rodneylay

Goodbye, and now you can delete the posts for real .................

When I discovered Xisto I thought I had found a very unique place for my hosting needs. Not only was the concept a cool one, but the prices for paid hosting was low. That was when I first discovered the site. The old saying that "if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is", definately holds true here. On Saturday, August 13 (yesterday), my credits were suddenly reduced from 31 to 13 for no apparent reason. I also lost use of my domain for most of the afternoon and early evening as well as my FTP access. This is the second time in the one week period I have used Xisto that I have lost access to the site. So, my planned upgrade was suddenly gone and I wanted to know what had happened to make me loose these credits. The only explanation I have been able to get from anyone, including the Admin department is that possibly some of my posts were deleted because they were probably spam. So, I checked it out and all of my posts are still here. I wrote the admin and asked them to show me what posts were deleted, or otherwise explain the loss of credits and I received a message saying that Xisto does not have any automation to track the posts (which is contrary to the help topics) and that humans spend their free time making this site work and I should just accept it and move on. In other words, when you loose credits it could be human error and that is good enough of an explanation. Funny thing about this message is that they just do not want to give me an explanation as to the loss of credits, or they cannot give me one, and they just don't give a crap whether it irritates me or not. So, I get a nice little re-inforcement of how true that statement above is. If it is too good to be true ....... The only problem with that is that Xisto promoted this site a certain way and claim to be the best, and they do not back it up. They don't even make excuses or lie about it. Their answer is simply "too f%$$ing bad. CASE CLOSED! I give you Xisto's own promotion of their service ...... While there are many other companies that offer free web hosting services, most of them have lot of hidden terms or limitations which are not disclosed openly. ..... Xisto does not fall in all such things and provides you genuine free web hosting without overselling. So you can be assured that your free web hosting account is safe and won't face any problems due to server flooding or any other reasons because we do not oversell at all. ..... The reason is, these companies purposely create limitations even though they can provide, so that their consumers eventually transfer to more high valued account gradually. Since our main income is not from Paid hosting, we don't care about it and we offer every hosting service absolutely Free. ..... Since Xisto does not provide any explanation of why credits vanish into thin air, and get irritated if you dare to ask for an explanation, there is no way a person can use the hosting here and count on anything. Maybe the upgrade is what they are trying to avoid. There is a better way to represent this site on your home page. That would be, "use the hosting services here at your own risk". Now, we'll see if this post is actually deleted. And, if I loose my credits for this post, well at least I will know why! Rodney Lay

I guess you should delete this post then and take away the credits since you seem to have an arbitrary and undefined system on what good posts are. This category, I discovered after trying to find out why I lost credits was not the best place to express my concern. That is why I posted in the other category. Spamming would be using this site to either promote myself, or taking other peoples posts and claiming that they are my own, and that is according to your rules. If this is the way you run the site, then so be it and you have lost a potential paying customer. Like I said, there are a lot of hosting companies out there that don't charge a lot of money besides Xisto. I am just looking for a good hosting experience and I thought I had found a unique place to do so. It does not seem to be such a good deal now. Too bad, I could have enjoyed spending time here discussing computer and software issues with other people, but instead I have to argue about why I am being cheated out of creadits. What a joke!!!!!!!!!!! Rodney Lay

Well, if a moderator deleted my posts then I don't know what they deleted because I still see all of them. Also, if that was the reason, which it does not seem to be, at least send us a message that a post was deleted and why it was so we may have to opportunity to understand what kinds of things are good posts and what is not. Now, tell me what post was deleted and why because I cannot find which it was and I don't like to have credits taken away with no ability to understand the reason. If I cannot follow the posting credit system or make sense of it then it is a poor system. Rodney Lay

Today my hosting credits dropped from over 30 to 13 for no apparent reason and I have no domain. My domain rodneylay.astahost.com does not exist and I cannot log in by FTP. What is going on. I was considering a paid account, and now this is happening and I am wondering if I am wasting my time here. I need an answer fast if I am going to stay here. I don't have time for a lousy, inconsistent hosting account.Rodney Lay

