Yesterday I confirmed with my host (twice) that changing the master account domain name would have no effect whatsoever on my business website, www.parallaxwebdesign.com, and I needed a different domain to oversee my hosting accounts. So I told them go ahead and do it.

Instead of moving parallaxwebdesign.com to its own account and creating an empty master account with the new domain name, they instead just changed my master name to the new domain name and left all of my content there - which was not at all what they said they’d do.

Now it’s going on 14 hours that my site has been nonexistent. I finally got them to just change the name back - that happened this morning while I was at a meeting with a client who found it odd that my own website couldn’t be found. I was not happy.

I just got home from being in Denver all day and lo and behold - my site is STILL not up. I am really getting angry, there’s no reason it should be taking this long. I’ve been so happy with this host, and this is the first thing that’s gone wrong with them but it makes me look stupid and careless when my website is down.

One more hour and I’m going to consider setting up a temporary account on another host. My business site has to be up. And I need my email. Now.

Well, my beginning silversmithing class has ended. It was really fun and I do intend to take the next class when it’s offered again in about six weeks.

Chinese writing stone pendant

I burned myself on the last night (that figures) when I picked up this piece before I’d cooled it off in water. Not too badly, though, just enough to persuade me I didn’t want to do it again.

This pendant contains a Chinese Writing Stone - I’d never heard of this type of stone, but I chose it because the pattern looks like an open flower to me.

This is a pretty cool and interesting hobby. I was surprised to learn that you can really get started for about $200 and do all the things I did in class with the equipment you can purchase for that price - making basic rings and pendants with or without stones, and bracelets too.

When I started my web design business and was looking for a host, I first learned about reseller accounts. The host I’m with now has a great one, but not everyone may be familiar with what this entails…

What is a reseller hosting account? Generally, that means that you purchase web server space with a host, then you’re free to sell that space in whatever increments you choose and at the price you set. And typically you’ll have some kind of hosting control panel where you can set up hosting packages and prices and manage your hosting clients - up to the point of monitoring the bandwidth they’re using each month, and upgrading/downgrading or suspending if necessary.

For example, if I purchase a reseller account with 20 gb of space, I can sell 20 1gb accounts or 40 500 mb accounts and so on to my web design clients. I pay for the original account, but my clients all pay me for their accounts too. It definitely pays for itself very quickly, and the ability to oversee my clients’ hosting accounts all from one control panel is a big time saving benefit.

This is so much easier than just setting up a client with their own hosting account and of course keeps me in the loop when they need to upgrade and renew!

I’ve been an Amazon affiliate for awhile but hadn’t actually been using it. When I migrated this blog over to Wordpress last week, I went back to the affiliates site and build a few product links to show some of my favorite web/SEO/CSS books. That’s when I saw the Amazon aStores link and I had to check it out.

Wow - this is a really cool idea. You can create your own store using Amazon’s products (anything you want) and customize it to look the way you want, and then you get a referral fee based on the number or type of items purchased. I put about 30 books in my store and had the whole thing up and running on the blog within a half hour.

I don’t know if it might make any money for me, but it’s a great way for me to share all my favorite books in my web design library in any event. This is a really cool thing.

Have you other bloggers put an aStore on your site? Has it done anything for you if so?

I had an interesting issue come up with a client recently. The client had already chosen one of the mockups I’d given them for their new e-commerce site, and we were ready to meet to discuss minor changes before coding started.

The day before that meeting, they sent me a layout they’d drawn up and wanted to know if they could use that instead. I told them we should meet to talk about it and they agreed.

What they had come up with was something they really liked. They felt it suited them perfectly and I could respect that.We discussed the idea and our mutual feelings about it, and it became clear that they were really into this idea and definitely wanted to use it.

Awkward moment - I felt odd about it, being the contracted designer. And they recognized that; it was clear that this kind of just happened and was definitely not planned from the beginning, but it was what they wanted. They asked if I wanted to continue with the project given that.

I’m not a programmer and don’t really have any interest in taking someone else’s idea and building the backend for it - that removes all the fun from the work for me. My enjoyment comes from putting together a well-crafted site from beginning to end that reflects the personality of the client, respects the audience they want to attract and then functions without too many glitches to deliver the promised results to the customer.

Web design isn’t primarily about money for me - I love the front-end work, and if you take that away, then, well, it does become much more about money. I tried to explain this and that I would have to apply an additional fee to make up for the lack of exposure, since I wouldn’t be able to show this site in my portfolio or have my link at the bottom of it.

So they thought about it and decided to go elsewhere and seek someone who would just code their idea. I think that was the right decision, and certainly better for me. I would be bored out of my mind doing something like that, honestly.

So in this case I’m okay that it worked out this way - but I’m interested to know if other designers have encountered something like this, and how you dealt with it?

I love the commercials for Vytorin - you know, the ones that put people that look like food (or is it food that looks like people?) side by side to illustrate the genetic and food components of cholesterol?

I think that’s clever - at least on the surface. I have no idea whether this is a good drug or not or whether the message is effective, I just like the the clever juxtapositions. Some of them are beyond lame, but we just saw a new commercial last night that was great - the woman in the straw hat that resembled a hard shell taco was very nicely done.

At least they’re having fun with it. How many boring drug commercials have you seen?

Dumb me. I spent 15 minutes looking around online today for a way to do this and didn’t find much - a few macros that scared me and not much else.

In Excel (2003) there are three formulas that let you change the case of a piece of text - PROPER that capitalizes the first letter of every word; UPPER that capitalizes every letter; and LOWER that (surprise!) makes every letter lowercase.

Note that Microsoft helpfully did not include an option for sentence case in Excel 2003.

But they did include it in Word… hmmm. SENTENCE capitalizes only the first letter of every string. I had a whole column I needed to change, so I copied it to Word, applied sentence case text formatting to it, and copied it back to Excel.

I can’t believe I didn’t think of that first. Hopefully this will save someone else some time surfing for an answer.

Want to be able to drop images into your HTML with a minimum of effort? Set up two little classes in your CSS file to do just that.

1. Open your CSS file.

2. Add in a new class like so: img-left {float: left; padding: 8px 8px 8px 0;}

3. Add in another new class: img-right {float: right; padding: 8px 0 8px 8px;}

(Note: Change the padding as you see fit, this is just a suggestion!)

4. Within your markup, add in your image just in front of the text and then put a div with a class of “img-left” or “img-right” around it depending on whether you want your image to the left or right of your flowed text.

mountains at sunset

Here’s an example of this in action using “img-left.”