Well, self-hosting ain’t as easy as it should be, I’ll say that much.
So far I’ve had an incident where all three of my sites crashed virtually at once. I gave up and started all over since it seemed the easiest thing to do with brand new sites, but things still seem buggy although not quite as bad as before.
Here on Mindbla and over on my UpbeatRhythms site things aren’t so bad. For some reason my email wasn’t working for any of the sites, but I opened a ticket with Hostgator (good company, so far I’ve got no complaints and they are very patient with us newbies and our stupid questions!), and they took care of that easily enough. And I’ve had some issues here or there but nothing that I wouldn’t chalk up to anything more than learning curves and growing pains. Except…
What has been absolutely disastrous, and extremely frustrating and annoying, is my picture blog which seems to constantly want to screw up the pictures.
At one point, the pictures simply vanished. As in, all of them. All the pictures. When I contacted ‘Gator the rep was like “site looks fine to me”, I’m like “no, all the pictures are missing”, and he was like, “oh, there are supposed to be pictures there?”. D’oh!
So, I fixed that with some online assistance and I tried to research up what the hell had gone wrong so it wouldn’t keep happening (again, picture blog keep in mind, if the images keep crashing what’s the point?). And then late last night as I was preparing to get some sleep and give my eye-strained peepers a much needed break, all the pics on site suddenly ballooned to enormous sizes, smashing through the margins and looking like shit.
Ugh.
Again.
So, I quickly switched to a different theme that made them look halfway decent, and then went to bed. In the morning it was still messed up, so I went theme shopping again and found a pretty decent looking one that seems to work well for pics. Fingers crossed.
All in all, I am realizing that as a newbie webmaster I’m bound to end up spending some hours backtracking and trying to fix stuff that is usually a non-issue on some hosted sites like Blogger. Still, it’s pretty cool to be “on my own” as it were, even if it is just a few blogs with some simple wordpress themes and some pictures and videos. Hopefully things will calm down enough for me to spend more time on offering quality content than on trying to fix the look of the spaces.
I did manage to figure out some CSS code for Mindbla here, and widened the body of the blog and a few other little tweaks. Hopefully it looks decent enough at this point, one way or the other either I’m going to have to chill out on obsessing about little theme details or else just go in the opposite direction and become a theme designer or something. Except that my sense of color sucks. So that’s out.
In the end, it all comes down to balance and finding a nice middle ground and not sweating the small stuff too much, which is why as you browse around my sites you might find minor glitches here and there. Hopefully at least all the pictures will be there, but you never know. Be assured that I’m probably well aware of whatever glitches you come across, and will get to them soon enough, little by little.
Thanks for stopping by!
