Dixon's Forum

A busy week at Dixon’s Forum, and a frustrating.   Decided to stick a ‘www.’ in front of ‘dixonsforum.com’, to appease the Googlebots.

A wwwed domain helps avoid relative urls and duplicate content in their indexes, so before I start pinging the Googlebots, I want dixonsforum.com fully wwwed.   Also, www adds server overload protection, so if traffic gets too heavy, some of it redirects to a different server.    Plus, better control over cookies, don’t get why nor how.

Adding the www. in the WordPress AdminPanel settings made my site logo a blurry blob, my media library  blanky squares, my images indistinct.

Support forums offered some guidance, and advice like ‘image URLs may appear in WordPress content, but image request handling is external and done by your server.’   I pondered that “image request handling” —  there must be something called a “request” that is “handled” by a “server”.   So when you want the server to handle an image, it’s an “image request”, not at all like pasting on Publisher pamphlets.

Good to know, but didn’t show how to fix the wwws muffing up the images.   Hostinger’s toolbox has a Force WWW function, which told me, “WWW and non-WWW domain records are not pointing to the same host.   Redirect not possible.”    The forum said this indicates something amiss in my “DNS settings” and guessed my “nameserver” was pointed to “CloudFlare”.   It wasn’t.

Exchanges with Hostinger’s Chat Support Bot and Agents diverted to tangents, misread questions answered other issues, shift-changes caused repeated repeatings and none of the normal ways worked.   Off-the-wall suggestions like special plugins and third-party naked-domain redirects were bandied about, and I was frequently assumed a developer for wwwing my domain, like it’s not a common thing.

Finally, at long last, in the wee hours of my third stab, a patient and knowledgeable Hostinger chat agent solved the mystery:   some plugins codes in my .htaccess file, or something.   They created a new file, and stuck on the www lickety-split.   No matter how long it’s ever taken, there’s always been someone there at Hostinger chat support who can solve my problem.   Whew!

Industrial Art dawned at a friend’s housewarming, a cute little apartment with a  countertop opening between the small galley kitchen and the living room.    Centered on the end wall over the countertop was an ugly gray utilitarian circuit breaker panel, hogging the perfect place for a pretty picture.    Ick.

Knew from work experience it’s against the code to cover it like with a picture, pondered ways that wall could ever look nice, and Eureka! — paint the picture right on the door, the flanges paint the frame!

Something generic, inconspicuous . . .    muted earthtones, sandy desert . . . perfect.    Every self-respecting landlord in America would want ’em, if the price was right:    I wanted to hurry out and invent one right away.

It so happened that my landlord that very moment was upgrading an electrical service, and gave me the old fuseboxes.   It also so happened that in the distancing past my brother had given me a whole pile of artist paints, from when he was an art student.   Huge collection, tubes and shades of colors, which I had only the week before thrown out, never imagining any possible use I, a notartist, would ever have for them.

But I had several colors of electric tape, because I find stuff like that handy.   And some spray paint.   Background, spray paint; cacti, cutouts.   Electric tape on electric panels!    Brilliant!    (Electric panel covers, really, a blank slate where the fuses used to go.)    A few coats of clear acrylic for a sturdy and durable, unique artpiece.

With a picture on the front of the door, another on its back, maybe a third where the fuses used to be, this art form would have the potential to touch lives differently than any other.    Thusly my Industrial Art sprang forth.

Click here to see the first exhibit, the practice piece, of Industrial Art    .

Click here       for its home page. 

Next Week:    “That’s my Way” Segment Four.