Sorry, Cicero.

Still haven't found out what happened to Grissom's squeeze, on account of all hell broke loose on another front. Well, when I say 'all hell', I mean someone else's irritation became my crisis.

One of the reasons I went all quiet, blogwise, for a bit was that I found a new toy - Serif WebPlus 10, to be precise. (Amazon sell it for £40, of course.) The last time anyone had had a go at a website for our Parish church it all ended in tears, so I offered to give it a go. It meant starting from scratch as the last person to try it had flounced off in such a huff that there was no way he was going to share any of the work he had already done (alas, for from the little I saw it was a nice job).

Knowing absolutely zip about websites and building them, it took me a bit of time to realise that the package we had (123-reg. Ugh. Horrible user interface, counter-intuitive site structure, ghastly instant-build options, answers to FAQs which tell you nothing apart from how to buy more of their services and a fantastically speedy and helpful support team. Bah.) was useless, then I had to work out what I could usefully use (WebPlus 10 - just lovely), and design the thing. The rector's brief was - well, brief. 'Orange and purple' he said. 'Orange and purple, with a picture of me.'

And then the content.

Ah me, the content. A while ago First Nations tagged me to to produce a list of ten authors who should be beaten with a bat until they STOPPED, and to my shame, Cicero was on there. (To my embarrassment, one of the reasons, and the specific reason for this apology, doesn't get a mention in that poorly-worded post.)

'Qui tacet, consentiret'. 'He who is silent, agrees.' Or, 'I'll take that as a Yes then, shall I?' Poor sod delivered his unarguably beautifully cadenced speeches to a houseful of Senators, not one of whom had the courage / could be arsed to express an opinion. Imagine. You take ages over a presentation, you write reams of words on subjects you know NOTHING about, because the person who does know, won't do it, and when, heaven forfend, someone does offer you some information you spend ages trying to turn the sow's ear of clerical prose into the silk purse of - well, something that makes sense, and no-one expresses an opinion. They just sit there. You ask, and ask, and ask 'Is this right'? 'Should I change this?' 'What do you think?' AND NO-ONE SAYS ANYTHING. Oh they might murmur the occasional 'Well Done', but contribute? Nuh-Uh.

I'm ranting, aren't I?

The point being, that two weeks before I'd planned to make the site live, Rector calls, all of a dither, saying he needs the site up NOW. So that's taken care of all the idle moments in the last three days, and I still don't know whether I've done it right. On account of, any changes to do with DNS take 24 - 48 hours to propagate across the net. I need the domain name to point away from the (ghastly) temporary page supplied by 123 (phtui) (that's spitting by the way) and at the actual domain where I've uploaded the site. I think. So by this time tomorrow, I'll know if I've delivered what I promised I could, or whether my name is actually Mud.