Since I plan to officially launch WebFeats on June 15, this Setup Diary will soon come to a close <sniff!>. But don't panic! For archival purposes, I'll continue to maintain a link to this historic (?) document from the WebFeats home page.
I was hoping to hear from FirstNet yesterday; what I was hoping to hear was that my merchant account (for credit card processing) had been approved. Well, I did hear from FirstNet yesterday. But what they told me was that they were unable to contact anyone from my bank to confirm the existence (and extent) of my account. (Thanks, Bank of America! Not only would you not give me a merchant account because I don't have a storefront, your lack of cooperation has delayed my setting up a merchant account somewhere else!) So I drove down to my bank and made them call FirstNet and give them the information. What a pain. FirstNet says that I should now hear from them in a day or two. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
I went to the printer yesterday to get some sales literature made up. I gave them the text that I wanted and a rough layout; I hope they can work some magic and make it look good. One problem is that my Application for Personal Web Space says that personal accounts must be charged to a credit card -- and, as you know, I haven't actually been approved to process credit cards yet. If that approval doesn't come through, I'll have to do some quick rethinking (and, possibly, reprinting).
Some graphic artists I know have designed a logo and some buttons for my website. Unfortunately, they have no Web experience, and that may turn out to be more of a problem than I thought. They have no idea, for example, how to do transparent or interlaced GIF's; since they've created only print graphics, that hasn't been an issue for them. And I don't have the time or the inclination to figure out how to take a Corel graphic and make it look good on the Web. I've contacted a couple of artists with some Web experience (there aren't many of them around, believe me) to see if they can take these graphics and Webify them by next week. If you see some decent looking graphics in this space on June 15, you'll know that it worked.
I've had my ISDN line -- the one that cost more than $600 to install -- for about six weeks. Yesterday, it went south. I assumed that my ISP had messed up. Wrong. It was the phone company -- they actually admitted to finding that they had some bad equipment at the central office. It took maybe 4-5 hours for them to fix it. I try to imagine what it would have been like if I had hundreds of clients depending on that ISDN line to keep their Web pages in front of their prospects -- no, I'll think about that tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day.
The Interface Kit to make my UPS talk to NT arrived today. It consisted of an RS-232 cable. For $45. (I'm in the wrong business.) I hooked it up and unplugged the UPS (simulating a power outage) to see what it would do. It really was kinda cool. The UPS -- which is rated for 17 minutes -- lasted for more than half an hour, powering my server, monitor, router, and hub. Pretty impressive. Then, it signaled NT that it was running out of juice, and NT shut itself down, no questions asked. I plugged the UPS back in; everything came to life, just like it was supposed to. I like it!
I finally found a good book about how to do what I'm doing. It's called "Running a Perfect Web Site"; it was written by David M. Chandler. Very thorough; very easy to read. As Joe Bob says: Check it out.
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