The part of the story I hadn’t mentioned yet was that while this tragedy was unfolding, I was doing some web design work with Donovan and was forcibly learning CSS in the most basic of ways. I was also getting my sea legs back when it came to web programming and HTML. Remember, I knew just enough to be dangerous back in the day.

So I went home and began sketching the new Vossome.com. I had the foresight to name the first site “ver. 1.0” in the high hopes I would be doing exactly this in the distant, not immediate, future. I went straight into Wordpress, which was working fine for me, to see how to plug this baby into my own layout. Roadblock. Wordpress doesn’t work that way, or when it does, you need to pay for the privilege. Well I certainly wasn’t going to do that, so I walked right across the street to Blogger.com and set up my new shop.

At this point I definitely left the world of web-n00bz behind me, because the process of setting up the new site was, if not infinitely, then at least 100 times more complicated than the “register, choose template, blog” system of the last site. So here’s how it was done.

Sign up for your Blogger account and get your profile set up, all that standard first-day garbage you normally have to go through. Then, make sure you have a domain set up to keep you site on. I directed my new site to a testing area of my old, OLD site, and in the Dashboard, under Template, I selected a Classic Template (this is a must for creating your own site) and under Settings, in Publishing, I directed it to my testing area and told it to Publish via FTP. That sounds pretty easy when you say it like that, but it took me about a week of banging my head against a wall and frantic IM’s to Tom Nemitz and Donovan (my web support team, whether they know it or not) to figure it all out.

Then I designed my site using a combination of Photoshop and Dreamweaver (PS in the beginning, DW for the other 90%). Yes it’s essentially a great big table, but it’s a great big working table. When I was ready and had a fully-functioning webpage, I selected all of the source code (available in the Code View in DW) from Dreamweaver in pasted it directly into the HTML field on the Template section of my Blogger dashboard. This is the only way to get your site into Blogger. When you publish, Blogger will replace whatever index page you have on your site/test site with this HTML (took me a while to get that straight, too). Now that’s all well and good, but where’s my blog?

Blogger has “blogger tags” that work a lot like HTML tags in your code. This page tells you what they are and this page tells you what they do. Bookmark these pages because boy, I needed them about every two minutes. Unfortunately, I found the random and unrelated pages that describe how to use these tags to be almost completely unhelpful until I had spend a few days trying to hammer these into place. Remember, I know just enough to be dangerous, which is generally not enough to be useful. Eventually I plugged these things in where I wanted my content to go, and then I used my newly mastered basic CSS knowledge to style them.

This entire process, which included learning time and skill growth akin to Bruce Banner getting really, really pissed off, took me about three to three and a half weeks. The site went up onto the real webspace right before I left for Mexico for a week and my free trial of Dreamweaver (30 Days!) expired the next day.

Go check out the new an improved Vossome.com 2.0.

The header comes from ready-made code that can be found at A List Apart (love those guys) and randomly displays whatever I want it to. The content is blog posts on page one, as well as two additional webpages to fill out the site. These were created in DW and were not uploaded through blogger. I used CyberDuck, a free FTP software, to put those up, because DW was being fussy that day. The new site has downloadable PDF samples of my work and other fun stuff, though not all of it is online as of yet. This way I can always have a readily accessible portfolio for visitors as well as constantly update when new work comes in. When enough new work comes in, I can update my PDFs and roll right along.

There are a few downsides to this, however. Right at the end of this process, and I mean the day before I went live, I discovered the Blogger hates me for hosting on an FTP (meaning my own server). Sure they allow it, but they get all whiny about it. For one, the categories, in Blogger called “Labels” does not work. This is a documented problem that many, probably all users via FTP have faced and yet Blogger has remained silent on the issue, which is just dirty. DIRTY, Blogger! And then the deal-breaker: I cannot upload images via FTP through Blogger.

What’s that? You seriously can’t upload an image to FTP using Blogger? No. You cannot. And for that, Blogger can kiss my grits. For now I upload my images myself using the Cyberduck, but that completely defeats the purpose of a convenient content uploading experience. If I was going to update everything with my own FTP client and hard-core my image links myself, I wouldn’t really need to use a blog in the first place.

So obviously, this story is not finished. We have, however, caught up to the present day, and at current I have no more stories to tell. I have a few big projects in the way of me completing Vossome.com 2.5 or 3.0, but rest assured when I do have time, this is going to need to be sorted out.

Thank you for reading the Continuing Adventures of Nate Voss, Self-Employed Graphic Designer!