago where my dinky amount of knowledge was somewhat close to the dinky breadth of knowledge to create websites, but I can't even begin to count the days that've passed since then.So, like any good techmonkey, I huddled in fear when Brian announced he wanted to upgrade the site. A few things here and there. Nothing too major, and--he wanted a blog. Now, it's no big thing to put a blog on a web page. Everyone does it all the time. But in order for Brian to do it, it would mean begin the first steps of severing my ties with the server back at Paris house, which meant getting rid of my safety net--moth-ridden and haphazardly strung together as it was--and doing this all on my own. I kinda dreaded entering the world of help desk calls and set-up tutorials, and cobbling together solutions by looking at other people's websites and figuring out what they had done. And it would mean getting paid. Getting paid--this was my biggest plus as webmonkey for the CE site and part of why Brian had been so patient with me as far as site maintenance, troubleshooting, etc. I was doing the site for free, and we hadn't been charging him anything to host the server. It ate up nothing as far as bandwidth (as far as Julian was concerned) and as long as Julian wasn't bugged with problems too often, there was no need to charge. But the implicit Catch 22 was getting me more and more frequently by the short & curlies: when we did have a problem, I couldn't expect Julian to answer very quickly because the webservice was free, and Brian wasn't worried about the speed as long as it got solved, but I couldn't say how long that would be because the webservice was free. So I moved the webpages to another server and until it all goes horribly awry, I'm relieved. I've got tech support guys to call! I've called them three times in three days! They have to answer my questions, and it puts no strain on our relationship--because I'm paying them! But, oh god, the problems with doing shit you don't know how to do when all you have are tutorials on the web! (I do have to say, though, the flash tutorials the new guys offer showing you how to change your DNS listing is very helpful.) There's a step-by-step on blogger showing how to move a blog to a new site via ftp. But their ftp info didn't quite jibe with the new server guys' info, and of course, it took a few days to get the DNS propogated (sure, like I knew what that meant before a few days ago)...or was it that the ftp for the new site wasn't enabled yet? To make things better, I got to work at CE yesterday and found out that I had copied everything one level down, and so anyone going to the CE website (now that the DNS had propogated) was getting one of those great directory structure greetings. (My thanks to John for the tip!) So, last night instead of going home to my beautiful girlfriend and eating a fine dinner and cuddling in front of the warm DVD player, I had to retransfer all my files but this time, my computer was acting up and deciding it just couldn't recognize my wireless connection: it's a little game we like to play, my computer and I, when we like to have me burst into tears. But, heyyyyyy, the point of this blog entry is: it's all good, baby. Just managed to hammer my way through an hour of confirming that, yes, there is a ftp connection now, and after diddling with eleven million combinations of possible ftp paths, got blogger to transfer the pages! And then, when the pages wouldn't show, it only took me twenty minutes to figure out why. And now it's almost all out of my way. Updating some relative links on the pages to point to the actual blog; a quick tutoring of Hibbs so he can log and blog without any pain; and I can gear up to enjoy the Gilroy Garlic Festival where I can cuddle up with my beautiful girlfriend in front of a plate of garlic stuffed mushrooms. Sorry again for the last few days of absence. I've been meaning to log on and talk about Robert McKee's Story, Nabokov's Lolita, and, of course, Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, and may do so today if the workday continues to stay quiet. posted by Jeff Lester | 11:13 AM | |
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