Musings of Old Man Joe

There and back again!

Personal comment

Thoughts

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Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com

I made my first website in the 1990’s, it was absolutely terrible as I really had nothing to say, yes that may still be the case but I ask you to be kind!
I was living in Korea town in Los Angeles, great noodle shops $8 dollar bowl with all you can eat Kimchi. Life in some ways was good. I worked in security for fifteen years until 2020 and pandemic.
I did enjoy my job and I do miss the people I worked with, I intended the website business to be something I could do when I retired as it would be a working from home thing.

2020 brought many changes, personally they brought frozen shoulder, loss of home of fifteen years, early retirement from security job, move to Ireland from Los Angeles.
I hear you say that’s not bad, and moving to Ireland has been great. But with the lockdown and having to leave our home in Los Angeles it took well over a year to figure out we were suffering a withdrawal of some kind.

Our life here in Ireland is better and there is no denying that. But that’s not what I am mean when I say withdrawal. 99% of my family are from this town I am now living in. If I throw a stone in the centre of town I will likely as not hit a family member.

But we have friends in Los Angeles that we have known for twenty or Thirty years who if I met I can give them a big hug and catch up.
I don’t think we realised for a long time we missed that.
It was better for both of us once we realised what the problem was. We are better now and looking forward to visiting California in November.

So what I do now is make websites, I am self taught and my skill set is improving all the time. The funny thing I have discovered is as a freelancer I have to do everything involved in the design aspects of the website. It’s not just the case of putting stuff on a page, there is the Brand, logo and having to manipulate images. It’s moved me in the design direction which is interesting.

The other aspect of the learning website design is that allot of people pay allot of money for websites and they were robbed. On the other hand there are instances where a business decides to try and save money on a website, maybe they decide to manage it themselves and not pay a person to manage it for them. If it’s a business that takes money through the website as a store or subscriptions beware on trying to save as that can come back to bite.

Every week people try to hack into my websites, I have security in place and multiple backups. My wife has learned over the years the term backup, she didn’t do that much before she met me.
I have two solid state drives and cloud backups. Some stuff is too important to be lost. I recently updated my wife’s website as she has her second book of poetry coming out in August. I also have another website coming soon for a client in Town. It’s a groomers and I hope maybe next week to pop it up.

Lot’s of businesses here use Facebook as a online presence. I understand this as it’s free, but the reason it’s free isn’t because Facebook is benevolent, they make money advertising on your business page. Maybe they show the other business in town that do the same thing as you. If you have a brick and mortar store would you let a stranger design your shop window. Search engines will in the end pick up your facebook page but they won’t unless you are searching for the name. If you sell burgers and search for burgers in an area it won’t bring up your facebook page, but it will bring up a website. A website is the store front the whole world can see (except china and Russia, North Korea and a few Arab speaking countries), but it still leaves quite allot.

When it comes to business and anything where money is involved I suppose it comes down to trust. And that’s a hard one to create unless you can give it time and have some people who can speak up for you.
Over a year ago I was talking to an Author who wanted to update his website, there were many pages and I think he thought I was going to charge him a fortune to retype the pages again. It was after we parted ways I figured that was his issue, Of course now I could tell him there is such a thing as copy and paste. But it just goes to show you have to trust the person you’re dealing with isn’t going to screw you over or at least be honest with you.

The world is a crazy place at the moment, the war in Ukraine, and the rise of Fascism in the United States. It makes me worried for the future, I hope my friends in the United States are safe and getting ready to vote

I thought I would finish with pet pictures!

Left to right Jade & Blossom
Left to right, Daisy 20 years old, & Poppy 15 years old.

Perspective

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Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

It was a small dog, about 18 pounds, looked a bit like a Yorkshire terrier. It walked along the path with determination. Sometimes it would carry a smaller animal mostly it was just by itself. It was a smart dog, avoiding the humans also on the path, stopping when it had to let them pass. before continuing on the path. Every so often there is a door or gate on the path which we all have to pass through. The dog will wait patiently for the break so it can pass through safely.