Well, I need to know what the deal is, because free hosting or not I want the system to be fair and consistent. Hosting is pretty cheap these days and if I am going to spend my time giving out good information nd replying to other peoples questions about things, my time is mostly worth more than simply paying for one of the wide array of 5-10 dollar a month hosting packages out there. When I found this site I thought it was a great thing, and still do, but not if the creadits go away for no reason, or if there is a reason you are not made aware of it. Don't cheat me, because my time is worth more than my money! Rodney Lay

I logged in earlier today and had just over 30 hosting credits, then a few hours later the credits dropped to 13. I need to know what the problem is if I am going to post on this site and make this work. I spend a fiar amount of time reading post and responding and putting up posts that I think will be valuable to the users of this site. When credits are taken away for wahtever reason, at least send a message explaining the reason so we can know how to play the game.Not too happy right now,Rodney Lay

I think the best solution is to either have two drives, one for the operating system and the other for files and programs, or to partition one drive so that the C drive has the operating system and the other partition has everything else. Whenever you install software, just make sure that it is installed on the second partition instead of C, which is the default. You will need to back up some things from the C drive as there are registry values and other files in the windows folder that you will need for the programs and games you have installed, but it is fairly quick the format the C drive and re-install the operating system and any support files there to get a clean start. I have been using this method for some time now and I will never change as long as I am running a PC. Another benefit is that most of the spyware and other things that corrupt a drive are installed on the main partition, or C drive, and if that drive is kept small by not installing the programs there or saving other types of files, then scanning with a tool to clean that drive is much faster. Your virus and spyware scans are a breeze. Scanning 20,000 files goes quite a bit faster than half a million. Enjoy!Rodney Lay

I only have one question for people who say they believe in the evolution theory that men evolved from apes. If that is true, where are the in between creatures that are part ape, part human?In the animal world you see all kinds of variations of different types of creatures and you can see that evolution does happen. I do believe in evolution in the animal kingdom as well as the life in the oceans. It is evident! However, evolution being the reason that we came about, from apes, can only be true if there is the so called missing link. If there is a missing link, why did that stage, or stages of development from ape to man cease to exist? We have apes here today and we have humans and there is nothing in between.Now, if you believe in what the Bible says about it, God created the fish in the sea and he created the animals. Then he created man in his own image. As you look around at life on this planet, that is the state it is in today. Why people have to assume that it was different at some time in the past is just pure speculation and probably denial about what the Bible has to say.There are no skeletal remains that support something in between man and ape. That is also pure speculation based on small peices of bone that are found and then someone builds up a complete skull or whole skeleton based on maybe 10% real skeletal remains. Even the skulls that show a creature that is part man and part ape do not exist. It is sculpted out of bone fragments, and 90% sculpted. If anyone could ever find a full skeleton or a skull that supported the evolution theory then that would be something, but that has never happened. And the reason it has never happened is most likely because there is nothing to find.But, again I will ask. If it is true, or even possible that we descended from the apes, where is the in between stage or stages, and if there is a missing link, why is it missing. It is not missing from any other form of animal or sea life. It is only missing between ape and man. It is only missing because it never happened in the first place.Rodney Lay

CSS positioning is a great thing and I use it as much as possible. But, you need to keep in mind that different browsers use different rendering tools and your pages will be a disaster across different browsers. CSS positioning is not supported the same by any of the browsers and even different versions of the same browser so what looks good in IE will be a disaster in Netscape or some other browser. My suggestion would be to develop for IE using CSS positioning and reproduce your page using tables for the other browsers. Either use a browser detection script to direct your users to the appropriate site or let people know that this is an IE web site. Until the browser developers decide to conform to the standards laid out by the W3C, we developers have not many choices.You can do some very cool things using positioning and I encourage anyone who designs web sites to practice using it. Just make sure you address the cross-browser rendering problems if you don't want angry site visitors.Rodney Lay

