My Notes

In the past 4 years of creating and maintaining my websites, I have learned that my projections of how much work and time it will take to get the site up and running are vastly underestimated. I believe this has to do with all of the details that go into setting up a site. Oh, and it also has to do with the learning curve.

I have no formal education or training on how web sites are created. For me it is pretty much trial and error, except for the fact that I’ve read the manuals that come with the software I am using to create the web pages. And I’m here to tell you that web pages and internet browsing don’t always follow the manual!

With my new website, www.carlgluck.com, I have been trying different plug-ins and features now that I have been armed with a little bit of knowledge from running www.artbycarl.com for several years. I decided that with this site I will try to get a much better layout and file tree, and I will go slow enough to be certain my site is not all kluged together. I am having fun and learning indeed, but it is a slow process.

This past week I spent time experimenting with my site email server. It was adding a UIDL line in message headers that was driving the firewall where I work crazy (well actually the firewall just “shot first and asked questions later” by deleting the mail from my site before it every came through). It took me a while but I got that figured out.

I have also been spending some time with JAlbum (see my last post) adding comments to photographs and culling out the ones that really aren’t good enough to put online. I tried a couple of different skins and themes, trying to find one that didn’t look terribly different from the theme I’m using in www.carlgluck.com. By the way, the add-ons like WordPress and JAlbum are so powerful that without them I’d spend weeks or months trying to make my site do the things that these plug-ins do.

In summary though, I think if you are planning to set up a website some advice is in order: if you want an accurate timeline sit down and figure out exactly how long you think it will take, realistically, and then multiply that by a factor of 3. That timeline will still be optimistic! Another bit of advice I can offer is to go ahead and set up a simple site quickly and play with it before you settle in on a more involved or complicated final setup. You will find in the first few weeks that you are using your site to do things you hadn’t planned on, and you will find that some stuff you planned on isn’t behaving in any way near like what you planned! Use these first weeks to make notes about what your next full layout will look like.

Another good tip for doing web design and playing with website servers, etc., is to find a couple of good forums or discussion groups that have knowledgeable people in them and ask questions. They will help you a lot.

Finally, remember nothing is perfect. Go easy on yourself. It can be really frustrating to troubleshoot or debug anything related to a computer. Learn to walk away and let something sit for a while. Sometimes a problem “works itself” as it gets older!

Managing photographs on a website can be a daunting task. If you are not careful after a while the photos will move you out of house and home. In addition, you can spend countless hours trying to downsize and caption hundreds of photos.

For my new website (www.carlgluck.com) I wanted to find some gallery software solution to presenting my photographs. My web design software had only a limited layout for photos. It just wasn’t what I was looking for. And there are php and content management plug-ins that are overkill. You could spend hours tweaking everything trying to get it to work right.

Then I stumbled onto a simple, free download that handles photos quickly in a straight html format. You can make a stand-alone gallery or you can integrate it into your website. And yet the package is elaborate enough you can control and customize it if you want to invest more time in your project.

It’s called “JAlbum”. It is a completely free download. and it works right out of the box. The site to download JAlbum from is www.jalbum.net.

In the days ahead I plan to set up some photo albums at my new stie using JAlbum.

Oh, I also discovered it is possible to insert images and photos into this blog. that will certainly dress things up. All I have to do is make the image the proper size before I upload it (the blog software allows resizing but so far I haven’t found where it can restrain the proportions of the image, so that is not a good option). Once it is into the piece I am editing I simply select the justification options, and I write my piece around the image. That is all part of the WordPress software I’m using. 

Setting up a website is a lot of work. Actually it means watching a lot of details. There are so many settings and nuances that it is easy to goof things up. One of the first things I’ve learned is to keep a log. I’ve gone so far as to give version numbers to my website’s files. About once each week I go from version 1.1 to version 1.2, etc. And I keep all the files of the previous several versions so I can roll back the site if I find something has “blown up.” I use website creation software with templates and wizards. I have found over the years that sometimes the software “looses its place” and the various buttons and menus get crossed up, displaying different font types or sizes. I’ve also discovered that hierarchy is important to many software systems so if I move a file or rename a subdirectory bad things happen. With an archive of various versions saved about a week apart I never need to loose more than a week’s entries if something blows up.