Starting tomorrow, I’ll be running all the web operations for DeskGig.com, an American only freelancer website.
I’m not political or nationalistic at all, but it makes sense to try to capitalize on trying to capture the American freelancer market, and I’ll tell you why. As a freelancer, I cannot compete with Pakastanis or Filipinos on price. I might be as good as they are, but they will beat me on price every time. That means that I don’t even bother with looking for gigs on oDesk or elance. Am I the only American freelancer who doesn’t bother with those sites? I have my doubts.
Also, as someone who has used an offshore development center in the past, I can tell you that the issue of communication is a big one. I’m on Pacific Standard Time (UTC-08:00) and dealing with someone on Philippine Time (UTC+08:00) is a super pain in the tucus. As a business, I would much rather prefer dealing with someone who I can communicate with during regular US business hours.
So yeah, 9 hours to go before I start my new job running the website for a new startup in Spokane, Wa. Good times!
EDIT: It is unfortunate, but due to circumstances, I ended my relationship with VentureLeap, along with the rest of the team. I hope all of the individuals involved in the development are able to pick up the pieces and move on. No hard feelings.
Yo, dawg. We heard you liked startups, so we started a startup that helps startups start up.
The website is mine, designed with the assistance of the lovely Stephanie Guerra and the less lovely but equally helpful Cameron Spear.
Everyone on the VentureLeap team has contributed an immense amount of time and energy on getting this startup going, and we’re hoping to make something of it.
I love Konquerer and Opera, really I do, but not at the expense of all that extra cruft in my CSS that only .5% of my total visitors will ever use. So how do I globally remove all Opera and Konquerer vendor-prefixed CSS3 from my Compass processed CSS?
At the top of your base SCSS file, add the following Compass variables:
It happens all the time for everyone else, but just now I’ve seen the new Google UI for logged-in users. They do rolling updates and beta tests like this, grabbing a sample of users to test their new stuff out on before it goes to the public in general.
I’ve LOLed over the most controversial function added to WordPress 3.0: The capital_P_dangit function. Basically, it forces WordPress to be spelled with a capital P, as decreed by Matt M and the other core developers.
Some people are angry that it is an arbitrary editorial control mechanism, so there’s been a huge fracas on the wp-hackers email list. Quite hilarious, actually, given the relatively small impact that the code itself has.
Lost amongst all of the brouhaha was John Bloch’s contribution on how to easily remove the filter:
Simply add that code to your functions.php file and call it a day
WordPress 3.0 final was released into the wild today, and guess what? I’m using it.
I’ve been using the WordPress 3.0 RC1, RC2, and RC3 for a while, using the WordPress Beta Tester plugin, and so far it’s been relatively painless. A few of the plugins weren’t working, which I stupidly forgot to note, so that I could pass it along to the plugin developers, but overall it has been very stable.
Who’s to say how much of a pain it’s going to cause me at work, given the proprietary nature of some of my company’s in-house developed plugins. We try to build things the “WordPress” way, so hopefully there are only a few minor hiccups.
As to security, I once again wish that WordPress would adopt a two-pronged release strategy. Yes, go ahead and release the latest, greatest bleeding edge version as your main release. But please, PLEASE, start a long-term-support (LTS) branch. Or not. Whatever.
The back-end is a touch cleaner, although I can’t exactly put my finger on all the changes, other than the color. (I suppose I could do a side-by-side, but that would be too easy, wouldn’t it.)
Long story short, I’m working on building some new theme templates that take advantage of the new menu system and a few of the other additions. It’s exciting finding a new theme function! (NERD!)
EDIT Ha ha. Yeah, about this post… I really do like Posterous, but since I develop using WordPress, I always need a place to be the alpha testing stage. So I un-switched. So shoot me.
I’ve been looking at it for quite some time, but I’ve finally pulled the trigger. My website/blog/home of the awesome sauce, dangayle.com, has now been ported completely over to Posterous. As a web designer, I love the fact that I could totally do whatever I stinkin’ wanted on my site. I could host images, I could scrap the design at will and start over (which I have done, just not recently). WordPress really is one of the best solutions for a lot of people’s needs. But, as it turns out, it’s not the solution to MY needs.
WordPress = Boring and old and crappy
The problem is that I’m bored with it. I’m sick of the micro-updates that totally jack up the website every three months because someone introduced a new bug into the system. The fact that they haven’t branched WordPress into a secure long-term support (LTS) branch and a current branch has ruffled a few feathers, including mine. I’m sick of having to deal with updates. And, quite honestly, I’m bored with PHP, the foundation upon which the WordPress empire was birthed. No offense to PHP programmers, but the language feels old tech. I’m not even a fully qualified programmer, but I can see it. It Python the be-all, end-all? Judging by the size of the stupid O’Reilly “Learning PHP” and “Programming PHP” tombs, Python must be a beast. I don’t want to learn it simply because I like the O’Reilly books, but I don’t want to heave those things around. Maybe Ruby is the answer. Anywho, I’m straying off the point.
Easier to post = more posting = better blog
And while I control it, I never post to it like I should. A blog that no one posts to is simply fruity. Posterous makes it easier to post to because it uses an interface that I use all the time: email. I’m always emailing stupid videos or interesting links or whatnot to people. What I like about Posterous is that I can simply add post@posterous.com to the recipient list, and BOOM! Tough Actin’ Tinactin. I mean, BOOM! Posted to my blog. Like this John Madden Youtube video:
In conclusion
There really isn’t a conclusion. It’s going to be an ongoing debate in my mind, and at my place of work, what is the best platform/what is the best programming language/etc. I honestly think that we should be able to accomplish anything we can think of at this point, and if it’s a language or a platform that is getting in the way, then it’s old tech. Time to bring out yer dead and toss it on the pile, even if it’s not quite dead yet. So, yes, Posterous. I like it. I got it set up, posts imported, domain transferred, everything. Less than an hour. Sweet.
If you haven’t read “Don’t Make Me Think”, you’re an idiot. Ok, not an idiot. Just not-educated in web usability. I recently purchased his new book, “Rocket Surgery Made Easy”, which is his expansion his chapter on usability testing on a budget, and I’m excited to get through it.
I spotted this video on Lukas Mathis’s ignore the code blog, and I thought it was worthwhile re-posting it here.
Although Google Analytics is great, for the price AMAZING, sometimes you want to look at your site numbers a little differently. That’s why I like looking at my Awstats from time to time to get into the nitty-gritty.
One problem though, when you realize that it doesn’t exclude YOUR visits from the logs. (Wow! There are a lot of Macintosh users with Firefox in the Spokane vicinity looking at my blog! I must be popular!)
To exclude your IP or host from the stats analyzer, locate the following file on your server, and open it with your text editor of choice:
Locate this section in the .conf file:
Within the SkipHosts="YOUR IP AND ANY OTHER YOU WANT TO EXCLUDE" section, enter the IP address of your network connection, and hit save.
Voilá! You are now skipped from your stats. Apparently, this doesn’t work retroactively, so you should see your stats changes from this point on.