How do you deal with the differences in the browsers in how they render a web page? This has been an ongoing problem for me in my web design experience. The only real way to deal with this problem totally is to design a site for each browser and direct your users to the appropriate site based on their browser as detected by javascript or some other method. Now, I know that you can design fairly generic pages using tables to have a fair amount of consitensy across browsers, but if you attemp to use CSS for layout and try to avoid tables which are not W3C compliant anyway, the problems can grow to craxy proportions. What do you designer out there do to handle this problem? I would like to know as many tricks or tips that you have to make this easier to deal with. Thanks for you input! Rodney Lay Notice from m^e: Questions are not meant to be posted in Howtos & Tutorials Section. Read the forum descriptions carefully before you make a post. We've plenty of forums/subforums for this kind of question on this board.

Hello from the midwest. It has been a great experience to find this site. For someone like me who enjoys talking about computer and programming stuff, and to receive free hosting for doing so, it can't get any better.I have been programming software since the mid 90s and doing website development since 98. I work as a free lance programmer and find a lot of designers out there who need someone to do the back-end stuff. Nothing better than working from home doing something you love so much.Back to Xisto! It is rare to find a place where so many people chat with each other about technical stuff. This is a great community. To the owneres of this site, a big congratulations and you have my appreciation for putting this community together. I hope to continue here for a long time and wish everyone the best.I am busily setting up my site on Xisto and encourage everyone to visit. My URL is http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/. It will take me some time to get everything together on the site, but I look forward to your visits, and welcome any comments or suggestions. Have a good evening!Rodney Lay

