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.

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.

This information was gleaned from a number of websites and my own trials in getting this to work, but I thought it would be useful to have it in one place for other HomeSite users who may not be overly familiar with server configuration.

Why map servers? The reason I do it is because it enables me to browse and view PHP includes live right on my local machine. You can see the results of server side includes without having to post the site online, a big timesaver.

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This is a post I made in an old blog over a year ago, but that blog no longer exists and I had to go hunting for this information again today. So here it is.

October 19th, 2005

I have been through hell trying to figure out how to permanently delete the annoying little PDFMaker toolbar that Acrobat 7.0 installs in Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. This toolbar cannot be turned off by any ordinary means. It pops up in different places in the application, sometimes making a two-tiered toolbar set into a three-tiered one. It’s in the way, it serves no purpose when all one has to do is print to PDF anyway.

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We have a 2-3 year old Dell Dimension XP2400 that I’m bringing into my office to use in lieu of the laptop. It’s in good shape overall, but has a ridiculous little 30gB hard drive.

We had a spare 80gB drive in the basement so that worked out perfectly. But the mounting bracket that came with this cramped case only holds one drive, and it has a weird shape. We went scrounging in the server room at my husband’s office looking for other cages and found two, but neither remotely fit.

I did find a few online, but decided to go with the bracket kit from Issue Resolved. Even though it was a bit more expensive than the bracket alone, they were super-speedy (it got here in three days) and included every part I needed - ribbon, screws etc. I’d use them again.

Now we’re formatting the HD after some confusion about how to do this on Windows XP Pro… Seems to be proceeding normally. I can’t wait to plug in the flat panel monitor.

I use Google Analytics on my retail site and have been since about the end of September. This morning I noticed that the home page was verrrry slow to load (about 5-6 seconds on a cable modem), so I contacted Hostgator.

They checked it out and found that the server was not being flaky, but they noticed that they could see the Javascript call to the Analytics site in the status bar. I couldn’t see that myself, but I went online and found that there are a lot of comments about Analytics slowing down websites. Many of them seem to be because people put the Javascript code in the header rather than at the bottom of the page, but mine was already at the bottom, so that wasn’t it.
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More than one of my clients have remarked on how many icons I have on my desktop… this morning I went looking for a utility to save that icon layout (it would take me forever to redo it if anything ever happened to it) and found one in PC Magazine’s utilities archive from PC911.

Download and save the two files to /Windows/System32/ and double-click on layout.reg. Now when you right-click on any of the ’standard’ desktop icons (like Recycle Bin), you’ll get the option to save or restore the desktop icon layout.

I hope I remember this the next time my desktop gets screwed up…

I use both pMachine Pro and Wordpress for blogging. pMachine Pro is a really handy little program; basically you just put PHP includes in your existing site to use it.

But it’s kind of twitchy sometimes. Occasionally it will refuse my password and I’ll have to change it. Here is the process I use to do that - kind of simplistic, but this is applicable to any simple login process when trying to recover a password.
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