Ahhhhhh….Technology

I love technology when it works quickly and easily, but when it doesn’t……arghhhhhhh!!! My first website was naively built in MS Publisher. Too late I found out that only Internet Explorer could browse it. When I went to MS forums, I found others complaining about the same thing. Maybe it was in the small print somewhere……

So I rebuilt it using a template. I don’t have time to go learn code and I don’t have the $$ to pay someone. Of course the other pages are still out there. And one of them is high in certain search engine ratings….but it’s a bad page.

I casually mentioned this to a friend of mine at a quilt show, John Bruns of Quilters Warehouse. He’s a really nice guy and very proficient on the computer. He gave me instructions on how to do a 301 redirect. This redirect tells the browser the page moved and sends it to the new page; it’s like leaving a forwarding address! It is supposed to do it without losing your search engine rating. Sounds good huh?! (If anyone is not interested in reading about computer stuff, stop reading here! But some of you might need this information!)

So yesterday, I dutifully decided to look into this some more, noticing that bad page was still up there, not in first place anymore, but in second, which is still high. I went to the internet and diligently searched for all the information I could find on this 301 redirect. I have learned that you can find just about any answer to any question you have on the internet. Most of them said pretty much the same thing and there may be several different ways to do the same thing as there always is. The articles I found online talked about a file called the .htaccess file. Apparently, the browser checks out this file first to find out if there are any special instructions. I went to look at mine on my server. I found an error 404 in it, so I hit the link to my site…it wouldn’t come up…it had a 404 error in it. See how this works? I sure didn’t know how it got that error in there, but I deleted it, and then my site came up just like normal.

Anyway, all the stuff I read on the internet said I should download this .htaccess file to my computer, then put the the 301 redirect instructions in it and then upload it back to my files on the server. But I couldn’t find any way to download to my computer. Arrggghghh…..but wait….what’s this little pencil icon here by the file? Why…it’s an edit function! I can edit this file right on the server! It was so much simpler than anyone said! And guess what?…….now when you click on that link in the search…..it goes…..right to the new page, the one I want it to! I spent the whole morning on this and I gotta tell you, it’s so great to find the answer to a computer problem…now if I could just figure out how to get Outlook to pick up my mail from gmail…..ah, well, I’ve spent a whole day on that one and still don’t have it figured out! Sigh. I’m going back to dyeing and painting now…