Without meta tags in your web pages you will limit your ability to be ranked well on the search engines. While they are not as effective as they once were, they are still important aspects of coding a good web site. There are a lot of other purposes for including meta tags beyond the search engines and I will describe the types of meta tags and their purpose below. Learn how to use these if you want a truely professional web site. META Tags are HTML tags which provide information that describes the content of the webpages a user will be viewing. Search engines have recognized that website owners and administrators can use this resource to control their positioning and descriptions in search engine results. Many search engines have now incorporated reading META tags as part of their indexing formulas. Abstract META Tag The Abstract META tag is very similar to the description Meta tag, except its an abstraction or a brief summary of the description META tag. Generally the Abstract META tag is a one line sentence which gives an overview of the entire webpage. Although search engines do not as often use this tag, it is a useful complement to search engines that read the first few lines of text of your webpages. <META name="Abstract" content="Abstract phrase"> Author META Tag The author META tag defines the name of the author of the document being read. This tag is not widely supported but is recognized as part of the META Tag standard. Supported data formats include the name, email address of the webmaster, company name or Internet address (URL). The most common format is to insert the name of the person or organization and a contact email address. <META name="Author" content="Author Information"> Copyright META Tag The copyright META tag defines any copyright statements you wish to disclose about your webpage documents. You may wish to indicate any trademark names, patent numbers, copyright or other information which you want to publicly disclose as your intellectual property. <META name="Copyright" content="Copyright Statement"> Description META Tags Search engines that support META tags will often display the Description META tag along with your title in their results. Search engines will often capture the entire META tag of your description field, but webmasters should bear in mind that when a search engine displays the results to a user, the space is limited, usually under 20 words which you can use to grab the attention of a user. For this reason, when creating your META tags, webmasters should make the first sentence of their description field to capture the attention of a user and use the rest of the description tag to elaborate further. <META name="Description" content="Your description"> Distribution META Tag The distribution META tag defines the level or degree of distribution of your webpage and how it should be classified in relation to methods of distribution on the world wide web. There are currently only three forms of distribution supported by the distribution tag: Global (indicates that your webpage is intended for mass distribution to everyone), Local (intended for local distribution of your document), and IU - Internal Use (not intended for public distribution). <META name="Distribution" content="Global"> Expires META Tag The Expires META tag defines the expiration date and time of the document being indexed. If your website is running a limited time event or there is a preset date when your document will no longer be valid, you should include the Expires tag to indicate to search engines when to delete your webpage from their database. The expires tag is commonly used in conjunction with the Revisit Tag as a means to get search engines to re-visit a website every few days. This is commonly used by websites who update their content frequently and want search engines to have a fresh copy of their content. <META name="Expires" content="Tue, 01 Jun 1999 19:58:02 GMT"> Keyword META Tag Search engines that support META tags will often use the keywords found on your pages as a means to categorize your website based on the search engines indexing algorithms (proprietary algorithms which index your website in search engine databases). Ensure you choose keywords that are relevant to your site and avoid excessive repetition as many search engines will penalize your rankings for attempting to abuse their system. Similar to the Description META Tag, search engines give priority to the first few words in your description, so focus on your main keywords and then elaborate further by using synonyms or other related words. When creating keywords for your website, do not infringe on other companies trademarks or copyrights. Many companies have filed and won lawsuits for attempting to "hijack" traffic to competitors from search engines. <META name="Keywords" content="first, second, third"> Language META Tag The Language META tag declares to users the natural language of the document being indexed. Search engines which index websites based on language often read this tag to determine which language(s) is supported. This tag is particularly useful for non-english and multiple language websites. I won't try to list the abbreviations for various languages to include in the tag, but use the link below to see a complete list of languages and the codes for each. http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/ert/iso639.htm <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" content="EN"> Refresh META Tag The refresh META tag is used as a way to redirect or refresh users to another webpage after a number of seconds. This META tag is often used as a "bridge" page which is accessed first by users and are then redirected to another webpage. Some search engines discourage this type of META tag because it opens opportunity for users to spam search engines with similar pages which all lead to the same page. In addition, this also makes many of the search engines databases cluttered with irrelevant and multiple versions of the same data. <METAHTTP-EQUIV="Refresh"content="X; URL=http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/; X indicates delay in seconds URL indicates the URL to redirect to Revisit META Tag The Revisit META tag defines how often a search engine or spider should come to your website for re-indexing. Often this tag is used for websites that change their content often and on a regular basis. This tag can also be beneficial in boosting your rankings if search engines display results based on the most recent submissions. <META name="Revisit-After" content="X Days"> X indicates a number Robots META Tag Robots, also known as spiders, are automated mechanisms that spider your site, or search your site on how to categorize the information you submitted to the search engine. Typically, a website owner would submit the main page and the robots would visit your site and collect all subpages and related links from your main page. However, this tag enables you to control which pages you would like spidered, and which to ignore. For instance, certain webpages and directories (ie: CGI Scripts) you may not want indexed in the search engines. Using the robots tag, you can define which pages to follow, which to index and which to ignore completely. Supported types are as follows ... noindex, index, nofollow, and follow. <META name="Robots" content="index,follow"> There is a ton of information on the internet about this subject. Just go to Google and type is Meta Tags in the search box. Hope this helps! Rodney Lay

In order to answer this question properly you need to tell what kind of motherboard you have and the type of biod chip. Without that information it is hard to even know if the chip will work with the motherboard. There is a good website that will give you a lot of information about how to do things like replace your bios chip. The link to the site is below. https://www.pctechguide.com/ If you would like me to help you with this, just let me know. I need to know what type of board and bios you hve though to help. Rodney Lay

Do this .................... How do I get PPPoE in Windows XP to log in automatically on boot? Note: Remember PPPoE is now native to Windows XP. 1) In Control Panel open "Network Connections" 2) Right click on your broadband connection icon and select "Properties" 3) Uncheck "Prompt for name and password..." 4) Click "OK" 5) Open your "C:/Documents and settings" folder 6) Open the "All Users" folder 7) Open the "Start Menu" folder 8) Open the "Programs" folder 9) Go to your Programs Folder -> Startup 9) Copy a short-cut of your Broadband Connection, from the Network Connections folder in to the "Startup" folder I hope this helps. Rodney Lay

