Saturday, February 28, 2009

my little corner of the web

I've had my own dot com for 4-5 years now, and I've done everything with it from trying to run a "crap I like" site to featuring news feeds, and a bunch of other stuff.
In addition to my page I blog here, and I also have a blog dedicated to facilities maintenance called maintenance mastery and I've been doing amateur web development overall for more than 10 years. My first html doc was on aol back in the 90s, if you think real hard you can probably vaguely remember the members.aol.com/user web pages. Yup, I had one. It was basically a biz card online.
I shelled out $100 for microsoft frontpage, and I started down the path of the very bad habit of spending too much time relying on the old gui to create web pages.
I did a few for friends over the years, and got pretty good at remembering a little html so that I could tweak stuff when frontpage just "wouldn't work."
Recently we've been working on the enercient project and I'm proud to say that even though it is a very basic page, I wrote most of it in notepad and used an ftp client to upload it to the site. I know that sooner or later, one of the real geeks will take it over, and we'll get Jaime to create some flash for it, but for right now- I did it, and I'm pretty pleased with how it looks.
Our newest project will end up stretching us all, but I recently registered enerciently and I decided to host it with A2, and there will be more about the site to follow- but A2 is my first real foray into "big boy" hosting.
my personal dotcom is hosted with network solutions, and I've done several projects and sites with them. Enercient is hosted with godaddy, and so far I haven't been real excited about my experience with them. First it was supposed to be less expensive (it isn't) it was supposed to be easier to use (it isn't.)
My account with A2 is a reseller account, and I have my own dedicated Apache Server. I've only just started playing around with it, but basically I've got full control over the site, I can sell site registrations, I can create and edit subdomains, I can create and manage emails on the domains I create, and depending on how well I can learn to use the LAMP tools, I could theoretically do all of the work to put up our social site.
I really like their interfaces and control panels, and I still haven't figured everything out- but I think I'm really going to like managing my own little corner of the web. If everything goes right, by the end of the year, I'll actually be the owner of a full-blown tech company, and I'll finally be able to say that I'm doing it, rather than reading, blogging,researching it. Now, if I can only get my email to say "you've got mail" when I sign on. We can only dream.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Who's yer driver?

If Joe Gibbs weren't such a super-bowl Champion Redskins Legend/ God-fearing Christian man, I'd accuse him of selling out to Toyota, but I'm sure that he has good reason for turning his back on the General, and someday I hope to have enough spritual maturity to understand.
Until then, I'm going to have to keep rooting for the teams that wear the bowtie, and this year I think I'm throwing in with Stewart-HAAS racing.

Second, every HAAS cnc machine sold in America means that there is some American in a machine shop putting in a day's work and actually MAKING something- so what's not to like?