The flight to Vegas took forever and when I eventually got here I was just about finished. The hotel’s impressive, it’s got over 5,000 rooms ferchrissakes and feels more like a town than a hotel. Oh well, what am I complaining about. And it’s got free wi-fi.

I’ve been messing with blogs recently and have also booked up to go on several courses on SEO and web page plumbing. These start in the next couple of weeks and I’m looking forward to doing them.

What I need is a blog or web page that’ll allow me to generate some home based work. I like the idea of usability testing as I reckon it’d be relatively easy to do that from home (Oh yeah, what about the usability of this page’s loading time? Ed), and my home office is large, and with a few improvements, i.e. building some more desk space, I would easily have enough room for 5 or 6 computers plus printers and all the other stuff I’d need.

With my 20 years experience of testing software plus previous development experience doing usability testing from home should be a snap. Hell, if someone wanted me to do more plumbing type testing I can do that to. That reminds me I need to get some books on the latest incarnations of SQL Server and Oracle as my SQL (Or do you mean MySQL? Ed) has got quite rusty in the last couple of years, though that shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to sort out.

So I need to create a web site to promote these ideas and get them to page 1 or 2 on Google. I’ve been playing with Google’s Adwords also recently so that will help with keywords.

When I tweek this blog I do all my edits on the server which is just a tad hairy coz if I screw up I’m not sure if I can unscrew myself!

I do backups to various PC’s and cloud drives so I am covered up to a point (Just like them old tape streamers that you could never restore from eh? Ed). I’ve been thinking about editing WordPress themes on Dreamweaver and hadn’t a clue how to go about that so did some searching. Firstly you need to create a folder on your PC to store everything and then FTP to that folder the WordPress theme’s stylesheet – style.css – and then FTP the complete images folder – on the hosting server – to the same folder on your PC. Create a new HTML document and save that in the same folder, on your PC. Then comes the nasty bit. Grab the code for the header – header.php on the hosting server – and paste that, in Code View in Dreamweaver, into the newly created HTML document. Then paste the code from the main index template – index.php, sidebar – sidebar.php and footer – footer.php into the new HTML document.

Actually that’s not all, you also need to change the location of the CSS file in the header and also dynamic calls for the blog name and sub-titles and as the darn thing won’t have access to your database tables they’ll be no content to display so somewhere headings and article text will need to be added. Jeez, this ain’t easy and you’ll probably spend hours messing about just getting the blog into Dreamweaver so that you can then start hammering away at it.

Hmm…just thought, so even when I have tinkered away at a WordPress theme in DW how the heck do I get all that amended code back to the server? Do I have to unpick it all and regenerate individual PHP files for header.php etc? Nope, this is just asking for trouble. Think whats needed here is an add-on or plug-in to Dreamweaver so you just point DW at a WordPress blog and it sorts itself out and then displays your blog locally but in DW. I then remembered that MS Expression Web imports web pages so tried it and though it did download a pile of docs I haven’t been able get it to display squat yet.

I tried six WordPress themes that were given away on a magazine the other day and none of them worked. If I was an expert at CSS I could probably sort them out. I suppose I could create a new blog and therefore there would be no content to import and then maybe these WP themes might work. Trouble with that wonderful idea is that I can’t remember how I created this darn thing. I did some jiggery-pokery then imported the articles from a WordPress.com version of this blog. But what was the jiggery-pokery?

The following is a telephone exchange between a hotel guest and room-service, at a hotel in Asia which was recorded and published in the Far East Economic Review…

Room Service (RS): “Morny. Ruin sorbees”
Guest (G): “Sorry, I thought I dialed room-service”
RS: “Rye..Ruin sorbees..morny! Djewish to odor sunteen??”
G: “Uh..yes..I’d like some bacon and eggs”
RS: “Ow July den?”
G: “What??”
RS: “Ow July den?…pry, boy, pooch?”
G: “Oh, the eggs! How do I like them? Sorry, scrambled please.”
RS: “Ow July dee bayhcem…crease?”
G: “Crisp will be fine.”
RS : “Hokay. An San tos?”
G: “What?”
RS:”San tos. July San tos?”
G: “I don’t think so”
RS: “No? Judo one toes??”
G: “I feel really bad about this, but I don’t know what
‘judo one toes ‘means.”
RS: “Toes! toes!…why djew Don Juan toes? Ow bow singlish mopping we bother?”
G: “English muffin!! I’ve got it! You were saying ‘Toast.’ Fine. Yes, an English muffin will be fine.”
RS: “We bother?”
G: “No..just put the bother on the side.”
RS: “Wad?”
G: “I mean butter…just put it on the side.”
RS: “Copy?”
G: “Sorry?”
RS: “Copy…tea…mill?”
G: “Yes. Coffee please, and that’s all.”
RS: “One Minnie. As ruin torino fee, strangle ache, crease baychem, tossy singlish mopping we bother honey sigh, and copy….rye??”
G: “Whatever you say”
RS: “Tendjewberrymud”
G: “You’re welcome”