Website Woes

It's one of those cool rainy days when it is too wet to do much work in the market garden or around the yard so I decided today would be a good day to update the Boulder Belt website. The first thing I did was upgrade the site and lost the banner ads that had been there since I created the site 8 or so years ago and also gave me more bandwidth so more people can visit the site. In the past I did not care about bandwidth but since I got my own domain name (www.boulderbeltfarm.com) the traffic to the site has increased greatly. Used to be I would get maybe 1000 visitors per year and now I get that about every month and the traffic is growing as more and more people use the web to search for organic foods. That, and the fact I got a domain name and do not have to use the URL: www.angelfire.com/oh2/boulderbeltcsa... That domain was simply too long and too anonymous for the search engines to pick up on so the Boulder Belt Eco-Farm site was never high in the search rankings (unlike this blog that consistently shows up in the top ten if you do a search for sustainable ag topics or home made catsup, or hoophouses, etc..).

Okay so I paid angelfire to host my site and lose the ads. I probably could have done better but it was cheap and easy (don't have to ftp files to another host and all). After doing that I decided to upload several photos to put on the site and that is where troubles started. The damned photos would not upload. On the 3rd try I got 3 uploaded on I put them on the website. I updated the farm store page, than I noticed that the photo files were not in the correct directory (actually they were but copies had gone to the wrong place) so I clicked on one file to delete it. The page that asks if I really want to delete the file came up and I click yes. Than I noticed I made a rather costly mistake. I thought I had clicked on farmstore.jpg. But no! I had really clicked on farmstore.html and deleted the page I had just put new photos on and also updated the copy. AHGGGGGG!.

I did not have a copy of the html on the hard drive so I had to recreate the page from scratch. This was not overly hard. I used a template that angelfire provides and that I use on all the other pages of the site so all I had to do was cut, copy and paste a customized template from another page and than delete all the old copy (except the links) and put in what needed to be there. this would have been a lot easier if I could have remembered what I written for that page but I did not so I had to wing it. I think I came out with a better web page, more streamlined and easier to read

That was my afternoon.