Alien I View

I am not going to bullshit about the whole week once again. This time only one day will be enough for me to write about before I go to yet another weeks work (A.K.A Fun Hibernation Mode)

I am going to talk about today. This day, A day of fun n laughs, heavy head scratching, disappointments, blood rush, recovery, Serendipity and some success.

Started of as any other Sunday, till noon everything was the usual, had a session of gameplay. The usual weekend breakfast (Gobhi ke Paranthe with loads of white butter over it .. umummumm) That is one of the reasons why I so much love winters, Green vegetables. Went out, the whole family, for some shopping. Back in home by noon.

Afternoon with some Orkutting. And trying to solve the new problem I have been facing with the change I want to make to my site/blog. Can you imagine how tough it can be, just to add a Blog Title in the header of the Blog pages. Unless you know hardcore CSS & HTML/XHTML, the details can kill you. That’s what I was into since Friday night. And since I am no CSS/XHTML expert .. after trying everything .. and I mean everything in my knowledge, I do not have a perfect solution. The best that I got was using an Image similar to the Header Image I have (Alien I Realm) just above the horizontal menu. I do not like this solution that is why I did not finalized it yet. I am looking at putting up a text instead of a static image. Cauz I can control text dynamically and besides it takes less time to load and the page title is the first thing I want to get displayed. It is getting really complex. Perhaps for all such small problems, like this one, that I have faced in the past, that I had once abandoned the idea of hosting my hand made Blog. But I am determined this time, no problem will be big enough to keep me away from maintaining this Blog.

And then when I try to access my blog .. what I get .. server down .. the heckin Http://phpnet.us server is down. The only free PHP/MySQL subdomain host providers that provide a bannerless hosting that I could find on the net. But it is down since today afternoon. Actually I do not know when it went down, today afternoon was when I checked it.

So I had to quickly ReSetup everything that I had left of the site & Blog on my harddrive to this new location. Luckily I keep a backup of every changed code including the Blog entries. I can even roll back to the very first look of my site & blog that I designed last year. He he .. A little boasting can always get some recognition. Back to the point, I restored the latest blog code, blog entries and my hand made skin to the new location (This location Http://alien.xlphp.net). But still there are so many changes one needs to make besides just uploading the code and image files. The blog settings that can only be done from the Nucleus Control Panel and that too only when it is connected to the live database. Although I had a list of what configurations need to be made but still it takes time, a good hour to get the site look like what it looks rite now (Just the configuration .. the designing has taken more than year of experience with PHP, MySQL, and especially Nucleus CMS all because of ma laziness and sloth speed and 3 months of not so good skin designing that hardly anyone of my friends approves of as funky. Come’ on guyz it was worth the effort. But the criticism is appreciated, and I am already looking at the changes to make it look more kooler.).

Let me highlight some good and cool features of the site skin that I designed all by myself:

• The site is all CSS/XHTML. No JavaScripts used at all. Pretty handy and moveable. I know because I have already moved the code thrice in just one month. He he .. well actually these is a JS used in the blog. But I am goin to remove that as well.
• No Tables (table tag) used at all. I am not very proud of this. But I was able to solve a major styling and formatting issue by avoiding the use of tables. That is why it is must that I mention this.
• I like this one the most. Past three moths I have played with iFrames and other non iFrames alternatives like keeping everything except the content pane in the site static when anyone scrolls down to read a long entry. I really hated iFrames, a major reason being that I had to create a new page to display the content and then the iFrame should point to this new page. Not till I figured out this so simple and so elegant non iFrame alternative to my problem. Simply amazing. There is no frame at all in the site. Yet you’ll see a scroll bar. And with this solution I do not need a separate page to display the content. I can use the same common dynamic action page. Now how cool is that. Lolzz ..

Yeah I know, all this sounds greek and geek. But I am satisfied that I successfully moved everything to a new host in just under 2 hours. Which actually took me one whole day the first time I was setting it up.

Now, here is something really interesting, and I’d love to blow horn about. Did anyone noticed I said above that the last host I was using (http://phpnet.us) were the only hosts that I could find on the net that are providing free, absolutely BANNERLESS subdomains. Well, that is true, to the best of my knowledge. And the host that I am using now (AddYour.net .. Subdomains for 122mb.com) provides free hosting, but not without banners. Actually they are Google Ads. On the top as well as on the bottom. Now you must be wondering that whered the Ads go on my page then. Yeah baby yeah. Thats where serendipity comes in.

I knew this site will display Ads and banners, that is why this host was not my first preference. But then since the other one is down, I had to move in here. I was just playing with the code as usual. And happened to made some changes (no I am not disclosing the secrets of this hack .. no way lolzz) and voila the Ads were no longer available on my page. That was pure unintentional code playing that actually gave me this Hack to remove the Ads. Well, to be frank it was more of a code error that I made, that any HTML novice an make out easily from the code of this site. So .. Serendipity .. lolz. And I am Ads free on this subdomain. For how long I can not tell. I am sure the host people will definitely look into this and block this hack as well. But till that time, I am Ads free. Yipeeee!!

Okay .. I think this is enough for one day and this blog entry.

I’ll keep posting updates. Till the next time.

-=oNo=-

Posted on Sunday, September 24th, 2006 at 22:39 in Alien Realm | rss feed for comments| Leave a response, or trackback