January 10, 2006  Reprieved  Not only has my membership in JediOKC.com been sustained despite my lack of posting (a requirement), but we also woke up to moisture in the form of snow, glorious snow.  Oh, what a beautiful morning.  Perhaps we won't have to look at a fire symbol instead of a sun or clouds on the next few TV weather forecasts. 

February 3, 2006  Towel Day  As you know, if you've read every word on this website - yeah, right, I am a huge fan of the late Douglas Adams.  I've just learned a group of fans has planned to celebrate Towel Day in his honor on May 25th.  Why a "towel," you ask?  In Adams' own words:

"A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical
value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

"More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost." What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with."

So carry your towel proudly.  Or not.

February 12, 2005:  Taxes Done!  I have e-filed the taxes.  Wahooooo!  Of course, I still have 477 pages of stuff to store for future (ugh) reference, the girls' taxes to do, and Dad's taxes as well.  But with any luck, the refund check is in the mail.  And now I can get to work on next year's taxes.  And catch up on all the things I've been neglecting, both online and off.

March 1, 2006:  Analyze That  Once upon a time I wrote something up for this blog every day.  That was then.  Now, I think about stuff I should be writing here.  The shame.

But I haven't been idle.  I've been plunging into the world of Google Analytics, trying to put their code on every single page of this site.  (Not that I'm done mind you.)

My theory is Google will look more kindly upon us come the next Google dance when we usually fall from our relatively high page rankings and suffer the slings and arrows of lower site traffic because ... oh, who knows why search engines do anything?

It just seems like a good idea, and the only cost is my time.  If my page rank theory is wrong, at least we'll get some good site measurement data.

Amazon Books Home Page

At the same time, I signed up for a beta testing program from Amazon to make the individual books we highlight look even better to those who visit our pages.  After I pasted the code onto our Bead & Jewelry Books page, I read the fine print and found only half the affiliates who signed up would get working code.   And unless you're seeing something I'm not when I visit that page, we didn't get working code.

And you question my ability to I pass the time productively.  Me too.

March 22, 2006:  Home is the Traveler  We are exhausted.  We got in late last night from London, where we'd ended up a fun (mostly) two weeks seeing the sights and bleeding money.  Details will follow in the coming months as I sort slowly through my notes and photographs.  Travel is wonderful, but it's good to be home.  Oh, and curb your dog.

March 30, 2006:  Ahhchooo!  I dragged myself out of a sickbed yesterday to attend the Yukon Community Education award lunch.  I have the privilege of teaching a beginning bead class there.

Today, however, is the first day I've felt human since we got home from our travels.  Part of the reason could be my feeble attempts to back up the raw files of over 2000 photos we took.  So far nothing has worked.  I assume the files are too large or ... ???

This means the next edition of Gracious Jane Marie, the Newsletter, will be ever so slightly delayed.  Sorry.

April 16, 2006:  Wah!  Things have been falling on my head lately. 

First, FrontPage is about to become history.  That means we must switch over to Dreamweaver no matter what the cost in (my) time and sweat.  I do not look forward to the process.

Second, Google sitemapping must be set up to get our search rankings up where they were.  But since I can't follow the simple (ha!) coding instructions, I have to list all the files in this site in a text document.  And there is no way I can figure to copy and paste a list out of FrontPage.  That means I must type each one individually with all its weird (my fault) spelling.  And I must do this yesterday.

Third, Excite has decided to blacklist us as spammers.  I have, of course, appealed since we're not, but as far as I can tell, this has come about for one of two reasons.  Either the e-mail spoofing we refer to on our homepage has seriously annoyed someone or another website on our shared hosting server has been wicked. 

Fourth, some our most popular pages are pages that either no longer exist at all or come up as versions we've improved upon years ago.  Each of our pages contains this meta code to prevent this very thing, but for some reason, the code doesn't work.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

On the positive side, the National Confections Association tells us 90,000,000 chocolate Easter bunnies are made each year. 

May 9, 2006  Why Can't I use "Buried Alive" as a Blog Title all Over Again?  Thanks to Anti-Writer Maureen Nelson, I discovered WritingSucks.com.  I would have done that site - not in FrontPage of course - if only I'd thought of it.

I have been working diligently on all the problems I yammered about in the previous entry.  And now I'm rich, beautiful and a joy to the world. 

May 17, 2006:  "We" Won!  Our cousin, Pat Harkins, won the Democratic primary for state senate in Erie, PA. 

We have another election winner in the family (June 2006 entry), but that's not my news to announce, so stay tuned.

May 30, 2006: Good Riddance to Bad FrontPage

As you can see by this entry, things are looking slightly different on this site.  There is a long chain of reasons for this.

First, FrontPage began slowing down and then refused to publish this site becausing of a System Exception - Access Denied error, which was apparently initiated due to a flaw within Office (maybe Sharepoint related).  When I used the Find function for a search throughout the entire site for a specific string of bad HTML, FrontPage failed.

I attempted all the cures on the Internet.  During this process, I believe I inadvertantly deleted a file I needed to make things better if not right. When I attempted to repair my operating system, I could not find my installation disc, and attempts to repair Office have not worked because of all this.

I successfully installed OpenOffice as my new Word-type program.

I transferred the site to Dreamweaver, something I've been planning to do for a long time.  However, Dreamweaver seems to be very unstable.  It takes 10 minutes or more to access and if something (like a Save As command or an Instant Message) happens to disturb it, it freezes.  I think this is occuring because of a flaw within this website passed along from FrontPage.

I am now in the process of going through the site page by page to delete the worst FrontPage code, which appears on my screen highlighted in yellow.  (I have not attempted to use the Dreamweaver function that deletes extra FrontPage HTML because I suspect it would remove too much formatting.)

My plan is to complete my current task and (hopefully) publish the site from Dreamweaver.  I do not like Dreamweaver.  I hope to find a better WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editor and work on more site cleanup someday soon.  After that, I expect to be able to add new content.  Cross your fingers.

June 20, 2006: Dreamweaver It Is   We've ordered the latest version of Dreamweaver after trying every trial, freeware and shareware HTML editor on the market.  They all suck a bit, but the thing about Dreamweaver that scares me is the need for a separate piece of FTP (publishing) software.  I can hardly wait to attrmpt to republish the site.  As it is, I somehow deleted most of grace-light.com while trying to publish it under my old copy of Dreamweaver.  I can only hope the new version is easier to use.

July 16, 2006: Publish or Perish  With any luck, I'll be able to publish the first revision of this cleaned up website in a day or two.  There have been tons of problems, mostly attributable to leftover FrontPage nasties.  And of course, the change to Dreamweave has hardly been smooth.  Today's fun task is finding and converting various symbols [© é ] into proper HTML so they up they way they are meant to.

July 25, 2006: Whew!  I know maintaining a website is a big job, but getting through this changeover has been daunting.  We continue to find strange symbols and other oddities on our pages and expect to for some time.  Still, the worst is over, and now we can build our code for the future.

September 3, 2006: Dreamweaver Crimes  Anyone who has read this blog, or even skimmed it, is likely to conclude I bitch a lot.  And I do, but with good reason.  After all the years of FrontPage hell, I now find myself in a similar kingdom run by the good folks who bring us Dreamweaver software for building websites.

My current solutionless problems include:

Diary Table of Contents