Work and Play

Monday, 1 March 2010

HTML Schnotml




They tell you it's straightforward. A monkey could do it. "Follow these simple instructions and you're done."

Yeah, right. To  my utter annoyance, the apparently simple act of installing a website program and getting the dratted thing to work has become the stuff of nightmares. I'm not particularly thick or anything, I just don't "get" code. Those WYSIWYG efforts that go with some of the sitebuilder programs such as Joomla simply don't do what you want, and you're pretty much stuck with the layout they give you if you don't know CSS.

Well I went on those online generator sites in the hope of taking a shortcut, but it seems that they don't work unless used in conjunction with other programs. Even then, you need a paid account on a site that promises to give you all that stuff for free. When you go for support, you are told you're ungrateful because it's all free. What's free? I wouldn't be looking for support if I was grateful, and it's hard to be grateful for something that doesn't work.

I had a go at efiction. It's a great and groovy program when you can get it to work. When you can't, it's the little things that drive you nuts. I get annoyed with the assertion that it's easy to change the site skins, but I don't like the ones they have, and making the ones I want appears to require a PHD in computer programming or something. Apart from which, the functionality I wanted isn't there - trying to upload a story from my PC to the site is a passport to disaster. Yet on Fanfic 4 All it works perfectly. Why does it work for them and not for me? I've had a whinge on the efiction forums, but haven't had a response yet.

Well there's a PHP fanfiction program that I'm muddling through with on another site (this is all being done on free website hosts where they have PHP and MySQL), and it seems to be okay except that it looks butt ugly. When it looks the way I want it to, I'll post links to it on my e-spaces and announce it with fanfare.

I'll let you know how it goes, but ATM it's making me tear my hair out.

Just sayin'.

No comments:

Post a Comment

So what do you think? Tell me here!