Chaos Magnet

Internet Consultant, my eye

A couple of years ago, I thought about being an Internet Consultant. Now don't laugh. I've been doing this for a goodly number of years now; I've been on the Internet longer than the World Wide Web has. But before I really got started, lots of firms started popping up selling courses and promising that you can make big money being an Internet Consultant. In other words, give us some money and we'll teach you the buzzwords you need to scam all these people who don't know what a web site is.

Needless to say, I changed my mind about hanging that title on my shingle.

Today I remembered why. I belong to a fairly sizable number of mailing lists that involve technical issues that your average person really doesn't need to worry about, like XML-DEV and RSS-DEV. Today this message came across www-html, the group that defines (or tries to define) the tags that go into various versions of HTML.

Names have of course been changed to protect the clueless.

------------------
Hello,

We cannot seem to get our site to work consistently in AOL. If you visit www.mywebsite.com or http://food.myothersite.com, it give the Web Site Not Responding error. However, if you visit www.myothersite.com the page immediately displays, but when you click on the link leading you to the shopping cart, http://food.myothersite.com, you once again receive the WSNR error. The only difference that I can see is that we have the w3c 4.01 on the Main My Other Site Page which is not made with the shopping cart program we use, Comersus, but is a stand alone page. We tried to place the 4.01 code in the cart, but it will not accept it. The cart developer says it is AOL's problem and not theirs.

Could you please help me with resolving this problem?

Thank you so much for any help and your consideration.

Sincerely,

Jane Doe
Internet Consultant
www.myconsultingsite.com
PH: 408-555-5555
FX: 408-555-6666
Email: jane@myconsultingsite.com
------------------

For those of you who are not "Internet Consultants" and thus have no reason to know why this is to ridiculous, I'll give you a heads-up. The site http://food.myothersite.com is the same whether you go directly or you get there via a link to a shopping cart. It's not appearing because the hosting provider -- which may not even be AOL, who knows? -- doesn't have DNS set up properly.

It has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the version of HTML on her pages.

There. Rant over. I feel better now. It just makes me crazy when people latch onto a title that they clearly aren't qualified for just because it sounds good. For heaven's sake, call yourself a Web Designer. There's no shame in that! Leave Internet Consultant for those of us who've put in the time and the work to learn this stuff.

(Whatever her problem was, it's apparently fixed now.)

Technorati tags: