Monday, November 22, 2004
“Yes, you are the only one who understands this stuff … ”
“There is … broken image,” she said. Granted, English is not her first language.
“I'm not seeing any broken images,” I said. Not only did we move her
site to a new server, but it has a new domain name. Lots of breakage
because of this insipid control panel software we're using to administer the
servers and you have to do things its way. Yes, you can
kind-of work around it at the command line (as I have) but admitting that
(shhh) breaks the warentee on using the control panel and of course things
like database names are based off the domain name. Lot's of breakage today,
but the database issue was resolved earlier, and that's not the current
problem. The current problem is a still broken image. The previous broken
images were due to permissions problems (which is odd, given that
rsync preserves permissions, at least in my experience it has,
but hey, something could have gone wrong in moving the site from the old
server to the new one) but that was fixed.
“But … see there … to the right the [mumble]?”
“I don't see any missing images,” I said.
“To the left right … I mean upper right corner, the [mumble]?”
“The what?”
“Bride.”
Ah, the bride. In the upper right corner. “I'm seeing that image.”
“Yes … below that … broken image.”
Oh wait … the page is just a tad wider than my window. I scroll right, and yes indeed, there is an image. “Oh,” I said. “There it is.”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” I say, now more talking to myself, “properties … ”
“Properties?”
This is now our fifth or sixth conversation today. And it has come painfully clear to me that this person does not understand websites, which I might be able to live with.
But she's not a realtor trying to understand this web … thingy … stuff … a-ma-bob; she's a resellor of websites. Who barely understands how this stuff works.
“Oh, I'm must mumbling to myself,” I said, dreading that I might have
to explain my web browser will display the properties of an image from a
webpage. I continue probing. Okay, the broken image is
top-new.jpg. I then start looking through the server, cursing
under my breath because of cut-n-paste, which works differently between
Windows and X-Windows. To make matter worse, putty, the
terminal program I use under Windows, handles cut-n-paste not as Windows,
but as X-Windows. Makes me wish I was hiking Mount Everest; at least then my only concern
would be hypothermia.
Eventually, I'm able to track down the problem. “The webpage is referencing top dash new dot jay peg,” I said. “The file on the server is actually called top dash menu dash new dot jay peg.”
“So the file didn't copy?”
“No, it did. It's just that the name of the file doesn't match in the webpage.”
“Thought you said you copied files?”
“I did,” I said. “It's there—”
“But it's not showing up.”
Am I the only one that understands this stuff? “It's a typo—”
“So I'll have my people look into it,” she says.
“Okay,” I said, not convinced she even knows what I said.
I'm dreading the next phone call …
