Hilary Moon Murphy

The QA Tester I Didn't Know I Had

I got an e-mail out of the blue from my friend Sabrina about this journal:

OK, I'm bored. Half the office isn't in, so there isn't much for me to do, so I tested some of your page. You might want to know ...

• the link from Speculations needs to be updated

• the "sign guestbook" link moans and wails "addbook.html does not exist in user's home directory, guestbook needs to be reinitialized *** /raid/008e/SoHoExhibit/6240/addbook.html"

  (the "view guestbook" is much happier)

Love,
Sabrina

For all you lurking QA testers out there: Thank you.

Marti said that she wanted a better web page program, one that placed all the tables in the right places. A webpage program of any kind would be nice -- I handcode all my own HTML, which is why my pages have such an endearing primitive look to them.

However, more than anything else, I want a better server. Geocities has now officially ticked me off. This past week, I have had great difficulty getting into my account. Geocities shunted me off into someone else's account everytime I wanted to post something. That is why you haven't seen too many journal entries of late.

To any of you who may be considering getting web space on Geocities: don't. You get what you pay for.

Here are some other reasons that I'm feeling just a bit disgruntled. Geocities changed my URL without notifying me, and I didn't find out about that until someone asked me where my page had gone! Fortunately, Geocities soon fixed the problem so that you can reach my website from both my old and my new URL, so I chilled out. Besides, I had to admit that my new URL was much nicer.

Then I had a brief spate of pop-up ads all over my site. I hate pop-ups! I figured out how to fix the problem, and everything was cool again.

Then fellow Webrat Rob discovered that he can no longer view my website due to some glitch between Geocities and Web TV.

And now Geocities has disabled my old guestbook, and they offered no explanation on their guestbook FAQs page about why they were making the change. What purpose does it serve? I really, really dislike the new guestbook that they have offered me in its place. I can't add links or images or other coding to it -- I can only change the color. Bleah.

And now it's empty. One would think that I have no friends. If you're reading this, could you sign my new guestbook? Please?

Hmm