A New Beginning – Priceless Friends

After nearly 4 years of being with Yahoo web hosting, MouseRunner.com has moved to DreamHost. I will give Yahoo credit for keeping Mouse Runner online with no interruptions at all since February 15, 2005. That’s pretty amazing, but that’s all that I’ll give them credit for.

Without any experience at all, I decided to create a web site mostly as a hobby to help to lessen the affects of winter boredom. After checking out many services, I went with Yahoo GeoCities. It was all point and click setup and extremely easy to use. After time I wanted more features and control and I didn’t want ads on my web site that someone had chosen so that began my search for a web hosting company.
I must have checked out 60+ companies before deciding to go with Yahoo. I was a huge fan of all things Yahoo and I had already tried out their point and click and drag and drop site building software which was very appealing compared to the HTML that I was trying to learn which was completely foreign to me and the cost of their hosting plans seemed reasonable so Yahoo became my choice.

After spending hundreds upon hundreds of hours of creating MouseRunner.com (and 2 other sites at the time), I was becoming more knowledgeable about web standards mostly due to the fact that I was a very strong Firefox advocate. I was curious as to how well the sites that I had created with Yahoo’s Site Builder followed these web standards so I began checking them out and to my surprise and utter disgust, MouseRunner.com’s home page had(has) more than 230 errors in its coding preventing it from validating thus making it inaccessible to many Internet users.

To make a long story short, I’ve had to start from scratch and learn HTML and CSS in a hurry. I’m very far from having mastered either but I’m on my way with it.
Yahoo has told me that it would be too expensive to re-write their site building software. What this means is that they are fully aware that their software (which they actively promote) produces web sites that will not validate thus preventing Internet users with disabilities from fully accessing those sites and its content.
If it weren’t for the fact that I still have a site with hundreds of errors itself due to Yahoo’s software then I’d start a class action law suit. Instead of that (for now) I’m focused on completely re-writing MouseRunner.com by hand line by line and page by page. Keep in mind that I’m far from a coding guru. It’s only for the fact that I have some amazing friends that are helping me out that there has been any progress at all.

Michael Buckley has established all of the primary coding and pages that makes up my 4 web sites. He is a highly skilled and brilliant coder/developer who has made it very easy for me to build off of what he has created by using what he has written as templates to create new pages and features. Now 3 of my sites are compliant to the W3C’s web standards unfortunately, MouseRunner.com isn’t yet one of them.
Re-writting MouseRunner.com has turned out to be a much tougher process than I had imagined but there is great progress which can be seen on www.MouseRunner.net, the building grounds for the new MouseRunner.com.

So here we are finally off of Yahoo’s servers and onto DreamHost’s.
Full credit for that goes to my other great friend Otto de Voogd of 7is7.com. It was on Otto’s suggestion that I moved to DreamHost for its features and costs, and it is Otto who has successfully setup and migrated my 4 web sites to DreamHost. He’s also setup the MySQL databases that are used by all sites, he installed WordPress onto two of them, and installed and setup StatEye (free and open source) which provides me with traffic (and other) stats from the sites.

Certainly not to be left out from being mentioned is Jamey Boje (a.k.a GraphicsGuru). Jamey’s been a strong and consistent supporter of AccessFirefox.org and he’s made significant graphics contributions over the years to MouseRunner.com including Mouse Runner’s games logo, site promotional graphics (current ones and ones for the new Mouse Runner), and he’s also donated Mouse Runner’s new logo (as seen on MouseRunner.net).

In closing, I owe a lot of gratitude to Mozilla for attracting such kind and talented people as the 3 that I have mentioned who I all met through Mozilla projects. We’re all good and long time friends.

Thanks for reading.
Ken

P.S. Use Google!!

If you’re in need of a web host or a better one, I highly recommend that you check out DreamHost. Otto has DreamHost coupons available that will get you a great deal.
Contact Michael for web design and development and other coding needs and check out some of the awesome software that he’s created including many popular Firefox Add-ons.
Jamey is also available for web design projects plus any other graphics needs that you may have including logos and promotional materials.