Website Domain Buying Question? Please help newbie here.

bartmc said:
let me tell you how fun it was writing printf statements with html embedded in them.
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Thanks. I was up all night patching (well, watching my automation patch) servers (I was up to make sure they worked properly afterward) and I wake up to see that. You just caused me a PTSD-style flashback. ;)

My first (and last) official coding job started with "fixing" a 50,000 line C++ cgi-bin program. I won't even go into how the coders who wrote it (who were all dismissed, not long after, all five of them) ended up with 50,000 lines of C++ code to hand out 15 web pages from an OS/2 box and Sybase SQL Anywhere.

I've yet to see a worse mess than that. It had a state machine embedded in it that acted as a "goto" to the code for each web page. Each page was generated by a complete C++ program, start to finish, that were cut and pasted together into one cgi-bin compiled binary.

Someone still needs to die painfully for that code or the Universe will never forgive. ;)

The other "fun" in that project was writing a REXX script to install or reinstall Sybase SQL Anywhere and upgrade or install the DB schema from a floppy disk and a SCSI Iomega Jaz drive -- and another to do nightly DB backups to the Jaz drive.

Kim, the domain name is cool... to keep this on topic.

I'd offer up webserver space, but I moved my various stuff to "the cloud" a while ago. If you end up needing a place to put stuff, there's folks here with better options than I, these days, but I'd stand up a webserver for you to play with if you really needed one.

(There's so many ridiculously cheap virtual server hosting options these days, it's hardly worth paying even the tiny power bill to run my own at home anymore.)

Definitely a cool domain name.
 
P.S. be prepared for a lot of comment spam with Wordpress. There's plugins to help deal with it, but they don't catch everything.
 
denverpilot said:
P.S. be prepared for a lot of comment spam with Wordpress. There's plugins to help deal with it, but they don't catch everything.
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Rusty told me that, and I activated the plugin last night.

The domain name has a story:

1. I was at the Reno Air Races, working for a week as a volunteer. By the end of the week I finally made it to the "vendor section" and was excited to see a bunch of toy planes etc to take home as souveneirs.

2. In looking at all the "stuff" I was reminded of how hard it has been to find FEMALE CLOTHING for pilots over the past two years. Mostly T-Shirts or guy shirts (button up hawaiian shirts).

3. I found a booth that said "we can customize anything" and talked to the owners. The husband was a pilot and the wife was into it too and they travel to all the airshows. They showed me shirts and hats and a wall of embroidery (GA planes, jets, etc). I asked "can I make that Stearman PINK?" and they said "yes". I was super excited.

4. Hours later (they had to help other customers and couldn't find the Stearman on the computer), we were done with the design. I knew I wanted a black baseball cap with pink letters because they had no "girl" shirts and I was afraid after a few washes it might tear or stain anyhow and not last too long.

5. During this time, they asked what I wanted the hat to say. I remembered seeing something somewhere on the internet (bumper sticker or T-Shirt) along the lines of "Silly boys, airplanes are for girls" or something like that. Instead of that - too many letters - I turned to the woman standing next to me. I asked her what she thought I should embroider. She said "what about I FLY LIKE A GIRL?"

6. It was a VOILA moment. The pink stearman would match the pink letters which would say I FLY LIKE A GIRL. For an added bonus I had the back of the hat say CAUTION: Female PIC

7. I received many comments on the hat, from uniformed men in C-130's to female student pilots at the races. I contemplated making more and selling them.

8. Last night, I looked it up online. Unfortunately, a pink website for lady pilots had made "I fly like a girl" T-Shirts and bumper stickers. Cafe Press showed a gymnastics shirt that said "I fly like a girl" with the photo of a young girl flying during a dismount.

9. I called the phone number on the pilot site, the owner answered, I talked about training and Young Eagles and the website and giving back. She gave me her blessing to use the name (I checked, it isn't trademarked) and asked if the stuff I emailed her could go on her facebook / site. I said sure.


That is the I Fly Like A Girl story. I have worn the hat to all flying events since I bought it, including the Livermore air show day and the mountain fly-out.
 
