“You wouldn’t drink 9 year old milk”, says Microsoft, and then asks us a good question, “so why use a 9 year old broswer?”

http://www.microsoft.com/australia/technet/ie8milk/
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That would be my new name for McHost. You can ask why. You can ask why I still bother blogging about them at all, considering I’ve moved away from them. I’ll answer both questions, starting with the second one. Yes, I have moved away from McHost without paying them for the next period of service (the current one is ending on 30th April), but my friend is less lucky. Besides, though all clients of McHost have their websites offline at the moment (yes, again!), their own website is up and running, including their admin panel, through which their clients, in theory, can order more services and pay them money. And their notifications work also – so I’m still enjoying their spam telling me to pay this wonderful (not!) company more money. That’s more than I’d agree to put up with. Kiss my ash, McHost!
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Yes, I have moved all my websites, and McHost has lost a client. I believe I’m not the only one.
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I’ve just lost two of my web projects – Foreign Reader Says and Saratov Unknown. The reason: McHost – my host – has a business-related conflict with the organisation that provides a datacentre to them (Oversun Mercury). They have given different explanations of the situation – as different as day and night, but as one of the victims of their fight I hardly care who of them speaks the truth and who lies. Let them decide in court. But why couldn’t they warn the clients in advance?
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Everyone who has ever moved from table-controlled webpage design to purely CSS-driven layouts knows what a pain it is to make the side columns go to the bottom of the page and still have the same background. With tables it was so easy, but now this apparently obvious task requires non-obvious solutions. People have used graphics and JavaScript to achieve desired effects (because IE6, unfortunately, doesn’t support display:table-cell), but Matthew James Taylor has suggested a very clever solution that allows us to do it without using anything but pure CSS.
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I’ve had many jobs, but again and again I had to hand my bosses my letters of resignation and quit. For different reasons: some jobs didn’t give me satisfation, either because I was forced to do things I didn’t like to do, or because I had to do them the wrong way. Other jobs were quite satisfactory morally, but didn’t pay well, since there was too little work to do; after waiting for a while I’d give up. Sometimes there were too little co-operation from the boss – or too little trust, respect, understanding. All the time I was dreaming of a perfect job, where I would be asked to do things I’m best at, respected for what I do and paid decently for my work.
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It’s been four months since I launched my first blog, Foreign Reader Says, and the more I blogged about books, the more I felt that I wanted to blog about many other things too – in other words that I needed a general blog. So I was sketching designs, thinking about topics for my future blogging and waiting. Saitiria.com was registered at the same time with the two other domains, but I kept it for a business website – it seemed to be a good brand name. Once I even started building a website with this name, just as becoming officially an enterpreneur seemed a matter of days. But there was always a Plan B.
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