Slow Sunday

Down at the local cafe, using their wifi since I have very little data on my plan. Had a nap this morning after breakfast. That was a bit weird.

Hunting around for a different host for my website. I have the domain paid for another two years. If I get paid hosting through my domain registrar, then it is about $7 a month. If I am going to get paid hosting then I'd be better off going through one of the bigger American hosts.

But I prefer free. :D

The drag with my current free host is that they shut down the site every 30 days unless I click a button (or get more than 10 visitors a month - that isn't going to happen any time soon).

Not a bad idea for them, weeds out time wasters and unattended sites. But still an annoyance. Might do an exchange next weekend.

Domain Squatters

For those of you that don't know, here's a quick overview on how domains work:

You never "own" a domain, it is just "rented" from one of the domain companies. You pay a (usually) annual fee to keep using that domain. Even mighty Google need to pay someone $9.95 a year to be allowed to use the domain google.com - if you don't pay, the domain comes up for grabs again for someone else to use.

There's more to it, but that's the bit that's important for this post. </backstory>

I used to run a number of old domains for various things but after getting married I had more important things to spend my money on, so I dropped them. Today I went and had a look at some of them, just for giggles. Most of them, like my old Tsytomd persona domain are simply 404'd. No surprises there.

What I did like was that my old story domain loneverse.com has a squatter on it, and they have my old domain for sale - for US$799. It's a bargain, I'd be mad not to buy it!

Jokes aside, it'd be nice to get my old domain back and be able to use it, but I don't need it that badly. Plus I can always think of another name if I wanted to set up a separate domain for it. But it is kinda nice to know that one of my domains was worth something. :o)

Website rebuild

Well, turns out I still had my domain running, it was just my hosting that I'd cancelled. Due to family commitments and a lack of spare spending cash I'd dropped all my sites and general internet presence.

Since the domain was still running, I figured I'd sign up with a free host and get my website up and running again.

Currently I'm just redeveloping my code to make it more flexible and compatible with portable devices since they are now more popular. When I built the site originally, there was no such thing as a smartphone.

And I want to have a rethink about what I'm using the site for.

Oi vey...

Today I was meant to get some exercise seeing as it's my day off, and do a spot of writing.

I failed at both - just sat at the computer most of the day eating chocolate. :-(

Obviously I'm not cracked up to be a writer. I don't have the passion for it. If I was a halfway driven writer I could have written almost three quarters of my million words since I started writing in 2007. Instead, I only have my very first NaNoWriMo novel and three half-hearted stories. And a site "devoted" to my stories ... with nothing on it.

*sigh*

Now I want to sit down and eat chocolate to make myself feel better again.

Well, I need to head out now, so I'm out of time to write and I'm out of time to exercise. I really need to stop making piss-poor excuses and just write. I even have a sticker that says "You've got better things to do!" on my monitor so I can see it when I'm piss farting around on the 'net.

"Anybody can say you can't write - don't let them say you don't" - Howard Tayler

Fireshot Firefox add-on DON'T USE

What a shame too, Fireshot used to be such a nice program.

What I find really annoying is that it was working fine, then the developer changed it remotely so it no longer works on my system...

Here's the skinny: Fireshot (used to be) a great program for doing screen captures. Very useful, very flexible. What it does now is demand an update, which does not work via the proper channels. It demands that you go  get an update directly from their site (http://screenshot-program.com). On their site there is a "friendly" click here to check your computer message which is a huge red flag right there!

If you are unfortunate enough to use the site's update, it buries malware so deep in your system that it is very difficult to dislodge and the program won't work - it demands payment!

Fireshot is deceptive. Fireshot is a fraud. Don't use Fireshot!

And I use this program a lot too. None of the other "screenshot" programs available as add-on's for Firefox were as good because Fireshot was the only one that I've found which was able to reliably capture flash elements on a site.

Music site rebuild complete - time to start again

Ha! I'm never satisfied. Since I've stalled on my music "career", I may as well use the site for testing purposes. I've only just finished re-building it in html 4.01 strict and now I want to port it over to html 5.

I think it's worth the effort as more and more browsers are supporting html 5 and it is the way of the future We'll see if this pans out or not.

Gallery - Redux

Well, it took longer than expected (like everything) but my new gallery is up and running.

Actually, it's probably not very well done as the main gallery index does not show any actual photos! It is a list of links to the pages that have the photos. Not the best way to do it since there are no "hooks" to grab people and get them into the photos themselves. My bad.

You can check it out here and see what all the fuss is about.

In other photography related news - my new camera has arrived! *squee* You can't see me, but I'm totally doing a happy dance right now. It's a Canon Kiss X4 and it's just dandy. I've only just started playing with it, I'm hoping to get some photos to share this weekend (or sooner!).

One more to go...

Well, the rebuild of my music site is practically complete. There is a bit more jazzing up that can be done, but that's as far as I'm going to go on it for now. I'm not producing music at the moment, having swung back to photography so there isn't much point in spending time and effort on the site.

However, my main site needs an update. I'll be totally re-doing the photograph section but the whole site I want to upgrade to 4.01 strict which means changing all the back end stuff. This is a lot of effort considering that on the outside it'll look pretty much the same.

Having said that, my primary focus is going to be the photography stuff.

I've already been sorting out through all of my photos looking for which ones to put up and have a fair stack sorted out. There's still more to go though, but I'm getting there. I'll need to re-organize the main page as well (plus write more articles, but I've been saying that for years).

Final thing on the to-do list is sort out the media computer and get it sorted out. It is too noisy and is running out of space. We'll see how that goes.

Website woes

Well, sometimes upgrades work without a hitch and sometimes ... they don't.

Upgrading the hosting plan on my main site and it's gone a little pear shaped. Mind you, it's partly my fault as I'm moving it from an Australian host to an American host (still the same company, they just offer hosting on both continents). I could have gone with hosting in Australia but the  American plans offer twice as much storage and twice as much bandwidth for the same price.

At any rate, at the moment the site returns a "domain not found" error message, but hopefully it'll be up again in a day or so.

Hopefully...