Which brings up the legal question:

Now that I know sites are selling stuff with the phrase on it, should I trademark the phrase (to me that is stealing since they had it first)?
 
bqmassey said:
Awesome Skywagon!
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Thanks, that was after a Mountain Flying Seminar - it was the flyout - and the CFI who teaches mountain flying sat right seat since the pilot of the plane was sitting left seat and needed a CFI with him. I was in the back but we were faster than all the other planes and had a better panel to report the winds to the other pilots on the air to air frequency.... so we went first.

The winds aloft forecast for Mammoth / Tahoe was "light and variable". Truly a perfect day to practice mountain flying.

That is my second Skywagon ride. The first was my first time acting as "safety pilot" so I got to sit up front in a different Skywagon for that one. The HP in those things is gi-normous.
 
Henning said:
That hurts my eyes to look at... Better on the laptop, but that is not an iPad friendly template.
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When I have time I will test it on my iPad but I have class tonight. I will assume that what I see on my old iPad is what it will look like on somebody's iPhone (I have Android and it is basically just text on that).
 
All of the pages are broken now so me thinks Rusty is up to something. I will leave it alone.

Growing Pains!

I definitely am not set on Theme / Menu / Pages / Buttons / Design yet. But playing around with this stuff is how I learn..... just added a neat E6B photo to one of my pages which matches the text.

Design is not easy. Many revisions. Others have told me not to use Word Press but to use Joomla.
 
kimberlyanne546 said:
When I have time I will test it on my iPad but I have class tonight. I will assume that what I see on my old iPad is what it will look like on somebody's iPhone (I have Android and it is basically just text on that).
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The pic with you and the plane gets shoved off the left edge with just the cowling showing from behind the blog page with this big white field on the right.
 
Henning said:
The pic with you and the plane gets shoved off the left edge with just the cowling showing from behind the blog page with this big white field on the right.
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I know, and this is one of many issues I'm having. Whether static or scroll, or tile or whatever, this theme does not like that photo. I need a better theme. So my "solution" is when you click on "my story" you can see that photo as it should look.

Like I said, growing pains. I googled "prettiest word press sites" for some inspiration and now have some ideas but this theme just is not letting me do what I want.
 
kimberlyanne546 said:
All of the pages are broken now so me thinks Rusty is up to something. I will leave it alone.

Growing Pains!

I definitely am not set on Theme / Menu / Pages / Buttons / Design yet. But playing around with this stuff is how I learn..... just added a neat E6B photo to one of my pages which matches the text.

Design is not easy. Many revisions. Others have told me not to use Word Press but to use Joomla.
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Yep, that was me, your permalinks are enabled, Look into a "Responsive" theme if you want it to look pretty on a iDevice. Name's Bart BTW, Rusty is a joke... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S580EX1nnYU
 
bartmc said:
Yep, that was me, your permalinks are enabled, Look into a "Responsive" theme if you want it to look pretty on a iDevice. Name's Bart BTW, Rusty is a joke... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S580EX1nnYU
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OK Mr. Trombone, thank you.

I will look into that iDevice thing when I can.

I will change themes, I think my lame-o tard-o theme is what caused this in the first place.

Question for you: permalinks with names:

1. Does this mean each page / menu / post needs to have a unique name or will it go "1" and "2" if I name something the same thing a year from now?

2. How does it convert spaces into the URL - it looks like hyphens instead?


Kimberly
 
Wow that doesn't resize to fit my screen. I need to start making a list of all thest things I need to fix.
 
kimberlyanne546 said:
OK Mr. Trombone, thank you.

I will look into that iDevice thing when I can.

I will change themes, I think my lame-o tard-o theme is what caused this in the first place.

Question for you: permalinks with names:

1. Does this mean each page / menu / post needs to have a unique name or will it go "1" and "2" if I name something the same thing a year from now?

2. How does it convert spaces into the URL - it looks like hyphens instead?


Kimberly
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1. I think so, but you can change the setting to be a little more unique than just the post title.