If you want a small, inexpensive digital camera that will take pretty decent movies with a memory card, then look for an AIPTEK DV4100. I bought mine at CompUSA. You can get one of these for around $100 and it will fit in your pocket. With a memory card that costs about $40 you can take 1-2 hour movies and load them to your computer or play them on your Television. The picture quality is pretty good for the price. Play with it some and learn the right settings for the environment. If it is dark you will not get as good a picture quality as with good light. I have been using one for about 6months and am very happy with it. Rodney Lay

Use the link below to go to MySQL.com and you will find everything you need to know about everything MySQL. You can download tutorials in all kinds of formats, including PDF which is nice for printing, as well as the MySQL database to install on your local computer. There are versions for nearly every popular operating sytem and computer. If you need more, just go to Google and type in MySQL in the search text box and you will retrieve a sea of good info to choose from. Good luck. Also, installing MySQL is not hard to do, but expect to take some time to get everything configured right. Do not rush the job. You will be much happier by taking your time and not have to try and fix things after the fact. Here is the link ............... http://www.mysql.com/ Enjoy! Rodney Lay

Hello, This post is somewhat dated so I don't know how helpful I can be at this later date, but my first response to your questions is that you have a lot to learn about the internet and databases in general. I mean no disrespect and hope you take my reply as constructive, but you need to come a long way in your knowledge before you start looking at career opportunities. However, having been in this business for about 10 years now I will attempt to answer your questions. First, there are a lot of career opportunities for people who are competent database developers for interent content. Follow these links to see the job postings for database professionals. Go to http://www.monster.com/jobs/search/ and on the page pick the state where you are interested in finding a job and then choose the job category "Internet/E-Commerce". You can enter keywords above the location box to narrow the search to database positions. You can also go to http://www.computerjobs.com/de/en/IT-Jobs/ and do the same thing. Monster tends to have more job listings. Now, assuming I am right about your knowledge level, find a book called PHP and MySQL Web Development and you will get a good overview of how important it is to know how to use databases with web page development. Since PHP and MySQL are open source tools you can use them to develop professional web pages without the large cost of settting up and using other tools. In answer to your second question, you cannot produce professional web page design without interaction with a database. Even if you have someone else do the database side you still have to know how to intereact with that database on the web development side. The book I mentioned will help you immensely in understanding that relationship between web pages and databases. If you would rather not buy the book, use this link ... http://www.weberforums.com/ ... to find similar information on the internet. I wish you the best and would be willing to assist you in any way I can. Rodney Lay

Depending on the size of your database structure it will be a fairly easy migration since both SQL Server and MySQL are nearly pure SQL database engines. If you follow the link below you will go to a very good tutorial on migrating to MySQL from SQL Server. This is from the MySQL.com website, and is the perfect place for you to learn MySQL once you do the migration. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ After reading this tutorial you should have no problem. If you still are not sure what to do then you should probably hire someone to do the job for you. Good luck with your migration. Rodney Lay

Do not worry so much about content and design or how attractive the site looks. I have seen sites that are the world's ugliest get lots of traffic. There is pretty much one way to get traffic to your site. Buy Google ad words. The greatest meta tags, content, layout, graphics, etc will not do anything anymore. If you cannot afford a lot of adword expense then find adwords that are going cheap but have relevance to your site. It can be done!I have been doing web development for 8 years and the marketing landscape has narrowed every year until now it mostly belongs to Google. You can advertise in local weekly shopper type newspapers across the country fairly reasonably as far as cost, and effectively drive people to your site with the ads. But that takes a lot of effort with ad writing and contacting the papers to place the ads. Google is the easiest and most effective way to drive people to your site.If you still do not believe me, do some research. Go to Google and Yahoo and Excite and other search engines and look at the top sites for various search values and compare their meta tags and content and look and feel and tell me that the best written and best designed sites win the battle. It does not happen! Try it!And then ............Buy Google Ad Words