I have a lot of interests–most of them technology–and this holiday season in particular has got me STANDING on my soap box.  Why?  Because of the inevitable confusion that the consumer will go through when buying a PC (personal computer).  Why will he/she be confused?  Because of the fragmentation of the PC market this holiday buying season, of course.

We’ve always had hardware choices: HP, Sony, eMachines …and of course, Mac.  We’ve had operating system choices, too: Mac vs. PC.  But this year we’ll be faced with more choices then ever.  For example, do you buy a Pentium 4M, a Core Duo, a Core 2 Duo, a Core 2 Duo with Windows XP Home, a Core 2 Duo with Windows XP Pro, a Core 2 Duo with Windows XP Media Center Edition, a Core Duo with Windows XP Home?  A Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro?  A Mac (in general) that you can then put Windows XP on?  How about Vista.  Do you buy a PC that’s Vista Capable (what does that mean?), Vista Ready?  We also still have Intel vs. AMD, and with Dell selling AMD boxes, the confusion will be worse then ever!  Then we’ll hear the “well, should I wait since Vista isn’t out yet?”  Microsoft has made that more fun by offering a coupon if you buy a computer now, that will give you a discount on Vista when it ships.  And we still have the “but aren’t faster processors coming out anyway so shouldn’t I hold off for now?” question.

I can’t wait for friends and family to start asking that “any recommendations?” question this year.

Just when I thought that I had reached the end of Judie’s never-ending “punch list”, she threw another one my way. This time instead of involving changes to the server, it involved customization to the blog itself! First on the list was finding a new theme, which didn’t take long. Then we had to roll out the theme. This took a bit longer since my previous experiences changing over a site’s look and feel have made me much more cautious about doing such things. Thankfully, the theme change is one of the easiest things to do in WordPress and within minutes I had a new theme up and running. Of course, it’s not a “one size fits all” thing, so we had to customize, which was a bit more involved. In case you couldn’t tell, the theme we chose is Beast Blog and Judie chose it because it’s green. Seriously though, it’s a solid theme and more importantly the creator of it is super-responsive and very skilled–more on that later.

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As part of joining the crew at GearDiary.com, I signed on to be the techie behind the scenes.  As luck would have it, Judie sent me a laundry list of issues that she wanted resolved.:-) 

So, off I went into the log files to start sniffing around.  The first thing I noticed was that the error log was filling up with Page Not Found errors and they were actually being triggered by a lack of a 404.shtml file.  The other error was being caused by a lack of a favicon.ico file.  The quick and dirty explanation for these errors is that the 404.shtml file is what’s shown to a user when they access a page that doesn’t exist.  Try this link to see what I mean. 

As for the favicon.ico, it’s a little icon that shows up next the URL of the page in your browser and next to the entry in your bookmarks, if you bookmark the site.  It turns out that the favicon.ico file used to only be requested if the page was actually bookmarked, but in the latest versions of the browsers, it’s requested all of the time. So, I took the easy way out and manually created a 404.shtml page (very little dynamic stuff being served), and I created a temporary favicon.ico file since we’re in the midst of getting a new logo.  There we go–no more error messages. :-) 

The other wild part is that the browsers themselves were actually creating the error since they were requested a favicon.ico file that didn’t exist, which then generated the error message for a page not found.  The ironic part of course being that the page that wasn’t found was the Page Not Found page.  Ok, that was really a little too geeky.

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