So for the past week or so the site has been down. I had some problems with my old hosting company; they ended up deleting the website with no backup.
Luckily, there are ways to recover the HTML at least by using Bing and the site: modifier. So with the HTML content recovered, I manually copy and pasted all the posts back into the site. Phew! Then came the task of actually re-styling the site, which I won’t even go into here, but rest assured that my weekend has pretty much been dominated by this.
The moral of the story, back your websites up. Even though your hosting company may claim to backup your files, experience has shown me that they don’t always.
On a lighter note, I have changed hosting to landonwisser.com. I know the guy personally, and I know there won’t be any problems with his hosting.
Two new menu items have been added to the left sidebar: the Request Script page and Donations page.
The Request Script page is a form you can fill out to request that I develop some script. Payment is optional, but the work I do for free will definitely be slower and I’m unlikely to make specific tweaks once I’m done. Basically, it’s a way for me to get some input on what I should be posting next since right now I’m just posting stuff that I develop for other projects I’m working on and not just arbitrarily.
The Donations page is pretty straightforward. Websites cost money to host, and I do put a lot of time into the posts I make. So if you like what I do or find a particular post very helpful, feel free to contribute. Obviously though, since the source is all posted publicly and considering the whole notion of “donation,” it’s completely optional, but of course, greatly appreciated.
The site is launched. Yay. I’m still working on the design and contemplating functionality. This is what I’m planning though for the website:
- A blog for my programming-related thoughts and problems I’ve run across and solved which others may also run into sometime
- A collection of scripts I’ve written freely available to anyone who wants to use them, along with a detailed explanation of how to use them with examples. User comments are welcome to find bugs or explain the script in a way I may assume is easy (since I wrote it)
- A “request-a-script” feature where one can request development of a custom script. This I would actually charge for. Once the script was developed and paid for, it would be added to the freely available scripts mentioned above.
Basically, I’d like it to be a combination of a programming blog and a website like dynamicdrive.com.
Some background on me and how I program. I don’t like the idea of paying for software, however, I DO believe in paying for someone to develop software. This is exactly how I plan to run this site. As soon as a custom script is paid for for development, it’s free.
I also am super elitist and write only custom scripts. I don’t use tools like mootools or jQuery. I know that this make it so development takes more time, but I think custom code is a lot cleaner, efficient, and flexible than when using libraries. Plus, I feel like programming from scratch gives a much better learning experience, and I am still in college.
Anyway, I’ll be posting a few scripts I already have soon, right after I finish the site’s design and whatnot.
