At Least There's a Sense of Accomplishment at the End
Today I was trying to get another of my websites up, and was having all kinds of trouble with it. I'd customized an open-source template I'd found on Free Layouts, and it had been working fine. But when I went to upload it, suddenly all the graphics disappeared. I thought that it had to do with the server-side includes, which don't work properly when they're loaded locally, instead of from a webhosting service. So I was trying to fix them, but it's not changing anything. So I went and checked my CSS, and it turned out that by putting the CSS file in its own folder, I'd messed up the links to the graphics. So I fixed them and reloaded the CSS file.
Except that the graphics still weren't showing up. I thought maybe it would help to clear the cache, in case I was reloading a cached page. So I did that, but it still didn't help. I was about to go nuts -- until I happened to switch into the Finder and realized that my HTML editor was saving the corrected file in the wrong place. So I had to move the file to the folder where I wanted it, and then upload it. Finally the graphics showed up like they're supposed to.
So now I have Grandma's Depression Memories up and running. It's a site dedicated to rediscovering the skills our grandparents and great-grandparents used to survive the Great Depression of the 1930's and apply them to getting through the current economic troubles.
And after that experience, I realized that I'd probably made the exact same mistake when I was customizing the CSS for the site on job-hunting. So I pulled it up and compared it to a copy of the unmodified template -- since the graphics in it are much more subtle, I had overlooked their absence. So I went through its CSS file and corrected it, and now the graphics load correctly.
Since I still had some time, I decided to get some book reviews up on The Billion Light-Year Bookshelf that I'd written earlier. I did a little tweaking and fixing the code there as well, so some glitches are now gone.
So while it was very frustrating for a while when I could not figure out what was going wrong (I was sure it was something almost trivially small that I was overlooking, since computers are that way), now that I've resolved the problems, I actually feel like I've accomplished something with my day.
Except that the graphics still weren't showing up. I thought maybe it would help to clear the cache, in case I was reloading a cached page. So I did that, but it still didn't help. I was about to go nuts -- until I happened to switch into the Finder and realized that my HTML editor was saving the corrected file in the wrong place. So I had to move the file to the folder where I wanted it, and then upload it. Finally the graphics showed up like they're supposed to.
So now I have Grandma's Depression Memories up and running. It's a site dedicated to rediscovering the skills our grandparents and great-grandparents used to survive the Great Depression of the 1930's and apply them to getting through the current economic troubles.
And after that experience, I realized that I'd probably made the exact same mistake when I was customizing the CSS for the site on job-hunting. So I pulled it up and compared it to a copy of the unmodified template -- since the graphics in it are much more subtle, I had overlooked their absence. So I went through its CSS file and corrected it, and now the graphics load correctly.
Since I still had some time, I decided to get some book reviews up on The Billion Light-Year Bookshelf that I'd written earlier. I did a little tweaking and fixing the code there as well, so some glitches are now gone.
So while it was very frustrating for a while when I could not figure out what was going wrong (I was sure it was something almost trivially small that I was overlooking, since computers are that way), now that I've resolved the problems, I actually feel like I've accomplished something with my day.