2. I think so too... Honestly, I'm not a wordpress guru, I set them up for people when I don't want to do any work :D You know when family or friends say "Hey I got this great idea for a website will you build it for me, for free of course. I set them up a wordpress site and say "My job is done!"
 
kimberlyanne546 said:
This all started from the hat I designed at the Reno Air Races:

dvpptx.jpg


The hat features a pink Stearman and says "I Fly Like A Girl".

I thought it was unique but later found a pink website selling the T-Shirts and bumper stickers.

I called the owner tonight (a nice lady pilot) and she talked to me about Young Eagles, the 99s, etc. and said I could totally use the words to make my own site.

I felt better rather than go behind her back. I sent her pictures of the hat too.

IFLYLIKEAGIRL

dot com

Hooray.
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Powder puff pilots?
 
Yes but whenever I write the name of something on here it goes to the top of Google so I didn't want to type the name of her site. I want her customers to get to her and not us.

She is super nice.
 
it will resize for your screen but I love that "Leisureland" and "Duckabush" appear right next to the title. Seattle TAC is weird.
 
denverpilot said:
My first (and last) official coding job started with "fixing" a 50,000 line C++ cgi-bin program. I won't even go into how the coders who wrote it (who were all dismissed, not long after, all five of them) ended up with 50,000 lines of C++ code to hand out 15 web pages from an OS/2 box and Sybase SQL Anywhere.
Click to expand...

Things have improved in some ways and gotten worse in others. 50,000 line applications really are pretty small compared to a lot of the web apps out there now.

You only improve software to a certain point, after that point, you start making it suck more and more with each release.
 
Looking good, Kim!

I'm wondering why WP isn't creating resized images for the pages, however. This will eventually consume a lot of bandwidth if when your site gets more popular. :yes:

I haven't used WP in a while, but I thought it would do that for you if the GD libraries are installed on the server; or let you upload resized versions that can be linked to the full-sized versions if GD and the other image-manipulation stuff isn't installed. (The GD libraries are not installed with Apache by default, last I checked.)

The reasons having resized images matters are (1) to save Bart's bandwidth; (2) so the pages load more quickly, especially on mobile devices); and (3) to save visitors' data usage when their service is metered (for example, when accessing the 'Net over smartphones, MiFi, stationary EVDO, or satellite).

I'm pretty sure there's a way to locally resize your images, upload them, and associate them with the full-sized versions; but like I said, I haven't used WP for a while.

-Rich
 
Henning said:
Much better now on iPad, pleasant to look at but I'm not fond of the Hello Kitty graphic as the home page image.
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The home page is not static - it displays the most recent blog post. Kitty will soon be pushed down.

The resize looks like a CSS or other code thing, img-full HTML or whatever. In image properties. I just need to brush up on my HTML
 
jesse said:
Things have improved in some ways and gotten worse in others. 50,000 line applications really are pretty small compared to a lot of the web apps out there now.

You only improve software to a certain point, after that point, you start making it suck more and more with each release.
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Don't want to trash Kim's thread, but the point here was it was 50,000 lines to generate 15 mostly static web pages. This was long before CSS or any fancy formatting... They had basically written an enormous program to connect to the DB and pull massive amounts of info, then throw most of it away and make one page at at time. It was really really bad. Worse than you'd see out of even a beginning coder. Later it was found that most of this Canadian coding "team" was just cutting and pasting code written by one coder who had left the company and they had not idea what they were doing. They didn't last long.
 
Lots of complaints still:

Posts look different in posts than on main page, even when I try to use HTML code.

Example:

On page where they have their own page, they are nice paragraphs. On home page, they are all smushed. Tried using BR and that didn't work.


Second, the "Recent Posts" only shows one on the main page and there are now two. "Recont Comments" doesn't work, is half cut off, and links to nothing though I thought I had a comment somewhere.

I am interlinking now, for example, link from one to another internally and linking to outside sites (opens a new tab, finally) when I mention "reno air race" or "soaring NV flight school" so people can check those out.

I'm getting there.


