(Yeah, this is one of those "Ree thinks into the keyboard" entries.)
I'm worn out. I'm pawing through bookmarks in search of decent hosting for my website. Angelfire snuck in exit ads when I wasn't paying attention, it seems. That means that any time someone clicks a link on my website that leads to a different website, they get a pop-up ad -- in this case, a monstrosity, even among pop-ups.
Insert me sighing heavily and wondering what the hell to do.
I have options, I guess. I could squander my money on paid hosting -- more on why that would be squandering later, if I get to it. I have a couple thought trains chugging at the same time and I'll try to ensure none of them derail.
Okay, time to put all my cards out for my readers to see. My main website is hosting with Angelfire. They provide reasonably stable service, but their ads have gone from tolerable to hellish during my stay with them. (I miss the SciFiVine and their ad-free hosting. Dot-com bubble, how I miss thy unpopped state.) My poetry is hosted on a friend's domain, but they've been having problems lately. My FTP account no longer works ("Password invalid!") and there's no other means of upload or management.
Squander. Right. I asked my mom if I could have a domain name for Christmas. She, uh, didn't react ideally. She sort of went off on me about "why pay for hosting?" Well, because ads suck, and it costs money to host sites. People who provide that service deserve compensation. "Well, what do you need a website for? What do you have to offer?"
Hit me like a fucking slap in the face, why didn't she. Okay, she didn't mean to be harsh. I know this. She only uses the computer for job searching and e-mail. She groks not the Net, HTML, website design, any of it. I know this.
Goddammit I am a geek and I need a fucking website!
I can chill. Really I can. After all, she only spent $35 on my webmaster book so I could use the most basic chapters, the advanced tricks having been disabled on free servers.
I am trying to teach myself programming. I am not all that good at it -- yet. I have been learning. I made good progress. I hope to get very good at it and make a living with it someday. I can't do that without outlay of money.
Why the fuck do my brothers get stacks of movies for Christmas and I get a computer book I can barely use without good hosting, when I asked for hosting above all? (Squirt now has seven DVDs he's never seen plus The Princess Bride. TJ got Pirates of the Caribbean. I got socks. I'm not making this up.)
What do I have to offer? I hate that question. It smacks of job interviews. On a website level, it's a question I've asked myself rather a lot. I have my poetry, but if I mentioned that to my mom, she'd just come back with "Why do you need that online? Don't you want to get paid for it someday? I thought you couldn't get paid if it was already online for anybody to read for free." Pfft, like anybody pays for poems these days.
What else is my website? Data on roleplay characters, a practice my mom still considers only slightly more mature than playing with dolls. A WinAmp skin I made long ago featuring art from a favourite webcomic. Links to my various journal accounts online.
This line of thought is getting me nowhere. I've had a URL of one sort or another since 1999 and I am not about to give it up now.
Hosting, then. Well, I'd been thinking about trying TopCities. Erin thought they used to suck, but maybe they've changed. I *might* be able to get hosted on another friend's domain, but I'd never be able to tell my mom where it was -- the "hell" in the URL would bug her mightily. Besides, that's far from a given. I could leave my poetry where it's at for now -- no sense scrambling about until I have more poems to add to the page.
When the domain currently hosting my poetry went haywire, it seemed to "split" into the domain name address and the IP address. My FTP account might still work on the IP address name. I'd have to change my links. I can still log into the domain name address using the admin account (I am trusted, yo) to make forward visitors with old bookmarks, though I wouldn't care to edit my site that way all the time.
"What do [I] have to offer?" Fuck you, mom. Programming, skinning, diarising, roleplaying, writing. Just because my mom doesn't get it doesn't mean I have nothing to offer.
I would really love to have some backup on that subject, though...
...later...
Aha! Turns out my mom has not seen my website, aside from the poetry section! I have showed it to her now. She asked about the big ugly ads, so I showed her which parts of the page held my content. Sigh. And why the hell do the big exit pop-ups contain a search box in which is pre-entered "gay webcomics"? This is not something I need my mother to see. Ack.