Where am I now?
Welcome to the style center of Jemima's Trek, which describes my personal trek through the swamps and popups of free web space.
If you're merely lost, try the site map. If something isn't working, see the discussion of what sorts of technical difficulties you may encounter at Jemima's Trek, below.
The confused and the curious can use this section of the site to find out about the various free web hosting services I've used or considered using as mirror sites, some tracking and monitoring services, redirectors, and email follies.
For those interested in site design, my style sheets and graphics, blog, and other fun bells and whistles are described as well.
Common Technical Difficulties
The commonest problem is getting only part of a long story. This happens most often at Crosswinds, so it should be easily solved by going to one of the mirror sites instead. You can also try reloading the page or clearing your cache.
This page should show up in two shades of tan with a yellow and white nested border. The main Trek-related pages should be yellow with chevrons down the left-hand side. If everything is boring and grey, then your browser may not support style sheets (CSS). All pages should still be legible.
The background image of those pages which have them should appear at the side or top, out of the way of the text. If it appears behind the text, so that you can't read anything, it's your browser's fault. Perhaps you have an old, sick browser. I recommend Mozilla for optimal, standards-compliant viewing.
Stylesheets
Everything fancy here at Jemima's Trek is done with stylesheets. The stylesheets handle background images, background color, fonts, the variety of link colors, and layout, including indenting and the extra space at the bottom of story pages.
All stylesheets are free for any use. For stylesheets from the static pages, see the yellow page. That page also covers images. For blog style, see the next section.
Blogging
I started out blogging with Blogger, but now I use MoveableType. My old Blogger templates are available on the blog page.
I've made several several stylesheets and javascript hacks for MoveableType. To see them in action, read the blog and click on the Style links to the right. To see the technicolor stylesheet on its own, check out the sample blog.
The blog stylesheets and javascripts are free, but the latter need a bit of explaining, for which see the blog page.
Free Web Space
The free hosts I currently use are Freeshell, Prohosting, and Netfirms. Freeshell has cgi without ads, but requires a one-time donation of a dollar and does not offer ftp for that dollar. Prohosting and Netfirms offer ftp and cgi, but have in-line ads. For more details, see my free stuff page.
Tracking, Counting, and Monitoring
The difference between a counter and a tracker is that a counter just counts hits on a particular page, while a tracker collects more information - exactly which pages on your site were visited, what the referring page was, down to even which browser and operating system the visitors use.
A monitor, on the other hand, checks whether your web site is up. Free ones tend to check once an hour or less. You can read about my past monitors and trackers on the free stuff page, and my current homebrewed tracker on the scripts page.
Redirection
Redirection seemed like a good idea back when I was migrating from site to site on regular basis. I settled on cjb.net as a redirector service, and it was ad-free until very recently. Now, however, it has popups, so I don't pass out that URL anymore. Jade still uses jadeeast.cjb.net, though, since it shortens her URL here by a few directories.
For more redirectors, all of which seem to pop-up, see the free stuff page.
Email and Newsletters
I've learned through bitter experience never to post an unspam-proofed email address on the newsgroups. My other use for cjb.net is the virtual email addresses, specifically webmaster@jemimap.cjb.net. I use that all over this site, unspam-proofed, because spammers don't tend to email webmasters.
I never thought I'd have an updates list, but I started one on Yahoogroups and still send out updates, every now and then. Otherwise, I just use my email at freeshell, which I will not reveal here. For a full saga of the email and updates list, see the free stuff page.
Bells and Whistles
There are just a few off-site bells and whistles here, like the Sev Trek Cartoons on the home page, the links page and the Buffy page. I don't belong to any webrings or link to any topsites rankings, since such off-site links tend to draw people...off the site. However, I do have that page of links, more for my own convenience than anything else.
My favorite funky web thing is Wiki. WikiWeb is a family of programs that allow any user to edit web pages through a simple interface. I learned about wikis when I was researching knowledge base programs for work. I've set up three fanfic wikis, for the JetC23 Collective, the J/C Collective and CSFic, the C/7 mailing list. You can find out more about wikis (and try your hand at them) by following those links.
There's also a wiki on-site; it's a fairly high-powered one, using TWiki. It's useful for keeping pages that need to be more static than a blog, but more easily updated than a normal web page.
webmaster@jemimap.cjb.net
jemimastrek-subscribe@yahoogroups.com for updates