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Entrance to the EAA AirVenture 2008

My husband and I recently treated our kids (and ourselves) to the EAA AirVenture 2008 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.  It was a lot more exciting than your average weekend family outing.  The day we went, it was waaaay too hot to walk through the entire grounds.  Buy the time we reached the Warbirds area, we were melting.  Luckily, a storm blew past in the afternoon to cool us down, so we stayed to see most of the air show… which, by the way, was fantastic.

They call the EAA AirVenture “The World’s Greatest Aviation Celebration”, and they’re not kidding.  There was so much to see and do that it was almost overwhelming.  We missed some things including the museum, but it didn’t really matter.  There were plenty of vendor exhibits, aircrafts on display, demonstrations, videos, workshops, and the like to keep a person busy for days.  For $40 you could even go on a helicopter ride, and $55 would get you on a Tri-Motor flight.  B17 rides were available for a whopping $425.
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For my birthday this year, my husband decided to kill two birds with one stone:  he bought me a gift certificate for a series of three one-hour full body massages at the Hands for Heart and Soul Wellness and Empowerment Center in Westfield, WI. It’s the romantic gift that says “I love you”, and also spares him from “the look” when he’s too tired to rub my feet.
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iPower, also known as iPowerWeb, has been my preferred hosting provider for years. They offer a very affordable hosting package for $7.95/month that goes far beyond what you get from some other providers. My first hosting accounts were at places like Yahoo and Readyhosting. Some were OK, others were downright terrible. After a particularly sour experience with a company whose name I can’t even remember, the search for the Great Provider began, and iPower is where I settled my roots.

Granted, their support has never been great. It would sometimes take over a day to get an answer by email, or 20 to 30 minutes on hold when calling. At times I even felt like I was training their tech support staff.
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This week I had the joy of experiencing X-Cart. And what joy it was. How I love thee, X-Cart!

(Ummm… yeah… Can you hear the sarcasm in my typing?)

Let’s start with some ugly truths. This shopping cart software is far from ideal for beginners. It’s certainly feature-filled, but the sad thing is, it’s so counter-intuitive that third-party add-ons have been created just to make X-Cart “easy to use”. What?!? Shouldn’t it be easy in the first place? Oh well, guess I’ll have to fork out some money for that add-on. (NOT)
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I finally decided to take a whole weekend off from work. Last month I was going to write an article about the benefits of taking personal time for yourself, but I had so much work to do that I never got around to it. I really do believe it’s true, but this particular rule never seems to apply to me.

This morning I was feeling a wee bit guilty about the emails piling up in my inbox. Determined not to do any “real” work, I decided that Sunday is a good day for cleaning out spam messages from my Yahoo account. Being the pack rat that I am, I can’t delete anything until I know it’s absolutely useless. So I gave the Rolling Stone email newsletter a once-over, and this article caught my eye: ” Rock Bloggin’: Kelly Clarkson and John Mayer Spill Their Guts on the Web “.
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My dad went on vacation to Yellowstone Park and Mount Rushmore during July. He returned with over 1200 photos and a dozen video clips from the trip. While we were watching the seemingly neverending slideshow, he commented, “Wouldn’t this be so much better with music?” 

My dad is one of those people who does a lot for others and never really asks for anything in return. Anyway, he’s my dad, and he’s getting old. That’s why I’ve spent all of my spare time for the past two weeks turning his vacation photos into a full video production on 2 DVDs.

For those of you who have never attempted such a project, let me tell you that it is tedious and all-consuming.
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Following up on my last post in eCommerce, here’s my report on PayPal’s Website Payments Pro.
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For quite some time, I’ve been exploring ways to make it easier for people to make payments online. There’s the old standby, PayPal, and more recently I’ve been looking at Google’s Checkout API. In their most basic forms, both of these online payment solutions are easy to implement.
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Welcome, and thanks for joining me at the Foxglove Blog!

My name is Dorinda Bohnsack, but please feel free to call me Dori. Like the fish in Finding Nemo. “Yes, I’m a natural blue…”

I started designing websites professionally in 2002 under the business name “Dirt Cheap Web Designs”. While a name like “Dirt Cheap” is catchy and attracts a lot of customers, it also limits me to being, well, dirt cheap! Sometime around January 2008, “Dirt Cheap” will officially become “Foxglove”. Hence, the “Foxglove Blog”.

Through this blog, I hope to share my insight into the world of website design and development. Some other stuff might sneak in, too, like gardening, music and movies.

Whatever the topic, your comments are always welcome… as long as you’re not a naughty spammer! (Why would I want Viagra, anyway?!?)

Again, thanks for stopping in!