Next morning the client and I headed down to
my favorite web host in San Jose. I like the town's gritty edge.
You can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.
We set up a colo 600mhz rack-mounted Pentium
with Slackware running on dual CPUs and 9 gig SCSIs, plugged straight
into Mae West. It was a nice piece of work, with a black case
and brushed aluminium handles. By this time the client had a bandwidth
boner the size of the Bay Bridge. I hadn't even told him about
hot-swapping yet.
Meanwhile my assistant had been working on snatching
the second domain name from the Oznic.com mob. It was the usual
deal, ten emails each way with the new kinder, gentler InterNIC.
A dirty job, but someone has to do it. With any luck the client
would control his second domain name by the time we had the server
set up. I rolled up my sleeves and went to work mirroring the
site down at San Jose. With the timelines we were working on,
it wasn't time to kiss Hazel goodbye yet.
The Hazel search function was so slow I had to
cut search back to returning 6 products at a time. So much for
their C binaries. The source code probably looked like a five-gallon
pot of spaghetti.
Then I dumped the flush-left 600-pixel-wide table
tags and made the pages float to browser width. That left one
big itch to scratch -- the text was overlaying the product images.
There wasn't time to get the text flowing around the images. Too
many screwy templates. I just punched the image cells out to 150
pixels and deleted about a hundred extra-wide images.
By this time the client was so excited he'd started
reading HTML advice columns. I know where that goes: meta tags.
That's jake with me. They want META tags, I give 'em META tags.
In fact tags help me out lots of times. When designers bleat about
me tearing apart their pages, I just tell them that "META tags
only operate in a dynamic resonance with the content." That shuts
them up pretty quick. Why not. I don't understand it myself.
META tags or no, this site was going to be getting
traffic. With five thousand targeted pages plus national radio
spots, the server would need all the air conditioning it could
get. His employees were babbling about gigabyte traffic. More
like terabytes when I was through. But whatever makes you happy.
I had a couple of options out of the deal. I'd do my cheering
when they vested ... if the share price
didn't auger in....
