Techie grumbles

Web services are giving me a lot of trouble these days. It’s getting very frustrating. 🙁

I wanted to update BLU~Blooded Blog, my VC blog associated with bylightunseen.net. It’s still on blogspot because I had to move it there when Blogger stopped allowing us to FTP blogs to our own domains. But now, Blogger has implemented some fancy new “template” system and I couldn’t update the customized template I had. Finally I “upgraded” to some piece-of-shit pre-fab template, which I’ll either have to laboriously customize all from scratch, or else move the blog to WordPress hosted on BLU’s domain, which I want to do, anyway. (Of course, I’ll still need to customize the whole blog from scratch in that case.) But when I tried to install WordPress on BLU’s GoDaddy account, it wouldn’t install even though I have “deluxe” hosting for BLU. So I need to puzzle that one out.

Meanwhile, MySpace has also implemented fancy new “templates” as part of this big refit it’s doing, and I lost my whole customized profile page on MySpace. They don’t allow css anymore although they might implement it in the future, which sucks. MySpace takes a flying leap back to 1989! I’ll have to completely redo that page.

LiveJournal used to keep me logged in and now I have to log back in to LiveJournal every time I go there–and I have a paid account.

WordPress and GoDaddy have been nagging me for months to upgrade WordPress for Rewriting the Rules and BLU Media Blog, which are WordPress apps hosted on my own domains for inannaarthen.com and By Light Unseen Media. I finally just did that–and seem to have wiped out Rewriting the Rules entirely. Now I need to figure out wtf happened to that.

I started working on redesigning bylightunseen.net to make it html5 compliant, formatted with css stylesheets and generally up to speed with my other websites. I was beating my head against the wall with that most of yesterday–finally got a menubar to display in an iframe (a technique I use elsewhere) and now the whole iframe has vanished, I have no idea why. When I finally discovered the main reason the css was choking up, though, you probably heard me groan where you are: I’d typed one parenthesis instead of a squiggly bracket. This is why programmers live on Twinkies. 🙁

I was looking for online tutorials for SQL, PHP, and ASP and can’t find the kind of information that would be most helpful for me, and I wasted time chasing that. I just tried to make a lousy comment on Facebook, hit the wrong key (cat on lap, for one thing) and the whole comment got zapped.

The Internet hates me. 🙁 And I am sick of “upgrades!!!” They have nothing to do with improving the actual usability of the service. All these “upgrades” are designed to facilitate monetizing the service–more ads, more eyeballs, “premium tiers” that can charge fees, and so on. Nobody cares about the user experience. It’s all about profits. *grump*

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