Coming up
It’s been a pretty busy work morning, between figuring out why the backup didn’t run last night (turned out to be my fault, you really gotta be careful when you change the scripts to account for a schedule change so that you remember to change them back later! Go figure!) and helping correct some database mistakes or lack of database knowledge from our newer employees, I haven’t really had time to take a good look around at the tech news of the day. So rather than tech news I’m going to put down in writing some things that I’ve been thinking about doing around here. That way, when I do finally get time to do them, I’ll have a list. 🙂
First I want to switch the commenting on the Child Abuse blog away from YACCS and onto something hosted locally. I’ll probably go with aspcomments since that’s what I use here. I like getting an email everytime someone comments, and I like hosting them myself. I don’t like having to open the database everytime I need to delete an inappropriate comment, but one day maybe I’ll write an asp page that can allow me to edit the database from a browser. I also want to create some relevant amazon links on that page, the proceeds of which would go to some abused children’s charity. Not sure which one yet, but it’s something I really want to do.
Also, I want to start moving over various pieces from the Geocities site. I’m thinking of starting with the Photos, moving everything into albums, adding some pics to the old albums and hosting all of that here. Probably going to involve a lot of work, but it’ll be worth it to have it better organized. Then I’ll start to move over all of the other areas, updating them while I’m moving them, as most are in serious need of an update! I’ll add the child abuse stuff to a subdirectory of this site, and make sure that Google can find it, which it seems to have done with the child abuse blog. It’s not like it has a relevant URL to it’s subject now anyway. Maybe someday…:) I’ll have to change the Geocities pages to point to the new location for awhile. After that, I wonder if I should do anything with the geocities site? It’s gotten much harder to maintain now that the free hosting doesn’t allow you to FTP files, and there’s very little scripting that you can do. It’s probably not worth keeping.
Speaking of not worth keeping, I’m also thinking about dropping the forums on this site. They served their purpose during the whole hosting company going out of business situation, but they don’t get much use now. Most of the feedback comes in email and/or comments now, and I think that’s enough. Of course dropping them means changing the navigation bar on every page, but using Dreamweaver that shouldn’t be too hard. (I love Find/Replace!)
On top of that, I want to clean up the HTML on all of the pages. I’ve already cleaned up the HTML on the root directory’s pages, I haven’t yet gotten to the sub-folders, like articles or webpage help, so I need to get to work on cleaning those up. I imagine I’ll need to rewrite all of the geocities pages to get rid of the crap HTML that Yahoo adds to the pages for their advertising purposes, but that can be accomplished by creating a template and just cut/pasting the text into it to create the new pages. A little time consuming, but needed. I’d love to do it all with CSS but I don’t think I’ll have time to learn that on top of everything else!
In the end it’ll be worth it, these changes will make it much easier to maintain and update both sites, and should leave me with two very distinct sites that just happen to sit on the same domain. I want them to be distinct, but I also want to be able to use the same tools to update them both, this is the best way to do that without having to pay out extra $ for another domain name and hosting.
Yeah and somewhere shortly after Thanksgiving here in the US, I need to pass those darn A+ certifications too. 🙂
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