Pulling away from Google Apps

Well I found that coming back to using Open Source and self made pages to be a bit more time consuming than I originally thought. I expected to be able to just throw up the existing pages and release the Google Apps version. My way of dealing with it did leave the main site at www.BeyondOneWorld.com without pages for a few days, something that if it weren't for the obscurity of the site in the first place I would never have let happen. Having a site in obscurity however does give you a comfortable degree of freedom. I wonder what percentage of the web actually exists in this special place, pages that never get seen, never making any difference other than occupying some search engine link that never gets clicked. Obscurity I am sure is a very crowded place, but of course we never see each other by definition.

I haven't been doing anything on the web for a long time and that was another cause for delay. I thought I would try out Dreamweaver again and see what it could do, the latest is at CS4. I realised that my old ways of knocking out TABLES on a page are now a very old habit and I must really learn more about using DIVs and CSS. So there was the first delay. Of course I had already pulled the domain away from Google Apps at the time and now it was pointing at my empty directory on the Dreamhost server. Inspired by the ease of setting up layouts and reminded of the relative complexity of some of the CSS rules for floats the pages came together very quickly and although full of dubious content actually needed to be made visually presentable. Ahem.. Well, OK, I found a wonderful image of the Earth that was freely available, picked out the best angle and rotated it and put it up onto the main site, not yet visually appealing but it will do for now, I hope. I'll get back into presentation of it later.

Back with Dreamweaver, I found it great to use but had an absolutely dreadful time setting up FTP, a few days have been spent trying to sort this out and I have finally given up with it. Somehow, it was getting absolutely confused as to what was my testing server and what was my remote, in addition to the fact it kept hanging on any transfer that was more than a few pages. I think that it had issues with PASV, ensuring that all transfer were in FTP passive mode, but without finding solution I think I have given up with it. I'll go back to doing it manually.
Now with the - I admit it, visually dreadful - pages up on the site linking in all the bits I selected I find that the work is just beginning. All of the Open Source applications now need to work together. An interesting puzzle to work through. Hopefully I can figure it all out.

My next step now is to pull away from Blogger and use Wordpress instead for my own Blog, the pages where this waffling commentary actually lives. This post will be the last one I guess on this service at blogspot.com, so I have the task of pulling all the posts into the new blog that will/should appear at http://blog.beyondoneworld.com/.

Here we go then...