The ongoing virus-hunt continues – the guy beside me found something on his computer first thing this morning – we spent some time looking it up to see what it does and what to do about it – then he had to use my work computer to do some stuff and I was relegated to just working on my laptop. I was glad to do it, it gave me a chance to follow along on one of the tutorials and I think I am really getting a handle on this stuff now – a small handle, but a handle nonetheless.

Then later in the day I spent a fair bit of time finishing up some odds and ends on various projects – organizing files and folders, stuff like that. As messy as I admit I am in my house, that’s how compulsively organized I am on the computer. (It thrills me to be able to find whatever file  I’m looking for whenever I need it – unlike my house where I’m lucky if I can find my family most of the time!)

I still have some catch-up work to do for the CGI part of  the program at school, but given the hours I am working it begins to look as if I may not get it done in time – I find I am less upset at the thought than I expected to be – but it does seem too bad to have put in all this time and effort and not even have a certificate to show for it… I just don’t know where I’ll find the time to get it done. I do actually know how to do all the stuff we’re required to do for the assignments – especially now that I’ve been working “in the field”, as it were – I just don’t have the time to write all the pages I’d need to do. I’ll have to see what I can get done this weekend.

So today we finally finished the interior page content (product descriptions) for the site we have been working on for what seems like weeks now. They got the other intern to help me out. This sounded like a good idea, but the interruptions as we handed files back and forth really threw me off my rhythm and although he did get the last several pages done, I didn’t get finished integrating them into the menu and internal PHP files until after 5 pm.

Near the end of the day, one of the bosses came over and offered me the chance to download a bunch of really super video tutorials from a paid site where he is s a member. I jumped at the chance – this is a site I use frequently for the free content, but I have been unable to access the paid content – after all, I’m still a “starving student”! I downloaded a bunch of tutorials on PHP and also on using WordPress as a CMS – the first because it has become increasingly clear to me that every single site we have worked on since I have been here has used PHP to some extent, and the second because I think it is unnecessary to re-invent the wheel when all you have to do to accommodate a large majority of situations is a bit of an overhaul.

All-in-all a pretty good day.

Today was spent cleaning viruses from various computers and generally sorting out the hard drives and doing a bit of clean-up electronically. Apparently the virus did not originate from here but rather was lurking on a client’s server, one who does not host with us. So now we are all clean and shiny and ready to go back to work.

Also today I finally added the Photo Gallery to this blog. Please do go and check it out – I am pretty happy with the photos, and the story they start to tell about this wonderful building we are located in.

I was happier to be back at work today  than I thought I would be – part of that due no doubt to the fact that my husband makes a very impatient patient! I left him to rest and take it easy at home for the day, but he’ll have to make his own snacks!

I was glad to have gotten as many pages done at home yesterday as I did. There are over 240 of them to do, and I am averaging about 25-35 a day, depending on how much formatting and spelling correction is required. I have gone from going slowly to make sure I haven’t made any mistakes, to “wow, look how fast I am getting!”, to “When will it be over, already!”

By now I have it down to a routine – edit and format the actual content of the page, save it with a very long and descriptive SEO-friendly filename, then add it to the PHP file that will call it to the location it needs to be in on the main page, save that file, add it to the menu file and save that file, test it in Firefox and IE, then on to the next…

When I got back from lunch I found everyone in a fluster – we have a virus on the loose. So the whole remainder of the day was spent trying to get rid of this virus that appeared out of nowhere. We can’t figure out how it got in, whose machine started it, etc, etc, and I really can’t see that it matters all that much – what we need to concentrate on is GETTING RID OF IT!!!

I didn’t go in to work today – my husband was feeling unwell and I stayed home with him. I think it’s just stress – he needs to find a new contract soon, or I need to get a job, because right now we are the opposite of DINK -(Double-Income-No-Kids) – we are NICAK (No- Income-College-Age-Kid)!

I did have the files I needed on my laptop, since I have been working on it as well as the computer in the office, so I did about 13 or 14 pages to take in tomorrow. Better than nothing.

SO today I continued on with the pages – there are going to be 246 or so in all, so I have my work cut out.

I have made a template so it is going somewhat faster, but each page has to have the content text copied into it, in the appropriate tags so the CSS styling will be effective, and then the filename has to be co-ordinated into a menu include file and a contents div include file. LOTS of copy-and-paste!

This afternoon I started on the second batch of pages, these are to appear in the same location on the screen, but from a different parent page and under a different ID, and now they don’t seem to be loading properly. I am absolutely perplexed by this – I’ve checked the code 87 ways to Sunday and it seems to be all correct – I wonder what I’ve overlooked?

I guess I’ll work on it tomorrow until I get it right.

This is going to be a short post -

Today I made 21 pages for the interior content of a site we are working on.

That’s it!

Today was a great day – work was fun, learned about including special characters by using PHP instead of having to type in the ampersand (&) and all the special text each time.

But the highlight of the day was finding out that my daughter has been accepted to Kemptville University for September! We have been waiting and hoping for this for what seems like forever – and we are all delighted about it. She will be doing the Equine Technology Diploma program, and also concurrently the Riding and Coaching Certificate program. So she will be living in residence there, and taking our horse, Chips, along with her. Hopefully she will start a blog about her experiences there, or maybe I’ll just have to content myself with lurking her Facebook page….

That means I’ll have to find a job pretty quickly once this internship is over, since I’ll be wanting to have a horse here for myself!

.htaccess – I know a new swear word! .htaccess! This little file has all sorts of magic powers, none of which I seem to be able to harness correctly. I feel kind of like the sorceror’s apprentice – everywhere I point my wand, something happens, but usually not what I wanted to happen!

But, really – how hard can it be? I mean, the people who use this stuff are humans, just like me – and I do know how to use the .htaccess file to direct visitors to a custom 404, and to prevent file index listings from appearing if the index file is missing or misnamed in a directory, so I know I can figure this out if I just read enough stuff online. (But most of the articles seem to be written in something resembling Sanskrit or Urdu – cetrainly not English or any language I am familiar with. I guess maybe they are written for people who are a whole lot more familiar with the Apache server environment than I am.)

Anyway, wish me luck, the quest continues tomorrow…

Well, I didn’t post yesterday, because I finally went to see AVATAR ( if I thought I could communicate like that with my horse, I’d wear a braid for the rest of my life!). It was a fabulous movie, but at well over two hours long I don’t see going back umpteen times – I have too much to do and too little time as it is!

Anyway – today was a good day. I learned how to to a mod_rewrite to redirect one html page to another – this is useful if you have a new site but don’t want to lose all the built-up SEO rankings for your old site.

Essentially what it does, is, when the URL of the old site comes up in a search, when the user clicks on that link, they are seamlessly and invisibly redirected to the new page – pretty slick and something that will come in useful in the future, I am certain.