I wonder if  that causes people who come here and read to think that I lose interest in being a web designer?

In reality, the times when posts are sparse is when I’m actually being a web developer :)

I looked it up the other day because someone on ?? (some answer site) was looking for examples of archaic words. It is not categorized by Merriam-Webster as such.

Good on them! It means “in truth, truthfully, verily”. We need a lot more forsooth in the world!

So, forsooth, I have not accomplished with this blog what I set out in my first post to do and I’m still at the same point I was then.

I suppose I should, truthfully, decide what I really want to do with this domain name :)

Now, here I am telling clients to keep their sites updated and fresh and look at my own “home” site!  For shame!  I hadn’t updated WordPress in at least a year and the site is fugly still. Definitely a case of “do as I say”.

Well, the updating is done.  As ever, it was an automatic breeze from the WP Dashboard.  Now we’ll see if I get around to doing something about fugly.

When he asked if that’s my website, I really didn’t have too much choice but to say “yes”. (What could I say, “nah, I just use it because it matches my name.”?)

The phone line got kind of quiet for as minute as I was opening another tab to pull up my site, all the while keeping  my mind on his problem with his site.  Maybe he wasn’t doing what I was doing  because his next question was, “is that where you advertise your web service or whatever?”

As I was seeing the wannabee tag line pop into view all I could say is “no, not really”.

Anyway, he expounded on the 10,000 hour rule from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, which I was also unfamiliar with.  Turns out that Gladwell says you need to practice something for 10,000 hours before you become a master.

Whoah! Do you realize that if you are talking about an average work week and year, that’s five years?  Yep, 5 years.

O.K., so it’s going to take me 5 years to get comfortable with PHP?  How’s that gonna work in computerville?  In five years PHP will probably have been replaced by AJAX or Ruby or the next best thing we haven’t even heard about yet.

And, since I think I’d like to become proficient in all 3 of the foregoing, it’s going to take me 15 years?  I don’t think so, I don’t even plan on being that old.

Nope, I don’t think we can apply the 10,000 hour rule to computers or old people.  Sorry, Maxwell.  Just ain’t plausible in my world.

I’m a compulsive computer packrat. I know I am because I took the test.

Actually, I didn’t need the test.  I only needed to consider that I have every version of every program I’ve ever installed on my computer.  Also weighing in are every version of every web site I’ve ever built, launched or not, and programs I never installed.  And I suppose I shouldn’t forget 7,890 ebooks (literally) and close to a million emails

I read through all the help for packrats that is available on that page but I don’t think it’s going to quite do it for me.  If I spent the recommended half hour a day de-cluttering my ‘puter while not saving anything, I figure the computer would be clean in 2017.  Then I could start in on my external hard drive.

I received an email from a Chinese company letting me know that someone in China wanted to register one of my domain names, with the .cu extension, of course. But still, they thought it might be a trademark infringement and wanted to let me know.

How sweet!

Except, not really. A quick Google for chinese domain scams brought plenty of results but I think this one lays it out the best as they actually followed it through to the end.

Started on a new project last week with all the sudden “free time” I had on my hands. Decided to build a new product site based on Oscommerce, a free Open Source shopping cart, as I’d not really gotten into it enough in my 4 days OJT to know how configurable to SEO it might be.

I also decided, for the sake of fast development, to base it on a template.

One of those two things was my first mistake.

The thing I’ve always hated about most shopping carts is that they all look the same. I once spent hours and days reconfiguring Zen Cart to never achieve presentation perfection. I thought I’d get a “jump start” on OSC by finding an OScommerce  template I could stand and modifying it to my needs from there.

You know how you right click  and view the source on a PHP based page you can view just the HTML code for  the page?  Well, I musta’ forgot how to do that because I bought the template.  Now I can print out all 13 pages of that page’s HTML code anytime I want to be totally baffled.

I’ve yet to figure out how to print out just the PHP code.  Learnin’ NetBeans as time allows so I will probably get that accomplished in time for my further befuddlement.

How the hell could you possible need 13 pages of HTML to structure a simple page like this: http://hoopshelters.com/index.php/cPath/1?osCsid=4b4a1d601cbe190f02c90c0a93000987? Although there is obviously nothing simple about a URL like that!

So far, I’ve not been able to install even the most basic Oscommerce contributions without breaking my local test site.  Now, I’m agonizing whether to start over with Zen Cart, another free PHP cart based on Oscommerce but with many of the contributed enhancements already added in, or to tear this one apart and start from scratch.

So, yep, Gramma, you were right and this could get to be a long story.

That’s one of the silver linings of being fired from that coveted first job yesterday.

I don’t really have to remove the wannabee tag if I worked there less that 3 weeks and only helped get the site online and process the first sale, right?

Oh, you think so, do you?

Well, what if I tell you the site sucks? What if it’s based on a free template, but ugly, and the store’s plugged into an I-frame? See what I mean?

O.K. That’s settled.  Still a wannabee.  Still need to redesign this site :)

On the other hand, did learn a lot from the 3 weeks.  Tshirts are hot business on the web.  There is a nice little OS Commerce plug in available that would make a tshirt site really fun!

The other perk was finding this guy. Dave Reeder was the designer of the template (which wasn’t really ugly until you added my former company’s logo). He’s a for-real designer with a brain, the actual code for the template was sweet and clean. Read his post about FTP’ing a virus to some of his client’s sites here. I never thought about Filezilla being infected, did you?

In other words, FB users will finally be able to direct people to their FaceBook page via a url similar to http://facebook.com/yourusername. Providing that your chosen user name is at least 5 characters long and is not someone else’s trademark. More here.

I’m a fairly avid FB’er.  I have been since most of my kids and some of my friends finally got FaceBook accounts.  It makes it easy to keep up with their lives when they post regularly (*big hint, kids!)

Regardless, I’m really having a hard time getting excited about this opportunity to have a great url.

Perhaps I’m blasé because, like Twitter,  I use FaceBook for fun and not for business.  Another reason could be that I already have an unusual name so I’m easily found via a search on FB. Whatever the reason, I hope I can shake it off long enough to think of a really great url :)