Ed's Blog

To date, my little blog has gotten roughly 4 times as many spam messages as actual comments. I shouldn’t be surprised, given the volume of spam that hits my email accounts. I’ve added a reCAPTCHA plug-in to reduce the number of robot spams, and chase the lazier real-life spammers to greener pastures. Hopefully the burden of entering the words you see in the reCAPTCHA don’t prevent the flesh and blood comments from getting entered.

Installing the plug-in took all of 5 minutes.

I wanted to write a post about the trials and tribulations I encountered as I setup my website. Mostly, this was a very good experience. The cost of domain registration has come down to the range of 8-10$/year. That’s pretty darn affordable. The only unfortunate side-effect to the cheap domain-name registration is that nearly any reasonably short name is taken.

I ended up using DreamHost . I think this is a good choice if you are using PHP/MySQL or Ruby on Rails. They don’t host ASP.NET, but there are plenty of other hosts that do. And they make it easy to add things to your site, like this WordPress blog. I haven’t needed any helpdesk support yet, but the automated stuff has worked well enough that I haven’t needed any.

For development, I settled on DreamWeaver. In general it makes writing  XHTML and css fairly easy. There are a few warts with Windows 7 that need to be fixed. The file open dialog doesn’t work correctly for selecting directories, so they need to release an update – soon!

I’m not a web designer but I do appreciate UI and design. I looked at lots of sites and templates for the look and feel that I wanted. I settled on one of the sample DreamWeaver templates at Adobe.com, and modified the graphics to personalize the site.

After a day or so, I had my site working pretty well on my Windows PC, and I uploaded the files to DreamHost. After uploading, the pages were there, but anything from the images folder didn’t show up. After scratching my head for 30 minutes or so, I realized that the directory name for the images on my Windows box was mixed case – i.e. Images, but the references were lower case in the HTML code. So lesson remembered, for those of us who are mainly Windows folk, that case matters for file names in Linux/Unix/Mac land.  It would have been nice if DreamWeaver had warned me.

Well, enough said for now. Please send me feedback about the site and the Blog!