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Domain Issues

8 Nov

I’ve recently been making changes to my website, which has resulted in difficulties accessing certain pages. Any of my PhotoShelter pages which point to their former subdomain (photography.karenjoslin.net), rather than the default PhotoShelter address, can’t be found there. However, anyone who wants to see my photography can still find it at http://karenjoslin.photoshelter.com. Hopefully this problem will be solved shortly and everything will once again work as it should.

Why is this happening? Well, previously, my site consisted of PhotoShelter for my photography and Gate.com for my home page plus extra pages that I couldn’t do in PhotoShelter. But since PhotoShelter added two custom pages to their offerings, I don’t need to renew my Gate website now that my annual term is about to expire. So I moved my domain over to Namecheap because of their low cost, e-mail options, and site control.

Transferring my DNS to Namecheap’s servers was easy and quick. I then attempted to set up a CNAME record to point my domain to my PhotoShelter home page, though I find Namecheap’s method of doing this confusing, even after scouring their help section for applicable information. (So far, this is Namecheap’s biggest problem for me – not providing comprehensive enough instructions for users.) Similarly, setting up my domain’s e-mail addresses was not as self-explanatory as I thought it would be, so I’ve temporarily forwarded them to an address elsewhere. At least setting up my blog’s subdomain was simple, though.

I did all of that on Friday evening, and when I checked everything on Sunday afternoon, my blog and e-mail worked perfectly. My domain, however, still points to my site on Gate.com. After further research and configuration attempts on both Namecheap and PhotoShelter, I think I have it set up correctly now. Maybe. If it still doesn’t work properly after the 48-hour propagation period, then it’ll be time for a chat with tech support. Until then, I apologize for any inconvenience.

I can tell from Namecheap’s forums that I’m not the only one who finds their documentation lacking. Once everything’s working correctly, I’ll add a post with the exact steps needed to configure a Namecheap account to point a domain to an external website.

Thanks for your patience!

© Karen Joslin, 2011

SiteGrinder + Photoshop = Easy, Efficient Website

23 Mar
Layers with SiteGrinder hints

Layers with SiteGrinder hints

As I‘ve mentioned before, the photography portion of my website resides on PhotoShelter, which I love. However, PhotoShelter doesn’t offer extra pages, so I needed an easy, affordable way to create the writing portion of my site. Another photographer suggested I try SiteGrinder, a Photoshop plug-in which allows the user to design a website in Photoshop without needing to know any coding. So I downloaded a trial version of SiteGrinder 2, and it turned out to be exactly what I needed.

Anyone who regularly uses Photoshop will find working with SiteGrinder easy. You create your website all in one file, using layer comps to define each page. (If you’re working on a large site, you can also split it into multiple files if necessary.) Hints added after a layer name tell SiteGrinder how to treat that layer. For instance, a layer with the tag “-text” means that SiteGrinder will output the layer as HTML text; without that hint, the layer’s text will output as graphics instead. This is an important distinction, since graphics aren’t recognized by search engines. The biggest change I made to my site’s design was to move my navigation bar up and add drop-down menus for “Photography” and “Writing” so that visitors can access all the pages on my site from anywhere. (Once it’s also configured on PhotoShelter, my site integration will be complete.)
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Creating a Custom Border for PhotoShelter Sites

2 Jul

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been redoing my website.   I’ve moved the photography portion of my site to PhotoShelter, which has numerous wonderful features for photographers that I’ll get into in a separate post.  One of these features is their website templates (called themes) that allow you to tweak the CSS or HTML code in order to personalize your site.  I like the theme I chose a lot, but along with changing the background color, I also wanted to replace the border on the content box with one I created myself.  Because my border was more complex than a single line, it needed to be saved as GIFs and linked to in the CSS code.  I couldn’t find any instructions to do that on PhotoShelter, though, and when I posted a question about it in the forum, no one answered me.  (That’s actually pretty unusual – it seems like there’s almost always someone who has a solution or comment to give.)
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