I remember reading that if you are going to sell goats, you really need a website. Since we sell goats, I took their word and decided to try and get a website. I immediately hit two problems. Our goats are not a hobby, but a business. So they had to be able to pay for their website. I did not want to put a strain on their budget, so that knocked out all those wonderful webmasters who do those fantastic websites. They deserve their pay. And, the second problem was, I am a computer illiterate. The computer books for dummies are too high tech for me. I’m not sure what is lower then a computer dummy, but here I are.

On the advice of friends, I bought FrontPage 2002. This is suppose to be a wonderful program, helping people do the impossible, build a website. Between me and you, I read the instructions and I do believe it is written in a foreign language. I watched other people with FrontPage and they read and did it and cried out how easy it was. So, I don’t know if I’m the foreigner who hasn’t learned the language yet, or that book really is written in a foreign language, like I suspect. Anyway, using FrontPage, a long suffering friend basically set up a simple site for me and told me to put pictures on it.

I did. Somehow. And, three years later, haven’t touched the site for fear it would blow up. At least I didn’t touch it until a few days ago. Shame drove me to it, besides a lot of people telling me I needed to update.

With great apprehension, I clicked on my site on FrontPage and decided to update the bucks’ page. We did have some new boys that needed to be introduced. I carefully selected some pictures, deleted some pictures, inserted the new pictures, published it, and presto, wham-o, there it was.. Oh, My.

It wasn’t exactly as I had expected. Oh, My. My worse fears were realized. Well, next to worse fears. The site hadn’t blown up as I had expected, but there were these odd pictures, ones I had never even chosen, above my captions.

First reaction was hysteria, but the second reaction took over, laughter. The caption that read, "Esau in winter gear." He’s one of our young red bucks. There was a picture of our backyard dog, Alice, in her dog house with her pal, a chicken who did not like the chicken house. Evidently the computer did not like my picture selections and substituted some of it’s own.

Over the caption that read, "Lamech with yearling does," there was a picture of two kids climbing on a stall wall trying to reach our black Thoroughbred’s nose as he was trying to touch them. What on earth? "Gideon with yearling does," ended up having a picture of does wandering around in a snowstorm, not a buck in sight. And, the odd picture exchange went on throughout the buck page.

After laughing, I checked what the page on FrontPage looked like, and it looked just like I wanted it to, with correct pictures, but on the published web were all the above totally inaccurate pictures. I clicked on the FrontPage to publish that buck page again. Same thing happened, all the wrong pictures.

Hmmmmmm. Well, maybe the pictures need to be renamed. Maybe it was replacing pictures with the same numbers. So, I renamed all the pictures I wanted to use, set up FrontPage with the newly renamed pictures, hit publish, and then checked the internet website. Still the same pictures. Oh, My. What to do, what to do.

I decided to call the place that has our site on it. Don’t know the technical name for them, but maybe they might know what was going on, though it probably wasn’t their problem. I waited a half hour for someone to come on the phone to help me and it ended up being worth the wait.

He said when he checked the site, it was just as I described it the way it should be. It didn’t have a chicken and a dog, or a horse and baby kids touching noses, it had the pictures I wanted. Then why on earth was my computer still showing the wrong pictures to me, I asked. He said I needed to get rid of some "cookies" the computer had. I didn’t even know computers snacked.

He told me step by step what to do and we got rid of come "cookies", probably the crumbs were slowing the computer down anyway. Then he said we needed to get rid of some temporary history files, or some such thing as that. He said my computer was going on memory instead of actually going to the published site and seeing what was actually there. At least, that was the way I understood what he said. "Why you lazy ol’ thing," I told the computer.

After it was all said and done, I checked the site on the web and it was just the pictures I selected. After over three years of expecting something terrible to happen if I messed with the website, I wasn’t a bit surprised when it did. The way I figured, people had gotten tired of coming to my site by now, hoping for an update, and had given up on me. No one visited it now, so what did I have to worry about, no one would ever see my big boo-boo’s.

Now, that I have built up a little nerve, I think the Sale Page is next to try. I have a bunch of cute little bucks and does that are for sale and need to be put on that page. But, probably what will happen is the computer will change the pictures on me again and instead of having cute little bucks and does up for sale, there will probably be pictures of our house or tractors, or me and Lee up for sale. Gee, I hope we get a good price.