H.T.M.Hell

I'm not talking about writing this week--well, not exactly.
I've been trying to get my ridiculous website to work, and I think, finally, just short of an aneurysm, I may have figured it out.

Now, I don't want to date myself. You've already figured out I'm no spring chicken. But when I learned about computers in school--the first year we actually had computers in school-let's just say, "think, DOS" and leave it at that. 10 For x=1 to 100
I'm talking Tandy, folks.

So when I invested in my domain name and a year's hosting with a highly recommended service, I knew I'd have to shake off some rust and learn a little html. But secretly, I hoped they had a point-and-click site builder like some of the free hosting sites. Wouldn't that have been easy?

Not so lucky, never so lucky.

It began. I had a great time designing my pages in Office, and even figured out I could save them as web pages without coding any html. Whoopie!!! I found my way around the hosting site, discovered my file manager and dove into uploading files.
That's about where it started to fall apart.

My fonts looked funky, my text wandered across the wide pages, and my pictures...where were my pictures?
sigh.

I'm pretty stubborn, and by Gods I was going to do this myself. So I poked around for the problem and figured out all my code was saved in a folder apart from my html file. I uploaded the folder. No change. Thought some more and figured out that my file paths didn't point to the pictures correctly, so I opened the site's html editor and all HELL broke loose. Whatever I did to that html code resulted in funny little black question marks dancing across my site.

About that time I figured out I could save the pages as single files, or mhtml, and it worked!!!
Everything worked. Except my host wouldn't use an mhtml page as my .com, and anyone wanting to actually SEE my site had to download a mysterious little program.... egad.

I lost a lot of sleep over this thing. I pulled out hair. I counted the days and subtracted them from my annual site cost to figure out how much money I was wasting. My brain was very close to imploding.

Then I noticed something funny. Outside my file manager and its easy little upload button, the site had something called an FTP client. My brain twitched. My memory strained. Doesn't that have something to do with file transfer?
Eureka!!!!
I only had to load each page, reverted happily back to html files, about three times to get all my links working.

Anyway, to make a long story a touch longer...the site is up....again. This time it should be user friendly. I've added a free short story, for my, er, your pains.
Put away the champagne, I could use a G&T.

bottoms up,
~Frances