Understanding the World Wide Web

Life With Kermie

1 May

Life with Kermie

So. You’ve got a truck or two. You’ve got a small business. You need a website to tell the world how wonderful you are. But you have no idea how to go about it. Keep reading because I’m about to give you the simple man’s guide to setting up your very own website page. As you well know, I have set up Truckin With Kermie not only to entertain but with the eventual hope of staving off destitution in these, our older years. I just haven’t worked out quite how as yet.

To set up a business – any business these days, you have to have:

1: A good idea.

2: Social Interaction – this is telling all your friends on Face Book, in the hope that they will tell all their friends that you don’t know, just what a wonderful Website/Face Book page you have.

3: A website and a Face Book page that feeds off it - as FB is where most go to these days.

I’m pretty sure you need lots of other things on the road to success but these are where we started. Numbers 1 and 2 were a relative doddle but number 3?

Our Steve is in the IT field which is good. The bad is that he’s in London and we usually have an hour’s window of opportunity to converse on what is needed and what I have to do to make his job easier.

Now I know that an ISP is an Internet Service Provider and I’ve had one of those for years, to whom we’ve being paying $36 a month for a website we’ve never had.

I know that http stands for something, something, something protocol, but then Steve tells me that I need one with an ‘S’ on the end or we won’t be able to have a Pay Pal payment system on the site. As we’re hoping to sell a few caps and T-shirts down the line we definitely need one of those S’s. A conversation with our ISP sorts that out and I’m starting to feel like an 8 year old, in that I reckon I’m almost as smart with computers as they are. NOT!

Things progressed along nicely until Steve started talking about things like URL’s, Drupal, GIT which I can apparently get via SSH which will allow him to clone suppositories – and on it goes.

So after much swearing and brain explosions we got our site sorted. I did have to send Steve a list of 21 spelling mistakes that I needed him to fix (HA! Something I’m better at than he is!) Now Truckin With Kermie is nine months old and travelling along pretty smoothly on the website front.

From a nervous gibbering mess putting up stories while Rita took me step by step through the ‘Bloggers Bible’ that Steve wrote up for us, I can now confidently post stuff in about one quarter of the time.

Through this whole exercise I’ve learnt more than I ever dreamed possible about the world of computers and computing. In case you are stupid enough to try and do your own site here is a glossary of terms and their meaning. Learn these and you too can be as savvy as me.

ISP – Internet Sucks Proper.

Drupel – what happens after a long night studying the workings of the internet and drinking a bottle of scotch while you’re doing it.

URL – a new game combining Rugby Union and Rugby League.

Non-cached Pages – This is the opposite of ‘cached pages’, which in turn is the opposite of ‘non-cached’. You get it don’t you? I certainly do!

HTML – It’s been a long day, let’s go out for a HoTel MeaL.

GIT Supported – An English footy club. We all know they are supported by GITS.

SSH – Doubly as bad as the usual ‘Shit House’

SQL – short for squealing like a stuck pig because nothing works.

CS - Cloning Suppositories – Don’t care how necessary this is, I aint doing it!

WAM – Wam is older than me so disregard this outdated technology.

PoP3 – presumably the number of hits Wam had. Also disregard.

“Your Pro Trial has expired.” – Rita will be pleased.

“Credit Card Failed” – Now that was easy to understand.

While this has taken a bit of time, we are very grateful to our Steve who burnt the midday oil (midnight his time) getting the site up and running. He has saved us a lot of money which has avoided a repetition of the ‘Credit Card Failed’ bit.

For someone who has trouble filling in an application for a dental appointment, much less a Driver’s Log, I reckon I played my part pretty well.

Well, OK at least.

All right, I was bloody useless and couldn’t have done it without Steve. Without his help I’d still be learning how to log into Squarespace – much less use it to develop a Web and FB page.

On second thought, as you lot are always on the road, filling in log books and trying to make ends meet, it may be wiser to leave the website set-up to your other halves. After all, it is more than likely they do your books meaning they understand numbers and computer technology is definitely a numbers game.

Whatever way you decide to go, you are going to need one - or more - of these to help you along.

CHEERS!