“The RoseBouquet”

So have you got a website or two, or more? Have you ever had to go through every page to fix something in somewhat of a hurry? That’s what I’ve been doing in the past week, sacrificing most of my normal agenda too.

I have a hosting package with HostGator, one of the largest hosting companies, and with a good reputation for support services. They host about 1,300,000 websites, so they sort of have the routine down pat. My package is such that I can host all the sites I want for one price, and offer to rent out space to other clients. I even host some Christian ministry sites for free as my gift to them. Right now I have four of my own there, and I host 17 others, 11 of which I personally look after. (There’s room for more, if you are interested).

Well, HostGator has been upgrading all their servers, and last week Sunday and Monday they were up to the one all these sites are on. Normally, things should go smoothly, but they do warn to let them know if our sites disappear or have some other hiccup happen to them as a result of the mass upgrade. I discovered that all these sites were present - at least the ones I have worked on personally, but the includes files had some problem so they didn’t show up the header, the navigation links, or footers, depending on where I had used includes. I contacted support and discovered by late Tuesday evening that I now had to remove a single character space gap in the line that calls for the includes file to show up. It came right after the # sign and before the word ‘includes.’

Well, not that hard to fix, but some of these sites had from 3 to 5 or 6 of those lines on each page. Some sites have 100s of pages. I got a bit melodramatic and exclaimed that it would take me the rest of my life! And with whose should I begin?

However, I tackled this big job on Wednesday morning, and by the time I was called to come join the Christmas party downstairs, I had already fixed three smaller ministry/client sites, plus started on the much larger WTM site. After a prayer for help I found that I could speed up this process in several ways.

My HTML editor program has a Find and Replace feature and it could remember the thing to find. I entered the start of those includes lines, then how it should be done without the gap and in just a couple of clicks could take care of ALL appearances of those characters on a page instantly. Then I found that by keeping the left Ctrl button down when selecting files to open, I could open a whole long row of pages at once. Before long I had a smooth, fast rhythm going; Hit Ctrl+R to do Find/Replace, hit Ctrl+S to save the file, and hit the close button. The next page would be open before me, so I repeated the process. When I had done a whole batch of pages, sometimes a small site completely, then I switched to my Konqueror program, and highlighted all those pages, and uploaded them by ftp as a batch. Presto, done!

Incidentally, two friends do their own web design so I wrote and asked them to fix their own sites.

I spent the rest of Wednesday and Thursday and Friday doing this, and though I didn’t get to it on Sunday, by Monday morning I had only my large Ruthes-SecretRoses.com site and two smaller sites that get the least visits left to do. I got about 432 pages done on my big one yesterday at home. I hope to finish the articles in the Sharing Library today. Then I’ll get to the last two sometime this week yet.

Wow! I’m impressed too! Actually, yesterday I kept spotting a few other corrections to make in the RSR site, so I did more than the speedy routine above.