Friday, September 22, 2006
Yesterday was my deadline for prepping the material for my next Information Architecture course for the Faculty of Information Sciences at the University of Toronto. What I have found from previous classes is that there are usually students who have problems with the school's own ftp site for downloading course materials, and usually I have to set up a directory on one of my Web sites for them to grab material from.
So I decided to simply register another domain and point my students to that instead. I would have liked to get the informal name "InfoArch.com" or the .net or .org variants of the same, but they were already taken. "InformationArchitectureCourse.com" was available, but the longer the name, the more likely spelling errors are likely to creep in. So I ended up registering "InfoArchCourse.com", put up the necessary files the school needed, and whipped together something simple, using a pre-existing CSS template I ran across that I liked.
I have to hand it to BlueHost, in that they make the process easy -- certainly easier than my previous web host provider did. Registering is quick and painless (and relatively cheap at $10 U.S. a pop), and then parking the new domain to an existing one (in this case it is linked to a subdirectory of this blog site) is accomplished in a few easy steps.
At this point my ambitions for the site are modest and largely functional: a place where my students can easily find and download materials relating to the course, which so far are contained within a couple of encrypted zip files. There is also some basic promotional materials relating to the course, and I've taken a stab at adding the sites I reference in the course, and that's about it. The text content is derived largely from what's on the equivalent FIS site describing the course, cobbled together in haste last night after putting the kids to bed.
At the moment the site is a far cry from what I would say would be an ideally constructed site based on Information Architecture principles, so I have my work cut out for me.
Not much to see as yet, but it's there and functional, which is all I need at this stage.
Labels: BlueHost, CSS, domain, Faculty of Information Sciences, InfoArchCourse.com, Information Architecture, University of Toronto, web site
Monday, August 07, 2006
As you can see, the captmondo.com site is back up and running, now run off of Bluehost's server. All of the text content comes off of Blogger, so there was little chance that the reams and reams of text would be lost. But it appears as though the last time I did a backup of my image files from the site was at the end of last year, so other than in the past few entries and prior to January 2006, there are no images. Something I hope to take care of over time, if only for my own benefit (and as a constant reminder to backup)...
Late last night I launched Erika's professional location sound recording site, which can be seen at: esrproductionsound.com. Not exactly what I would call a "wordy" site at the moment, as more text content needs to be added to flesh things out, but it certainly looks good and professional, which was the goal.
One of the unexpected benefits of moving to Bluehost from the now-dead Web Raided is the vast increase in server space I have allotted to me, which is on the order of 15GB's(!) worth of space. So I have restored the frantics.org site under the /frantics directory under this site. Bluehost allows domain parking, which means I should be able to redirect the domain to that folder. While I was at it, I have also restored the old Miscellaneous S site. It is sorely in need of an overhaul, and many of the pages go back to the early days of the Web in the mid-90s. I would like to add a tribute page to both Toby Steel and to Alan Wright to the site, and maybe even cobble together a place where people can download music samples and perhaps even buy albums.
Much work still to be done. At least it's fun work. ;-)
Labels: BlueHost, captmondo.com, esrproductionsound.com, frantics.org, Miscellaneous "S"
Thursday, August 03, 2006
If you are reading this, the storm has passed, so to speak.
Erika told me soon after I got back from work that her email was down, and that the captmondo.com Web site was down too. So I went online to see what was up. I then discovered that WebRaided's (my Web hosting firm) Web site was also down. Odd. Must be a bad problem if their own Web site is down. So I Google-d for their main telephone line, and gave them a call, expecting to hear an automated message saying when they expect to be back up.
Instead, I got a message saying that the number has been disconnected and was no longer in service.
Uh oh....
So WebRaided appears to be dead. I check my previous emails but there was nothing there saying that this might happen (but my over-eager spam filters might have disposed of any such messages, and I had cleaned out my junk email folder late last week). So I am without a host for several Web sites: captmondo.com, frantics.org, and magicomusic.com (the last I run for a friend of Erika's). More important than my blog or the other sites is the fact that Erika's email is down, which she uses for her work.
The last site I set up, chateauvolterra.com, is hosted by BlueHost Web hosting in the States. I went with them when WebRaided said that they were unable to handle a simple domain transfer. So I went online and bought a year's Web space for captmondo.com, and went digging through my emails to figure out who I had registered the domain name with so that I could transfer it properly.
I also picked up esrproductionsound.com for Erika, since she really ought to have a promotional Web site for her business, along with a more business-sounding email address.
I am hoping I will be able to transfer the frantics.org and magicomusic.com sites to subdirectories of the main Web sites I now have with BlueHost.
I had been planning to work on the chateauvolterra.com site over the long weekend. Guess I'll be doing a lot more Web Admin work than I had originally planned...
Labels: BlueHost, captmondo.com, chateauvolterra.com, esrproductionsound.com, frantics.org, magicomusic.com, WebRaided
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