!!blue’s blog

To quote the website:

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

—Tom Werner | Gravatar

It’s a concept that you wish you had thought of right? It’s gaining popularity since it works on many different weblogs. Plus, they are given a rating so you don’t get anything you don’t want showing up on your weblog: rating guidelines.

I love the concept of being able to “carry” your Gravatar with you!

My host sent their customers an email that included the following excerpt:

Due to the increase in SPAM complaints and AOL’s automated SPAM filter not being able to determine what is SPAM and what is a forward, effective Tuesday @ 5am EST TCH will no longer allow forwards from TCH accounts to AOL accounts.

—TotalChoice Hosting

In other words, our host offers automatic email forwarding from our website’s email to an AOL email. However, since that also forwards spam, AOL can’t determine what’s legit email and what’s spam and proceeds to mark everything as spam and blacklists my host’s servers. Which is not good.

In other news, my host now offers hosting services in a data center in the UK. Business is booming for my host, so here’s my link to them: TotalChoice Hosting. Yay!

The book I’m reading right now Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook is well on its way to being my favorite book (besides Gibson’s Neuromancer). It explains why coding with web standards is so important and explains what coding techniques to use over others. It’s absolutely the book to use when you finish learning HTML and CSS.
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We are having freakishly good weather today except for the fog. It’s gorgeous, it reminds me of walking to school when I was little and not being able to see down the block and thinking, ‘I’m walking in clouds.’ I cursed myself for forgetting my camera because while waiting for the el train, the train tracks disappeared into fog and it looked like the train was coming in from the clouds. It was moody and very vampire-movie-ish. I took advantage of the nice weather to wear my first skirt of the year! :tease: Of course, this weekend, we’re going to be hit with cold weather in the teens. Ouch!

I have been trying to add my links list into a database. I created it using MS Access and then had to convert to a SQL database because that’s what my hosts will accept. Well, I suffered because I didn’t know what I was doing. I had to export my DB as a CSV file then create a table on my server and import the data into the new table. :what?:

This was after I spent about an hour importing the table into my SQL server at work. That did a whole lotta nothing because I didn’t know why I even did that for in the first place! Now I hope to create a page that will connect to the new DB and create the links list page; plus a page where I can log in and edit rows in the table. Right. I’ll be needing A LOT of help on that.