Musings of Old Man Joe

There and back again!

Internet

WordPress and the change in website design.

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I have been working on websites for better or worse since the late 1990’s. Of course then it was through yahoo and the website was much more basic than today.

Yahoo website from 1999

Image of Yahoo.com from 1999
web.archive.org

Of course a lot has happened since then; the thing that changed the way webpages are made was the iPhone in 2007, and the arrival of the tablet and iPad. The arrival of these new technologies precipitated responsive design, which means the sections or parts of a website will stack so they will fit in a smaller screen size.

In December 2018 Gutenberg was released for WordPress. This is a block based system to allow the website to be responsive. Other responsive design tools to mention would be bootstrap and masonry and there are many more all tailored to allow for responsive design. The difference is that these other tools are mainly used by developers and not for the general blogger. Before this block editor, much of the design aspects you would have to work with were HTML (the skeleton of the website), CSS (the styling of the website), and Javascript (the functionality of the website). Now in wordpress you have all the design elements on the side of the page, so no code necessary (or mostly no code). Since the initial release of Gutenberg there have been updates that have slowly improved the way the blocks worked, (I am no expert in Gutenberg, just a humble user) but I must say that it’s only recently I feel it is reaching it’s full potential.

Recently Gutenberg and wordpress have been talking about Full Site Editing . The reason I am actually writing this post about this is I don’t think bloggers, or I could say people who use the tools but don’t read about them as such, understand how much this is changing the way we create websites. My read on full site editing is the blogger or developer will have access to not just the page or post but also the page templates, widgets, menu, pretty much the whole site.
My understanding was that using the customiser meant you didn’t need a child theme, as the changes didn’t impact the wordpress core theme, but the customiser is being removed which in a way is sad as it’s being removed only as it’s becoming mainstream in use.
I believe that you will still need a child theme & the development of the child theme with full site editing isn’t there yet, but many developers are working on this so I expect a result soon.

Before windows 95 you were using DOS to use a computer, windows 95 changed all that! Block full site editing is going to do the same thing for website design, and it’s a big thing!

I have been creating and hosting websites for many years and I see the changes and wonder what the future will bring. Will there still be a market for freelancers to design websites if you don’t need to learn code any more? Or is it more that website design is in a transition? Now more then ever with people making their living on the internet & working from home, will easier tools create a new market for people to interact with the web?
Of course website design is more than just the website, it’s also managing the site back end in regards to hosting, software updates, and making sure its secure. So the freelancer is going to be around for quite some time. And because the changes are happening so quickly, if you have 15 websites some will be older themes than others and will require a different skill set to maintain.

So in one way things are getting easier, and in another way, more complicated, and that’s technology in a nutshell.

Blog Update

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Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

For all those entrepreneurs who mail asking asking me if I want to market my blog in so many ways. I say to you thanks but no thanks!
My humble blog is not for money or for marketing anything. I am not a writer and for this space I use to just share my experiences good and bad.

I thank you all for the offers but should you mail me please understand I shall not be replying to you. I hope you have a great day and I wish you all there best with your endeavors.

Peace! ??

Today algorithms rule our lives, this needs to change!

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Everybody who doesn’t watch Fox News (state TV) will know by now how much the Russians helped the Donald get elected President. The question I still have with this today is why him? They were helping him way early in the republican election process, why not one of the other republican candidates? Is it because they knew he could be manipulated? he has rich Russians staying in Trump tower New York & has for years. Why they decided to use social media to help Trump eludes me, yet they did!

Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash

FaceBook, Twitter, Google all use algorithms to determine what to show you when you log on or do a search. The search results are created to show you what the company thinks you want to see! that’s all well and good, but when you are looking for unbiased information this is not the way to go. You will be fed exactly what you need to keep thinking what you want to believe. The bubble that has politics so polarized can be said to have been create by a computer program. With ten likes on FaceBook the computer knows you as well as a member of your family.
There are many articles TechCrunch and this one CNBC that have mentioned the devil that is FaceBook. I actually deleted my account because it freaked me out when you look for something on your phone on Amazon, then go to Facebook and guess what you will see come up on an add?
Yup!

I know from reading Teri Kanefield that what is going on with Trump and the GOP is fear of change, the white ones are losing their dominance and they are fighting back. They feel that progress will leave them behind, and it is true. They want to take us back to a time that existed for only a rich few. It’s an idea that has no place in a modern society. But with the help of Fox News (state TV) the average person who alas chooses to watch (state TV) has been bombarded with propaganda that only
Paul Joseph Goebbels would be proud of. It’s the difference between Fox News (State TV) & NPR (News).

But what has made this much harder to fix, because fixing it is going to be very hard. The computer companies have to figure out a way to not only give results in search but also give credence to the results. Or at least fake news should be labelled as such, with citations as to why. FaceBook needs to get out of news period! It was the reason the Russians were so easily able to manipulate the American public against Clinton. When the Autocrats are in charge we don’t have a democracy. Legislation is being done by people who were not voted in as such but have manipulated the system so much that we weren’t able to vote them out!

In the end this all comes down to trust, I trust the news media, NY Times NPR, BBC, because that’s their job. Fox News is not a news outlet (State TV). When I lived in England I knew the Sun was a conservative newspaper, the mirror was more liberal. So you could read both and get a gist of what they were saying. I preferred the times or the independent as I liked my news more neutral. NPR is the equivalent of the BBC, which means you get news.
Bottom line is never trust just one news source, they can sometimes make mistakes. Because that’s life, it happens. But not everyday not every story, and most of the time it’s a fairly accurate account.

