Web 2.0 vs. Web pages or Technology Frustration!

When we first started Learning 2.0 at work, I immediately loved it. This weekend it hit home just why I love it so much.

I used to design web pages in my spare time and really enjoyed it, but somehow I drifted away from it and haven't done more than make updates to the pages at work for several years. A few months ago, a friend found out that I know how to 'do web pages' and recruited me to update a site for him. All I had to do was go through and make corrections to the existing site. It was only 8 pages, so I said 'no problem, I can do that easily.'

Using Notepad, I made all the changes, added menus to all the subpages, so you didn't have to click back home to see the rest of the site, simplified some of the file names (40 character file names really aren't necessary for buttons, are they), saved all the changes to my flash drive and made arrangements to meet Ike in his office to upload the new pages.

That's when things started going wrong. They use FrontPage to ftp files to the server. Maybe I just don't know how to use FrontPage (I've never used it before then), but every time I tried to upload something, FP recreated the folder that I used to hold the files. When I finally did get a page to upload, none of the links worked, and all the images were gone. Yikes!

Since it took about 1 1/2 hours to get that far, I promised Ike that I would work on it over the weekend (I had all the software I needed at home) and would have a working page by Monday morning. Easier said than done. Remember I mentioned that I hadn't designed web pages in several years. Well Dreamweaver, Photoshop and WSFtp were all on a computer that hadn't been touched for a couple years. In fact it was in pieces.

I hauled cpu and all associated parts to the loft and proceeded to put it back together, started it up and sat back to see what happened. It sounded like it was dying, but it did start and actually worked. I opened all the software I needed and started creating. (Did I mention that I waited till the last minute to do this project? About 7:00 Sunday evening.) I redesigned a menu bar, resized a bunch of new photos to add to the page and proceeded to recreate each page from scratch, so I knew they would work when uploaded. That was the easy part. After the first page, I had the basic layout that I could cut and paste, and Dreamweaver had started feeling like an old friend. Life was good.

About midnight I finished saving all the pages and had them ready to upload. This is where it got fun again. This computer doesn't have a modem; it got fried years ago. It doesn't have a CD writer, only a reader. It does have a floppy drive, but I got rid of all my floppy disks when I moved and was glad to see them go. It does have a USB port, but it has Windows 98, so it wouldn't recognize my flash drive which didn't come with software. I grabbed my daughter's new mp3 player with the CD. No. It wouldn't work with Windows 98. Next step was the external zip drive I used to use; I found it and hooked it up, but it wouldn't work.

Now it was almost 12:30 and I was running out of options. I really needed to get those files to a computer that had internet access. My other daughter had just bought a really cheap mp3 player (I've never seen one for $18) and it had a software CD. Maybe it would work. I sneaked in her room to look for it. She immediately jumped up out of bed and demanded to know what I was doing in her room. She looked at her clock and said "It's 12:30, get out of my room and go to bed right now!" I took a chance on my life and asked her where her player and software were, since she was already wide awake.

She gave it to me, amazingly enough, and believe it or not it worked. I transferred the files and took them to the new computer, downloaded WSFtp home edition and had the site uploaded and working in a few minutes. If I had thought about it, I probably could have downloaded drivers for my flash drive, but I wasn't thinking clearly by this time.

Learning 2.0 is so simple. No downloading. No ftp. No special software. I love it!