I am on path with the dog when I sense a commotion coming from behind us. There was a container on the side of the path, a large metal container used to transport goods on a ship. The side of the path is muddy and the container is sinking into the mud. People are scrambling to remove what looks like paintings from the container before it sinks and the items are lost!

Suddenly the container moves and I hear a scream as somebody is stuck under the side of the container. The person I hear yelling for them is somebody I know. I fear the person under the container is also somebody I know. I head back to lend a hand to try and get the person out hoping they are still alive.

We find a metal scaffolding pole and place a wooden beam on the mud to act as a brace so we can lift the container on one side to pull the person out from under!

The room is dark and I hear a snoring pug beside me, it’s early and outside is quiet.
My life like many has not always been easy, but on this day at this hour I consider myself to be a very lucky man.

WordPress and the change in website design.

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apple laptop notebook office
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.

Winter is Coming!

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Not Game of Thrones related post!

Back Garden with the grass cut.

I cut the grass last week before it rained & I hope this will be the last cutting until the new year. It’s actually been warmer this week than expected, a last little bit of heat before the cold sets in.
We have a storage which we keep the furniture we brought from Los Angeles as the house we are in came furnished. On reflection we took too much stuff with us but with the lockdowns and the trauma of being kicked out of our home after fifteen years we were a bit confused.

Noticed a month back that the storage (yes I am still writing about that) was damp and boxes were not loving this, and the books & clothes inside the boxes were loving this even less!
So we undertook a major save the stuff operation, placing things that suck the humidity out of the air inside and removing the damp boxed and purchasing plastic tubs to replace the cardboard! I must admit it’s the first real project we have had with purpose since we got here a year ago. And it felt good to have something to do and have a result.
I also finally got to the point that a could ride my motorcycle (couldn’t transfer my American license).
I took it out for a spin yesterday after eighteen months. It stalled a few times which could be due to crap in the engine which will burn out or it will need to get a tune up.

I do feel that we are finally getting used to our new place, and we have made a plan to go back to California later next year and say goodbye as we were not permitted to do that before we left. I think that will help us both and have closure and we can move on.
I know I say this every blog but I know we have been so lucky and many people have not. This doesn’t diminish what we had to go through, moving home and the stress involved. I in fact know a few people who moved due to the circumstances and changes over the last few years, viral and political!

So in this weird and crazy world I am happy to be able to write a blog post about cutting the grass!
Peace.

One Year Later in Ireland

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Here I am in Ireland after a year and the world is coming to grips with the new normal, I read that in the 1918 Flu somewhere between 17 and 50 or as many as 100 million people died because they had no vaccine and it just had to take it’s course.
Today 5 million people have died due to covid-19 or as many as 17 million depending on how it was counted.

As bad as that is and as grateful as I am we now live in a world that can make a vaccine that will help us get through this. With booster shots every year and growing immunity as our bodies get used to covid it will in a few years be just like a flu shot.

But for those of us who moved out of everything we knew to a better place the feeling of loss is there. I was forced to move from my home. Under different circumstances we always intended to leave and find a nice place to settle to. But being forced puts you in a state of limbo. I have struggled with this since I moved and waiting for the world to get out of the pandemic just makes it linger. What will my new life look like and when will it begin?

I know how lucky I am in so many ways but that doesn’t mean it’s not frustrating to have your life in a flux. You want to have a feeling of home and happy but there is an unsettled feeling that doesn’t go away. I just keep hoping I will in time as get used to my life here. We didn’t so much move to Ireland as we left Los Angeles and that makes a difference.

It doesn’t mean it’s bad here at all, it’s a much better life an almost every way, but that’s not what gives you the feeling of home. It’s more than just the place you are living at. I have no regrets in what we had to do, I just hope we will figure out how to emotionally move now that the bodies have done it!