I'm not a technogeek.  I know enough to get the job done, or at least figure it out eventually.  Most of what I know I've picked up over the years.  Very little of it comes from any classes or formal education for computers.  Don't misunderstand - I have taken classes on computers and programming.  It's just that everything I learned was obsolete almost immediately.  I learned my formal knowledge at the dawn (or at least early morning) of the internet.  From then on I've been learning as I go.

This section of the site is going to be devoted to any tech questions, situations, or solutions that seem appropriate.

First of all, for anyone who wonders and hasn't guessed yet, this site is powered by Movable Type.  I've been using MT for only a little while now, and it's been an extreme love/hate relationship.  For the most part love, with a tiny little bit of frustration now and then.

Most of the frustration comes from being new to MT and discovering little quirks here and there, and dealing with the lack of any formal guides to MT.  There are plenty of forums and snippets of info here and there, but I haven't found anything yet that does a nice job of holding your hand and showing how to get a site up and going from start to finish.

The love for MT comes from not having to code pages by hand.  I originally learned how to make a webpage with the old Netscape Navigator.  It was a version of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).  I didn't understand any of the actual HTML code at that time, and didn't want to understand it.  Later on I learned HTML a little bit at a time, and pretty soon notepad was my favorite webpage editor.  Yes, notepad.  The simplest of the simple text editors.  I didn't even know about CSS at that point and did everything with tables.

Next came CSS.  At first that was also a frustration, but I quickly came to appreciate just how much better and easier CSS can be.  That and a few books on the subject helped tremendously.

All along the way I was learning about FTP and dealing with webhosts.  From the sounds of it, I've been pretty lucky to have a good webhost and haven't run into many problems yet.  It doesn't take much looking to find some real horror stories out there about bad webhosts.

After all this, just recently I came across MT and decided to give it a shot.  Wow.  Talk about much easier than coding by hand.  However, if I hadn't learned to code by hand, MTs whole template/widget deal would have been an extreme frustration.  As it is, I think the template and widget system they use is very, very nice.  With a little knowledge and some experimenting it is very cool and easy to use.

Alright, enough on the background.  Have a question on something you see here on our site?  Want to know how something is done, or how I fixed certain problems?  Leave a comment and I'll (try to) leave an answer.

Here's one little example of something that came up with MT and was eventually solved: MT doesn't like ".gif" images.  I didn't figure this out for awhile.  The first I knew of this was when I could no longer go to the 'manage-assets' portion of the MT dashboard.  It was working fine the day before, then stopped working.  I kept receiving an Internal Server Error 500, and the error log said Premature End of Script Headers.  I didn't know what that all meant.  After much frustrated searching through various MT sites, I finally found the answer on a forum... and then promptly lost the link to it.  The answer is simply don't use .gif images with MT.  They seem to cause some kind of hiccup between MT and image::magick.  If that doesn't make sense and you need more info, feel free to leave a comment.

That was just a small example of one of the typical problems that crop up when trying to put a website together.  If you have any questions or examples of your own, leave a comment.  General computer questions are also welcomed.  I know that my family and friends are always coming up with new and interesting dilemmas with their computers.