Ok, I'm going to elaborate more on that last entry. First, I'm going to begin by confessing that I was unaware that I had the appropriate project handbook beside my desk all this time. I was under the mistaken impression that there was a new one issued for this semester (I can understand where that train of thought came from, I just wish I had actually checked the manual before last week). As a result, I did not know what my actual deadlines were (having fallen away from my self-imposed ones). The good news is that I realized my faulty assumption more or less in time. The bad news is that there is still a lot for me to cover over the next week.

In terms of implementing my site design, I had gotten caught up in learning CSS that I had forgotten how handy tables can be. When I finally came around to using tables (something about consistently nesting divs so that I could get things to align right and yet still expand if needed did not feel solid to me), I found myself fighting CSS too. I was fighting Dreamweaver the most, when I should have been of working with it and then tweaking the code as needed. Somehow I came to my senses and began to work with Dreamweaver, and implementing tables and CSS together. I had something that felt solid, and I had a stylesheet that I could use with different-looking pages (since the bulk of their layouts were now handled by tables and not absolutely positioned css divs). That helped me feel ready to upload to my host.

Then came the host-purchasing. I spent all of Friday reading over hosting plans and terms of service trying to choose the best one. The plan I had outlined in my proposal was going to be too small to hold both my comic and my portfolio site (since I want to keep them together in one account). Moving up to a bigger plan with that service (A Small Orange) was no longer a good option, either: their own website and those of my friend who'd recommended them to me were running glacially slow. I contacted that friend who told me that the speed issue was substantial enough that he was in the process of moving to a new host. So, then came the day of reading plans until my head spun, and then some more. In the end, I wound up going with Bluehost, which another friend of mine had suggested a while back and which was my original alternate to A Small Orange. At least I know I contemplated this thoroughly.

I installed the management script, Comikaze on my new account, uploaded my files, and things just worked. It was amazing. Naturally, there were a few small tweaks and bumps, but it's up there and I'm pretty much awed by that fact. I inputted the new domain name server information for the betabits.net name earlier today in order to expedite the switch. Then I called a real human being at Yahoo! to make sure I entered the information correctly. Not only had I done that, but he could already see my site at betabits.net (he described it to me and everything--he said it looks nice; i was thrilled). The change has yet to propogate to my corner of the Web, but hopefully it will soon, so I can get people checking it out and filling out my survey. Phew. So much more to do, yet I feel so done already!