Day 6 - Building My Website... or Me Versus the Romulans

So who knew that Romulans developed the Internet? I know I didn’t. At least, I didn’t know that last week. But I know it now, this week, after spending several days messing with the website I’m going to use to promote my book.

You may have noticed that the URL for this blog you are reading includes “daultonbooks” in it, which reflects my primary URL, www.daultonbooks.com. Pretty cool, huh? Except that to get that fancy URL, or any URL, to turn into an actual website you have to travel to the Romulan home galaxy and deal with alien languages and technologies that are completely incomprehensible to a normal human being.

First off, apparently the Romulans are incapable of articulating human speech despite how they were depicted in the Star Trek television shows and movies. Apparently that was false advertising, because in reality it turns out Romulans can’t open their mouths wide enough to sound human words or something. And worse, clearly as a show of contempt for our species, they didn’t even try to use human language when they invented the Internet, so everything is named some impossible-to-make-sense-of Romulan term, like, for example the one I just used above, URL. I can see it now…

“Url,” snarled some Romulan engineer as he was mashing keys on the Internet-making console aboard the Romulan Bird of Prey warship. The Romulan commander heard him and frowned an alien frown. A towering figure of severe countenance and ice-cruel eyes, the furious officer strode over, his leather space armor creaking and the barrel of his laser reflecting the colors of the engineering peon’s monitor.  He glared down at the work his underling was making such a racket about snarled.

“Html,” he spat at the underling. “SWISH. DNS.”

The underling looked irritated and snapped back, “Ip, Ip,” thinking that would help, but the commander wasn’t buying it.  He drew his laser and, set to stun, shot the poor bastard in the face with a massive electrical charge. The engineer slumped to the floor, the sparks still flickering a web of static over him as he gasped, “TCP, IP,” which came out on a breath of smoke.

I’m assuming this is why I needed a static IP as part of getting my server hosted, which is what I found I should get as part of a much longer, more complicated, and too boring to write about journey towards getting my damn website going. I ran into Romulans everywhere, even some of my friends turned out be Romulans and I had no idea. Frankly it was quite a surprise when all I was really trying to do was get my URL from Go Daddy to Host Gator who has my DNS, so that then another Romulan fellow I know can do whatever those people do that makes it so that pretty pictures and multisyllabic words will show up whenever someone types in www.daultonbooks.com.

Uhh.. or something.

All I know is that if I were a computer designer, I would have made all this stuff way easier for regular people to use. They are lucky I'm not a programmer or I would make them all look bad.

Oh, and could we possibly have more stuff with weird addresses and mandatory format passwords on it? I can hardly remember my own damn phone number and these people have dashboard addresses that you can’t even find from their home page, which, when you do find them, you have to know the password that gets you into your own home dashboard which is different from theirs. How ironic that they name these things “home,” which is a place you CAN find, when in reality it is a web-place you probably won’t ever be able to find again if something happens to your browser bookmarks. Then, once inside, you have more passwords for the different parts of it: a password for the billing part of your account; one for the admin, and one for … whatever the part is that will eventually let me do stuff to my website. And of course they make it so those passwords have to be numeric. What could be easier for someone like me, AN ENGLISH MAJOR, than remembering long strands of numbers?

So, anyway, I have passwords for all this stuff, and at least for the moment, I remember them all. Not that it matters, because I can’t see anything. There’s nothing there. My page is blank. It’s not even blank. It’s just, not there. It’s not there because, once you have made your way through the complex Romulan security, it turns out that you have to do something with the DNS 1 and DNS 2 and, until whatever that is happens, you don’t actually have jack for a website even though you paid more than jack to both Go Daddy AND Host Gator. Oh, and the static IP costs extra, which, with a non-existent website, is kind of like getting shot in the face by a Romulan stun gun.

I am absolutely certain that the Romulans at Host Gator and Go Daddy are drinking really good tequila that they bought with my money and laughing about how I don’t have a website yet. They could probably flip some switch on their ship’s console and turn my website on, but why should they? It’s more fun to hover over my house with the cloaking device turned on so I can’t see them laughing at my rookie website ass.  “RARP FTP,” they laugh. “NNTP, MIME.”

Sigh.

Anyway, I really will have a website eventually. Go Daddy transfers the http-xyz-hyper-drive whatever blah blah on March 31, so, until then I get to sit here with my human words that have vowels in them and swear impatiently.