My Thoughts On Being A Web Master
We’ve just scheduled Close Up Jewelry Photography Classes for the third quarter of 2007. They are as follows:
All classes run from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM. Click on a date above to sign up for a class. See bwh Web Designs for full class description. Can’t make any of those dates? Leave a comment here telling when would be a good time for you.
Hope to see you in a class!
I just read about this on another blog.
The author suggested that the worst mistake an e-commerce site can make is to hide its domain information. This is done by registering your site with privacy. Apparently some people will do a lookup on a domain and will not buy from a site that doesn’t reveal any information about itself. Makes sense. You want to ask - What are they hiding?
I know many people who have registered their sites with privacy. And I know why they’ve done it. It’s because they are a home-based business and don’t want to list their home address for all the world. My suggestion? Get a P.O. Box and use that. I got one from the Post Office, the smallest one they have, and it was very inexpensive. I was fortunate , a new post office opened up less than a mile from my house. Before that I had a box with UPS, but they are WAY too expensive!
For well over a year now, we’ve gone to dinner at Capparelli’s on Main nearly every weekend. It’s a local Italian restaurant. In the evening on weekends, they always have music. Quite often it has been Two for the Road. They are 2 guys playing piano and guitar and singing.
Then sometime in April, we got to talking about websites. They’ve been wanting one, but didn’t have the time to build it themselves. An idea was born, and this is the result:
Chris and Jerry play a wide range of music; everything from the ’50s on up to recent tunes. They’re great entertainers. Often, while we’re dining, we look around and see quite a few people singing along - me included.
For this design, I was given a business card and told that they wanted to keep the logo. Here’s the card:
I took the gold color, combined it with black and found some music symbols. The line at the bottom of the page “The more you drink… the better we sound” was my suggestion. Every time we’ve seen them play, they have said that at least once!
Check out their site. You can view the calendar to see where they’re going to be. On the music page you can hear clips of some of their songs.
Today we held the first Close Up Jewelry Photography Class. We had only one student, but that was okay with everyone. Much more personal attention and it was a good first class for me. Our student was a friend of mine, I had built a website for his wife. I also have done all the photography to date for her website. He plans to retire in a few years and wants to do the photography and put her jewelry on the web for sale. (Currently, she doesn’t have any e-commerce on her site.)
It was a good first class, and we were able to determine some areas for improvement.
Our student comment “Thanks so much! This is a great start for me.”
The class was held at a local bead shop - And The Bead Goes On. If you’re in the San Antonio area and are interested in taking a class, visit their website calendar to see when the next one is scheduled.
Friday morning I got a notice from my server that one of my hosted websites had exceeded its space quota. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I’m the only one changing that site, and I haven’t touched it in a few days. What’s going on?” It just didn’t feel right. It was Friday, but it was acting more like a Monday.
Upon further investigation, I found that I was NOT the only one changing things. Seems that the comment count on the photo gallery was over 73,000! Ugh. And all of them are trash. They’re scums that use automated systems to advertise their websites. You know the sites, the same ones you get all the spam about. Ugh.
So first thing I did was check the settings on the gallery. I changed it so that you have to prove you’re human in order to leave a comment. You know, read the funky letters or numbers and type them in - aka Captcha. I did this for all sites that use this gallery.
Still curious. How do 73,000 comments in a database increase the disk space used by the website? Easy. They apparently create files to go along with the comments.
So how to clean it up? I don’t want all those comments out there, and they’re taking up space. Checking the gallery’s website, I find that someone, bless their heart, has created a script to clean up all the comments. It only deletes 500 at a time, so I’ve got a long way to go. But at least I’m cleaning it up.
I’m always into counting and numbering things. So, among 4 websites galleries, I had a total of 106,181 comments! And, after cleaning up the mess, I had over 700MB more space on the server. Perhaps I’ll re-look at other photo gallery programs and see if there’s one that doesn’t take up so much space or that makes it easier to turn off comments. The one I’m using is, after all Open Source, and free - so I guess it proves once again - “You get what you pay for.”
