jimsjournal
| Two weeks to JournalCon -- 08/06/04 |
jimsjournal |
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There are only two weeks left until JournalCon 2004 in Washington, DC. I am getting close to maxing out my space on Geocities. If I had stuck to text-only entries I could probably have lasted for many more years, but these past couple of years I've been using more and more photographs and even though I try to keep those images fairly small (thinking about readers who still use dial-up connections) 30K here and 40K there and next thing you know another megabyte is filled. I have thought about getting my own domain a number of times. As I mentioned once (two or three years ago) somebody had registered jimlawrence.com and was asking a lot more than I was willing to pay. Then, a few weeks ago, as everytime I loaded a new entry, Geocities would give me the latest statistics on how much space I was using out of the 20Mb they provide for free, I realized that the domain name I really wanted wasn't jimlawrence.com, it was jimsjournal.com. So I checked and it was available. Now I needed a hosting service -- lots of them around with a wide variety of prices and plans -- but I have also heard horror stories about bad service, dropped connections, server crashes, etc. So I asked for suggestions in a forum at the JournalCon site. I got a pretty quick response from cosmicrayola, suggesting the hosting service she uses. And then Jeanne suggested the hosting service she's been using for more than three years without problems. Over the next day or so, three more people added enthustiastic seconds to her endorsement. So I've decided to take the plunge -- I registered jimsjournal.com and I've also ordered a hosting package from Verve -- just the starter one for now but it wouldn't cost much to upgrade when I start fill up that space -- plus it's got e-mail included so I could set up multiple e-mail addresses for myself and have web access to them (because I neither trust nor like Outlook). The big problem is that I currently have 17.1 megabytes of stuff on Geocities -- and at some point I would want to move that to Verve. Okay, of itself that is no problem. The problem is that I did not really have a very good plan when I started this journal back in 1996. It took me a few entries before I even began to divide them into sub-directories. And, I did not make consistent use of relative addressing. The previous entry and next entry links at the bottom of a each entry use relative addressing, but usually in the body of an entry, when I've mentioned some other entry of mine, I've just cut and pasted the full address into the link, including the whole www.geocities.com part. *sigh* And just to make it worse, I don't have good copies of many entries on my hard drive. My first entries were written using some Web page software I'd picked up, but I soon began writing them in Notepad and then, frequently I would write them in the Geocities online file manager window. Since I began using IBM WebSphere Homepage Builder, I do have copies (on two different computers, depending which one I was using at the time) but those copies don't always match what is online -- on a significant number of entries, I've written the entries, loaded them to Geocities, and then have found myself making a little tweak, maybe correcting a link or changing the wording of a sentence or adding another thought... So my big project -- which may take spare moments of time over the next several months -- would be to download my archives from Geocities and then edit them to change all links within my site to use relative URL addressing. So I went to SelectSmart.com and tried their 2004 Presidential Candidate Selector -- answer some questions and they purport to tell you how the various candidates match with your views. Frankly, I don't think it's the best such thing I've seen, but I'm posting my results here:
This isn't actually very helpful at all. Not surprisingly, the Libertarian candidate is the one scoring closest to my positions as interpreted by SelectSmart's awkwardly phrased and rather clunky questions. Unfortunately, although I have voted for Libertarian candidates in the past (including in 2000), I think they completely screwed up this year and nominated a total jerk. It's not that I would expect a Libertarian candidate to actually win, but I would like to feel that I am at least voting for someone who is at least theoretically capable of filling the office. Badnarik is so far from being qualified that I have to look at his nomination as being a farce and, perhaps, the beginning of the end of the Libertarian Party as anything but a sad joke. I'd vote for Kerry before I'd vote for Badnarik. |
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