I met Mac when he was hired on as a fellow Tech at MacWarehouse (long since swalloweded up by CDW) He's a great guy, real easygoing and very knowledgeable. He already had a similar setup (now no longer in operation) at e-mac.com as I was putting together ('cept the rat bastard had a [much faster at the time] G3!) so I hollered at him asking for assistance with getting MacDNS up and running.

Mac called me 3 nights in a row. He checked in on my progress, he offered his help and even sent me documentation and spent some time on the phone (long distance!) walking me thru setting up MacDNS. Even though I ended up not using MacDNS (see below) Mac was of great help and went out of his way to assist me with this. Thanx Mac!

In order to have a domain, (at the time) it was not enough that you register it and pay them your money you then have to find a way to tell the internet where your web server is. At the time you could not do it from a web-based form on your registrar's site.

When you have internet access from your local cable company, then as now, you can't change the DNS name they give your cable modem (hell most people don't even know it even has a URL. But you can add your own. So I needed to get my IP Address and domain name out there. Unfortunately nothing I tried worked. The handy web form front end to change your DNS records was still years away from being generally available to any Steve, Dick and Harry who wanted a website.

Enter Mr. Ruffin. Joel hired me at Sarnoff. He managed the enterprise infrastructure for the company. Joel was a busy man. Very busy. But he took some time to assist me with getting the DNS records set-up correctly. A true sweetheart of a guy.

But all the work I had done was for nought. The damn web site still wouldn't resolve! So I sent out a plea for help on a mailing list. Brian answered with a couple of pointed comments about MacDNS and that he could get me up and running. All for the low low price of just 30 bucks (a year). At this point I had been banging away at this for a week with no success and was at my wits end trying to figure out what I had done wrong. I decided that $30 a year was reasonable and took Brian up on his offer.

Brian was patient, understanding and quite friendly. So if you need hosting services, from simple DNS info to a full blown commercial web site, Brian is your man at MacServe.Net. In fact my brother hosts his business' website with Brian's company. Thanx Brian!

Believe it or not I met Lynne thru an online dating service. There was never a romantic click between us but we are a couple of true blue Mac computer geeks and have remained friends. She used to do some really outstanding web design. That evolved into her own web based business and she is now no longer slinging HTML for hire. At the time she was kind enough to critique me from time to time. Nothing like learning from the best!

I work(ed) with these guys at Sarnoff Corporation and when I was having difficulty wrapping my mind around a cool JavaScript navigation bar they came to the rescue with some some assistance. I don't use them any more having found some CSS menus that work quite a bit more easily. But CSS didn't exist then. Thanx guys!

I spend too much time surfing the web. What computer geek doesn't? At least I admit it. I spend a lot of time on Slashdot and Digg. they're a kind of news/discussion web site, boy do they discuss. A lot of discussion centers about various websites and how these sites aren't "web standards compliant." That and flaming Apple, Microsoft, AOL or whatever today's whipping boy is. What can I say, geeks like to kvetch.

It's February 2006 and my move to Austin has been great. The job search has been a bit slow. I have some time on my hands. So I get the urge to try my hand at a 100% CSS front page. No tables, no blockquotes, just pure unadulterated XHTML joy!. But I'm having a hell of a time wrapping my mind around CSS and How It All Works. Then one day Digg has a story that linked to a guy with a web site that had a nice beginners tutorial on CSS page layout. It was perfect. Also now out of date and gone. I knew a little about CSS and this filled in the cracks. In a simple clear and straightforward manner. Check out his website at www.subcide.com.

So thanks go out to Steve Dennis at Subcide Design. I guy I don't know from halfway around the world. We've never met and corresponded only briefly when I wrote him a thank you note. So if you live in New Zealand and need a web designer he seems to know his shit. Cheers mate!

It's been a while since I got the urge to set up a blogging engine on my own webserver. I am not going to go into all that again. But a brief mention of where I got started seems like the right thing to do and I just realized that maybe it ought to be on the "Thank You" page (too), duh!

I spent all of 15 minutes deciding on using Wordpress and Googled around and found a really amazing tutorial on installing Wordpress over at MacZealots. Helpful, well written and just what I needed. Thanks guys (and now gone...).

Of course Wordpress requires a database back end. What I know about databases can be summed up in five words "CD Collection in Filemaker Pro." fortunately the guys over at Hivelogic.com have a great tutorial on installing MySQL. It's a part of installing a bunch of other stuff that I don't need but the MySQL part was perfect. And from the looks of things this tutorial has been updated for new versions of Mac O/S and of the applications therein. A vaulable site and a great resource, check it out sometime.

The page design I did almost four years ago was starting to wear a little thin with me. I had tweaked it a little from time to time but I was tired of the logo and the whole design. So I went looking and finally found an approchable design that my meagre coding skills could handle

Roger had a tutorial on how he built the navigation bar for his web site. I found it after a bit of Googling for a CSS navigation menu. His instructions and code are really pretty good. You should check it out.

I have been hosting this site on an old Mac since I had my own domain sometime in the late 90's. Back when MacWeb was an acceptable hosting platform and all the content was static HTML pages hosting a web site was a pretty simple thing to do. As technology advances you can do more with what you have, which takes even more time and effort. Keeping the web server and it's various parts (Wordpress and it's plugins, PHP, MySQL and the O/S) updated turned into a hassle and became practically impossible.

I do IT for a living. I spend my day fiddling with the annoying idiosyncrasies of Windows 7 and server versions from 2003 through 2012. When I get home the last thing I want to do is the same thing with a Mac web server that can't take the latest (fully patched and "secure') version of Mac O/S and the underlying components (Wordpress, PHP, MySQL) that I really dont grok. So after a few years of hoping I never got hacked and seeing how well Hostgator did with my wife's business website, I paid the extra few bucks a year to add another website to my plan and moved stevec.us over to the cloud. If you are looking for a good web host with good support and excellent uptime you would be hard pressed to better than Hostgator.com.