Always Working... For What?

This actually works better over to The Wording, since it has so much to do with just everything, including the site, but once you read, you’ll understand why I put it here:

Not a lot of people really understand what all a webmaster has to do. The goings-on behind the scenes are too technical, too dry, and generally too boring for them to concern themselves with. But it can be extremely frustrating.

Today, I went to add a little button to the sidebar - the “Vote for My Blog” button above Daredevil there (and please use it - vote for us!) - and I couldn’t figure out how to do it! I mean, I’m hitting “Edit” and jumping around and spending half an hour going through Google Help and shit, and then I come across something that was talking about “Add an Element” and then it hit me: my Layout page has no “Add an Element” button!

Now, I know it had one. I know it did because I’ve obviously used it before; I mean, look to the right. I made the whole sidebar and I didn’t do it by hardcoding (editing the HTML directly). So where the hell did my little "Add Element" button go?

Well, I don’t have any idea. Further, Google doesn’t have any way of contacting them directly and have no posts indicating that they realize this is an issue, so I’m effed. Just completely effed. I lost at least an hour, hour and a half, getting madder and madder, looking for something that should have been there because I didn’t even know it was gone. Oh sure, I could post a little complaint or question to the forums and wait for... ever to hear from someone - anyone - but why lose all that much more time?

That’s what webmastering is like; that’s why I haven’t done more on the site and am not going to until I switch hosts.

When I first started The Weirding, I spent three months putting together design and sketches on paper, pulling together content, original writing, selecting art and fonts, and more. When I got ready to go live, the FTP didn’t work. So I tried a different program. No, let me back up:

When the FTP didn’t work, I spent several weeks searching for another FTP program that might work. I tried something like 5 of them. With each one I installed, my registry became that much more bloated and none of them worked. The hosting company was absolutely useless; no one I talked to even knew wtf “FTP” was!!! By the time I got hold of someone who did, he was basically telling me to install a networking program on the site itself, meaning I was going to have to learn an entirely new, completely proprietary, language and coding methodology. In other words, I was going to have to learn how to do Unix commands from a Windows computer through an external site! I spent literally weeks going through all of this and by the time the host finally got their shit together, I was burned-out!

Is that an excuse? Really only to an extent. Look at it this way:

You spend weeks planning a vacation and 3-4 days packing. You get in your car on the morning you are set to leave, having called everyone along your route and made all your reservations and so forth, and the car doesn’t start. After a few hours under the hood, you realize the battery cable is dead. After another few hours, you find someone to run you to the store and they charge you far more to do so than it actually costs them and the whole time, they act like it’s such a hassle to do it, but you’re thankful and ready to go, so you put up with their bullshit and pay their exorbitant fee and after another few hours of work, you get the cable on and you’re ready to go!

Then you see you’re out of gas.

So you have to walk down to the gas station and pay yet another exorbitant fee for a gas can that you’re only going to use this one time. You get the gas and lug the heavy damned thing all the way back home. You manage to spill most of it down the side of the car pouring it in because the funnel-thingy is too short, but you get enough in there to get it going and hopefully to make it down to the station, where you can fill it up.

So now you’re ready to go! Except that now it’s mid-afternoon and traffic is going to be hell and you’re completely worn-out, so you decide to wait until the next day and start over.

Next morning, you double-check the cable, eyeball the gas gauge - everything looks great! You crank the car...

And it does nothing.

That's when you listening to the radio all day long while you looked for the problem and realize the battery is dead. No problem: just get a jump and the alternator will recharge it along the way, right? Except that you have to ask that same jackass neighbor because he's the only one who has cables. So you decide you'd rather not put up with his crap and offer to pay him a whopping $30 to do it, so long as he doesn’t say one damn word to you.

FINALLY! You’re up and going, the car is started, everything’s ready to go! But you forgot that piece of mail you need to drop off at the PO along the way, so you jump out and run to the door only to stop halfway there as, with slowly-dawning horror, you realize you locked your keys in the car...

THAT’S what getting The Weirding up has been like, exactly.

So I’m switching hosts. Which may mean some of the features will be going away for a minute (The Speakeasy and The Wording, specifically - well, The Wording will be switched to a Blogger blog), but this isn’t certain yet (the host I am hoping for is working on getting CGI access installed and it should be available soon). But even after I switch hosts, I am going to have to upload everything all over again, meaning the new content - most of which is already finished! - may still be a ways away from being published.

I couldn’t be sorrier for all of this, but as I hope you're starting to understand, it really isn’t all my fault. Sure, I could fight the burn-out and struggle along, but with a new setback every time I “start the car,” it just isn’t that easy. Besides, if I'm going to have to re-upload everything once I swap hosts, what's the point? Just more work for me!

I'm thinking of taking out a loan to get everything going in style, but that kind of goes against what one of the main points of the site was: to make something literally out of nothing (an idea echoed within the design, in fact). I would consider taking on partners, except that I have a very specific plan for what I want to do and don't want to compromise that for someone else's money. I would love it if I could get more technically-inclined, creative folks to throw in their talents, but I don't have any real incentive to propel them to do so, so I don't expect anything.

Still, we’ll see how things go. But with disappearing buttons, non-functional FTP, days and weeks lost to searching for programs and learning new methods in vain - none of which I can control - I hope people are starting to understand just how easy it is to get frustrated after over a year of dealing with this shit.

And going...