Tech Support

I think I got the whole CSS/HTML crap down. Not down to a science yet, but I manage. (It's really ironic to say this, when just a few days ago I realized that my blog looks retarded in the Mozilla Firefox browsers -- something about the positioning of the background pic is off and NOBODY told me!) So I'm always looking into moving onto bigger and better things. As y'all know, my budget is skin-tight (I have a problem finding loose change to get my own hosting, but absolutely no problem forking over my credit card number to Netflix for DVD's.) and I'm moving onto bigger and better things, but at an extremely slow, retarded pace.

When I say bigger and better things, I'm talking about something that will allow me to expand my horizon, in the area of the World Wide Web. I am sorta kinda like the webmaster for my work's website, but I didn't make the pages and I just do minimal alterations to the content. I am not quite grasping the concepts of .php and .asp and all those good stuff. I was looking into using MovableType for my blog, but realized that it's A) too difficult, and B) I think it costs something! Yikes. I recently went to WordPress to see if that's something I'd be able to use, since I'm seeing more and more bloggers using WordPress.

With my limited knowledge of the web page making field, I have understood that I will need some sort of host (as though I were a parasite!). And there's some requirements to that, like perl, MySQL (which I keep pronouncing it as "My SQUEAL" because honestly, SQL just looks more like SQUEAL than SEQUEL -- I believe it is supposed to be read as "My Sequel" which doesn't even make sense -- is there a "My Prequel" then? But that's just me, I guess) php and etc.

Rome wasn't built in a day. I know my knowledge of those acronyms will expand, slowly but surely, and I don't expect myself to be endowed with a sudden enlightenment overnight. I know there will be hard work and a whole lotta studying involved. In my recent trip to BN, I looked for html/perl/php/asp/css/photoshop/illustrator related books, but there were just so many. And how do I know where to begin? Can I jump into reading about perl without knowing what MySQL is? Or vice versa? If anyone can recommend a way to go about learning this business, I'd be extremely thankful.

My brother has agreed to get me a scanner for my birthday present. I know my birthday was more than 45 days ago, but leave it to little brothers to be fashionably late with gifts! Well, since he has agreed to get me one, I won't have to dig into my purse for that. But with this scanner, I will need to learn some kind of photoshop-like program that will help me work. I really would like to get to know photoshop. I was dumb. I thought it was free, like the Adobe acrobat reader. Photoshop is expensive. It's so expensive, it makes me rather pensive about it. Perhaps all this is just too expensive of a hobby.

Knowing computer programs, by the time I'm done learning the ropes of photoshop, a new version will have been released, and they probably won't give me a free upgrade, because I'm just unlucky like that. If anyone can send me a copy of Photoshop or Illustrator, I'll give you a lil' sumpin' sumpin' in return. A handwritten thank you card.

I had actually downloaded some sort of trial version of the damned program. It's hard. It's weird. It's NOT user-friendly. But I hear it is capable of doing some magnificent things. I likee magnificent.

Well, so far, all I've done is renewing my Villagephotos.com subscription for the miniscule amount of space to store my photos (ripway service is free, but really cheap, so photos frequently look like lil' boxes with a red "X" in them. As I have said, this whole process will be a continuous one. It will take a while, a long while to learn all of it, and as the web continues to grow, I will always have to update my knowledge. I suppose the first big steps are the most difficult. I just don't know where to start. Somebody help me!