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I used to like computers, I remember liking computers, now I just want to give up on the whole thing
Argh. All I ever post here any more is whiny complaints about how the world doesn't work the way I want it to. This is pretty much the state of my life the past few years, so I guess that's not that surprising. So anyway, me whining. Again. Dammit.
I'm trying to set up a new, professional domain for my math tutoring and petsitting businesses (which I should probably post about here at some point). I figure that a nice feature for the pet business would be if I kept a daily, password-protected blog for each overnight client so they could check on their pets while on vacation. Because I want to get this set up soon and don't want to spend a lot of time learning about various blog/CMS choices I was going to do this with Moodle, which is kind of like killing a spider with a 30-volume encyclopedia set. (Plus, I could then set up practice quizzes and such for my tutoring clients, and easily re-purpose the whole thing if I got a teaching job, as Moodle is a great platform for things like online math homework assignments.) However, the host that's my current first-choice (for reasons mostly having to do with a good customer service track record) will only support up through Moodle 1.9 on their cheap hosting, and the more expensive hosting needed to run Moodle 2.x is a big enough cost differential that it doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense to spend that much more when what I actually need right now is, in fact, less than 100 password-protected blogs rather than a full-fledged learning management system. (Moodle 1.9 will lose even security-fix support next summer, so I'm not going go with that.) Of course, I don't know anything about the various blog-hosting systems. Wordpress is what everyone seems to use for blogging, but doesn't seem to offer much in the way of intrinsic privacy levels, so it looks like I'd have to spend a lot of time messing around with plugins. There are a lot of other blogging/CMS systems out there, but I have no idea where to even start researching which don't suck.
Am now tempted just to make html pages in emacs rather than use a blogging platform and assign each client their own password-protected folder on my domain. I already know how to do that, and it just sounds way easier. I'm pretty sure that's the Wrong Way To Do It, though. I keep wanting the 90s back, which is not the way to make websites not suck.
I wish I were wealthy enough to just hire someone to deal with all of this crap for me, but if I had that kind of money I wouldn't be petsitting in the first place. Computer stuff just changes too fast for me to ever understand what the hell is going on anymore, and I'm just so tired of trying to even find the right way to frame my questions.
I'm trying to set up a new, professional domain for my math tutoring and petsitting businesses (which I should probably post about here at some point). I figure that a nice feature for the pet business would be if I kept a daily, password-protected blog for each overnight client so they could check on their pets while on vacation. Because I want to get this set up soon and don't want to spend a lot of time learning about various blog/CMS choices I was going to do this with Moodle, which is kind of like killing a spider with a 30-volume encyclopedia set. (Plus, I could then set up practice quizzes and such for my tutoring clients, and easily re-purpose the whole thing if I got a teaching job, as Moodle is a great platform for things like online math homework assignments.) However, the host that's my current first-choice (for reasons mostly having to do with a good customer service track record) will only support up through Moodle 1.9 on their cheap hosting, and the more expensive hosting needed to run Moodle 2.x is a big enough cost differential that it doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense to spend that much more when what I actually need right now is, in fact, less than 100 password-protected blogs rather than a full-fledged learning management system. (Moodle 1.9 will lose even security-fix support next summer, so I'm not going go with that.) Of course, I don't know anything about the various blog-hosting systems. Wordpress is what everyone seems to use for blogging, but doesn't seem to offer much in the way of intrinsic privacy levels, so it looks like I'd have to spend a lot of time messing around with plugins. There are a lot of other blogging/CMS systems out there, but I have no idea where to even start researching which don't suck.
Am now tempted just to make html pages in emacs rather than use a blogging platform and assign each client their own password-protected folder on my domain. I already know how to do that, and it just sounds way easier. I'm pretty sure that's the Wrong Way To Do It, though. I keep wanting the 90s back, which is not the way to make websites not suck.
I wish I were wealthy enough to just hire someone to deal with all of this crap for me, but if I had that kind of money I wouldn't be petsitting in the first place. Computer stuff just changes too fast for me to ever understand what the hell is going on anymore, and I'm just so tired of trying to even find the right way to frame my questions.
no subject
There is probably some other kind of thing that I actually want - a Customer Management System or something.
At a guess, that sounds like a "customer relationship management" (CRM) system, particularly one that has customer service and support features. I found this list of CRM systems (in Wikipedia :-), but that list seems to only include one or two with a customer-service orientation, and only a few of them will run under the Free BSD OS (as "cross-platform"). From what (little) I know of them, there should be at least one or two that support this kind of configuring, though you may want to encourage the customer to fill out the form rather than attaching a file. [Natural-language parsing, even for limited subject "domains" as house-sitting and pet-sitting, is still *hard* for a computer to do; the form also may implicitly detect or prevent omission (or, perhaps, over-specification) of the information. In a different subject domain, I am reminded of the house seller who specified a house siding of "CBS", to the total bewilderment of would-be buyers. It turned out he meant "concrete-brick-stucco," but I'd bet most people were baffled what a building siding and a TV network had in common.]
Given that I need to keep looking for work, I probably won't be able to help much beyond this, but I'm perfectly happy to send you some more details for free if need be. [I have been out of the computing biz for years, and miss it badly.]
It's after 2:30 PDT [5:30am local], so I should be fading out here ... :-/
no subject
I think I'm just going to set up a static site for now because I can see that I have to give Actual Thought to what kind of dynamic web stuff would make sense and I just don't have the time right now. My competitors don't generally have very elaborate web presences, so it shouldn't cost me much business if mine's pretty basic. I just need something to put on the damn business cards so I can start putting them up on local bulletin boards and such. One of my competitors says she gets most of her new business through newspaper ads, even, so I may go that route.