Kimberly
 
denverpilot said:
Don't want to trash Kim's thread, but the point here was it was 50,000 lines to generate 15 mostly static web pages. This was long before CSS or any fancy formatting... They had basically written an enormous program to connect to the DB and pull massive amounts of info, then throw most of it away and make one page at at time. It was really really bad. Worse than you'd see out of even a beginning coder. Later it was found that most of this Canadian coding "team" was just cutting and pasting code written by one coder who had left the company and they had not idea what they were doing. They didn't last long.
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Sounds like hibernate + struts + weblogic. If you think 50K lines of C-Code to drive 15 web pages is inefficient.... Fire up an Oracle/Java Application server and watch the magic. Then get fancy and do message level signing of SOAP messages. Just the plug-in to sign the soap messages was around 7GB IIRC, that's for a compressed installer file.
 
kimberlyanne546 said:
Lots of complaints still:

Posts look different in posts than on main page, even when I try to use HTML code.

Example:

On page where they have their own page, they are nice paragraphs. On home page, they are all smushed. Tried using BR and that didn't work.


Second, the "Recent Posts" only shows one on the main page and there are now two. "Recont Comments" doesn't work, is half cut off, and links to nothing though I thought I had a comment somewhere.

I am interlinking now, for example, link from one to another internally and linking to outside sites (opens a new tab, finally) when I mention "reno air race" or "soaring NV flight school" so people can check those out.

I'm getting there.


Kimberly
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I've been doing software development for the better part of 25 years, I hate web development almost as much as I hate security and slightly less than writing documentation... Enjoy.
 
bartmc said:
I've been doing software development for the better part of 25 years, I hate web development almost as much as I hate security and slightly less than writing documentation... Enjoy.
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Why do you think I do other things for a living? Web development sucks and to have anything even worth bookmarking people expect new content daily or at least weekly. If I do this thing "well" it is like having another job!
 
kimberlyanne546 said:
Why do you think I do other things for a living? Web development sucks and to have anything even worth bookmarking people expect new content daily or at least weekly. If I do this thing "well" it is like having another job!
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Most web designers can't cutup their own HTML. They build a site in Dreamweaver then expect someone else to do the rest. It is a needle in a haystack finding one who does. When it comes time to deploy, I usually have to have a developer do it for them, especially if it is front ending an application, like many sites do. Most of our development is web, but it is pretty much all .NET, so it isn't too painful.
 
John221us said:
Most web designers can't cutup their own HTML. They build a site in Dreamweaver then expect someone else to do the rest. It is a needle in a haystack finding one who does. When it comes time to deploy, I usually have to have a developer do it for them, especially if it is front ending an application, like many sites do. Most of our development is web, but it is pretty much all .NET, so it isn't too painful.
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I wanted to go into the HTML but this thing has warnings and CSS and style sheets. Way over my head now but that's OK - I will make this thing do what I want eventually, damn it. For now though, content is more important than constantly screwing with the layout.
 
kimberlyanne546 said:
I wanted to go into the HTML but this thing has warnings and CSS and style sheets. Way over my head now but that's OK - I will make this thing do what I want eventually, damn it. For now though, content is more important than constantly screwing with the layout.
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It's actually simpler. It removes the styling from the markup. If you're putting styling in your markup you're doing it wrong. Suggest you track down a good book on HTML and CSS.
 
bqmassey said:
Jesse's right. It actually makes things much easier.
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Yeah! Cascading rules coming in from all directions applied so complexly that no mere human coul possibly know and understand what is being applied to the elements. So fire up a web browser with a CSS tool and let it calculate the styles being applied! Which is great until you realize every browser will give you different calculations. then you get to redo it four, five times so that the page looks somewhat acceptable on a dozen or so browsers. Throw in some JavaScript do dynamically change the CSS just for fun... What could be easier? :D
 
The trick with a Wordpress site is to find a good theme that does most, if not all of what you want. Even if you have to pay for it, it's well worth the time that you won't spend fighting with a shoddy free theme or trying to make the default theme do a bunch of stuff it wasn't meant to do.

Also, Kimberly, take a cruise through the Wordpress Documentation. Some of what you're describing sounds like it might just be a setting that is not the way you want it to be.
 
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