And so can computer algorithms, they can also make mistakes. they need to be tweaked every so often. As a web developer when google changes its algorithm which it did not too long ago. All the web developers were checking their websites ranking to see what changed. All the tech companies that we rely on for our information need to be more responsible of the outcomes of their business models. It’s not good enough any more to blame Russia because they could. We should be asking why did we let them?

I want to write about website design.

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gandalf using the computer
I feel like this quite often!

For the last few years I have been working toward having my own website design company. I have designed about half a dozen websites for friends and family. This I would say is most web-designers start in the business.

Younger ones may even have the chance to go to a code camp and get hands on coding experience, which is great of course. I actually want to go to a camp next year if I can afford it. Of course you have different opportunities if you’re in your twenties and even thirties than when you’re in your late fifties!! My expectations have to be more what I can do for myself as any company would prefer to hire a coder that would be a bit younger. I get this and I’m not complaining. I think I would much prefer to be a freelancer than part of a design business. But that is where getting into the business becomes a bit more of a challenge.

Where to begin?

As I mentioned before most people start this business helping out friends and family. It’s a great way to get the feet wet and you get an opportunity to iron out the bugs (should there be any of course!!)

It’s also really common for newbies (hate that term), to charge much less as they don’t have the confidence to ask for the $60-$90 per hour a full stack web developer can earn. For your info there are front end developers who create websites, there are coders who can also use software to talk to the server/database in case you had a store or needed some specific actions to take place like a membership etc: Facebook. The dynamic aspects require server side languages and having that knowledge makes you a full stack developer. Personally I am studying it but not sure if I want to go into applications as such, the answer is still out on that one!

What I have learned (short version)!

There are so many ways to build a website it’s crazy, but the things that you should consider are really not too hard to grasp.

How much are you willing to spend on a website?
The answer to this is how important is a website for what you are trying to achieve.
If you have a online business and this is the way you intend to make money it’s crazy important you don’t skimp. If your site goes down for a few days and you lose hundreds of dollars it would be a hard lesson to learn.

Is your website not an online business but just to promote a static business?
I would still make sure it’s hosted with a good website hosting company. You don’t want any downtime and you don’t want to hacked! Yes I secure my websites and many attempts have been made. The cheaper hosting companies will look after their computers but not your website, you are responsible for that. Always back up you’re site!

Mobile/Tablet friendly
Nearly 50% of website traffic is now either mobile phone or tablet, if your website is responsive you’re good. if not you will go down in google rankings!

WordPress or not WordPress?
It was only recently when a friend asked me to look at her website as it needs updating, it’s not mobile friendly it is not WordPress or another CMS (content management system). So in order for her to update the content she would have to use an FTP (File transfer protocol) to update her website using html and she doesn’t know code.
I looked at the code for her website and it was fine, but just being the html there was no easy interface for a regular person to add or change content.
I have coded many websites and some are interactive using different CSS libraries like Bootstrap. But to have the non coder use their website it truly needs a CMS either WordPress or Drupal.

Free Websites
Last I want to talk about the free websites, you can create a website using wordpress.com or wix.com and with wordpress for a not too large sum of money you can even have your own url (yourname.com).
There will be advertising and you are limited to what you can add but it’s doable for a web presence. Wix to be honest I don’t know much, it’s probably quite reasonable for the free page but any more content and functions will probably require some kind of payment.

In the end the choice is always yours, but don’t bet tempted to spend money on this unless it’s required. Remember you have choices!

Peace!

Blade Runner 2019

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I remember watching blade in the early 1980’s, and to be honest although I loved the movie I was young and appreciate it much more today than I did then. Just like 2001 a space odyssey which was also way ahead of it’s time, I wondered back then what the world would truly be like in the years to come, and if I would even see it!

Flying through Los Angeles in 2019

It’s funny how science fiction in many ways is being brought to science fact, but not exactly how we envisioned and not in the time line we thought.
After the Moon landings in the late 1960’s until 1972 we all (well myself anyway) thought that after such an event there would be no turning back.

Well as we know now those missions were not really for science but just a pissing contest between the USSR & the USA. It was a shame but just after that the world stepped back to the time before the moon shot and carried on arguing about money and religion and rights (all very worthy subjects but not for this post).

So in the 1980’s and 90’s the world of computers, hardware and software start the play on the technology of our time. Hardware & software have always been almost racing to see who can get ahead, it was never an even race. It was probably when the iPhone came out in 2007 it was the catalyst for the tech companies to get their shit together and produce the solid state hardware in bulk and at a decent price to let the technology move forward.
it would seem there always has to be a profit or war for things to move forward.

blade runner movie poster with Harrison plus cast

Blade Runner Final Cut Set in Los Angeles in 2019

So here we are in 2019 the time of replicants and Blade Runners out to find them. How have we done with the real world?

Well due to Star Trek we have our mobile communicators, automatic doors are all over the place. We can ask computers and most of the time they can give us an answer (excluding Siri of course). Uber states it will have flying cars in or around 2020.

So considering we the people did stop after the moonshot due to budget cuts and domestic stuff, the timeline hasn’t been too bad considering!
It’s not as dark in Los Angeles as it is in the movie, but of course it was trying to get across a future when people didn’t try to stop climate change or worry about genetic manipulation or disease. In George Orwells 1984 big brother was the government and people for years have been worried about the government watching you. Well in many countries the government does watch you. But even worse is corporations using apps and the internet to watch not only what you do and see, but save the information to sell that information to whoever, and the people went willingly!

I will be optimistic for the future and say even though some people voted against their best interests that the times will change, mistakes have been made in the past and they can be rectified.

Peace!