FlatPress

I have finished installing MacOs X under Virtual Box. In previous posts, I talked about upgrading my PC with this in mind. I used the following tutorial: https://www.makeuseo … -10-virtual-machine/
The only issue that I have is that the mouse is not responsive and jerks around as I try to select something. This may not work out as a development machine as I wanted.

Shaun just messaged me and told me had started proofreading the book. He said he had found a great many errors and would let me know when he finished.

Well, that puts the kibosh on launching tomorrow. I hope that I didn’t screw up my free kindle promotion. I unpublished the book, so let’s hope that the Amazon programs will show that.

5/26/22: Here we are a week later, and it still is not ready for prime time. Maybe I can get it going by June 2nd or 9th.

I knew that you could host web pages on GitHub.com, but I did not know how to go about it. The tutorials are all for Linux, and involve Jekyll software, which only runs on Linux.

95% of the world runs on Windows. I started slogging through the documentation, trying to figure out how to make things work. You can see the results on https://www.ErrorMessageEyes.com. Getting to the point where it worked was not easy.

I use Cloudflare as a domain registrar, so it was easy to set up the domain and DNS.

The rest was not obvious. I downloaded GitHub Desktop software, which is not all that useful, but it was good to set up a new repository and a branch for the project.

I keep the websites that I have on Google Drive so that I can work with them on any of the computers that I use.

I use Kompozer to create the website. The days of me being able to code CSS by hand are gone. My brain no longer works that way.

GitHub Desktop updates my repository and branch easily.

I had to log into GitHub on the browser to get at the options to use the GitHub pages option. It is a menu item hidden deep in the settings menu. I can’t remember what I did exactly, but I fiddled a bit with the settings, and when I set the custom domain to ErrorMessageEyes.com, it all magically worked. If I had to do it again, I am not sure that I could get it to work at first. If I wanted to add another domain, I think that I would have to add another repository and branch.

One last thing, if I make changes to the HTML, I have to clear the cache in Firefox in order to see them. There is some option that tells the browser to use the cached version of the page, even if the page has changed. I find this annoying.

GitHub looks like a fairly dumb hosting option without Java, PHP, Perl or any other scripting language. That’s why you need something like Jekyll to make it work. I wish that someone would create an easy way to create a static website that I could push to GitHub using Windows.

Tomorrow Eventually, my book goes up for free on the Amazon Kindle store. I feel like a mad scientist trying to conquer the world. I have this crazy plan to reach the top 10 in the Amazon book store Best-Seller list.

I will hit Hacker News with a link to my new domain, www.ErrorMessageEyes.com. I am emphasizing the word “free”. If it hits, it will be good for a few hundred downloads.

I joined six Facebook user groups that are based on cyberpunk or Science Fiction. Each group has 50,000 or more users, although I suspect that most of the users are either bogus or inactive. I will spam each group with a link to the new domain. With luck, they will be good for another few hundred downloads.

I can count on a dozen or so downloads from my FB friends. They might even share the page, helping me get a few more.

It is possible that I will be able to hit 500 downloads, and if it goes viral, I may make it up to a few thousand downloads. This would be enough. When the free period ends, I will still be high in the Amazon bestseller algorithm and may sell a few dozen books for real money.

But it is more likely that I fizzle and get 100 or so downloads at best. I’ll know better on Tuesday morning.

In a previous post, I talked about upgrading this server to 16Gig of ram. I had problems on the system after that. It threw all kinds of errors and this morning I came down, and it was frozen. Anyone trying to access one of my sites got the Cloudflare copy of archive .com.
I finally opened up the case and pulled two of the 4Gig chips and put in the two old 1Gig chips. Now I have 10Gigs. So far, so good.
I am going to wait awhile to see if it stays good. It has been running for about 6 hours now and there hasn’t been an issue. I have been using some memory hog image editing software, and it never burped.
Keep your fingers crossed.