kartooner.com

What kind of world do we live in where an individual with a qualified Masters degree ends up working at a low-paying job with sub-standard benefits, as opposed to someone without qualifications ends up making $80 to 90-thousand dollars a year with solid benefits? It seems to me that certain aspects of culture can incur backwards results.

This thought spurred from conversations I’ve had with people who’ve earned their degrees and yet either haven’t applied themselves, or their luck hasn’t struck a successful chord. It’s an interesting conundrum and certainly merits an explanation. As I’ve gotten older and wiser I’m beginning to notice the whole picture (or the whole enchilada), details start to emerge and explanations for certain unexplainable events surface.

In this instance it seems that for most of the population “success” is measured by who you know. Moreover the connections you form and how they work for you in the business world, which as a result can lead you to a high paying position, if that’s what you’re looking for that is. For some, success might have different conotations and while having a high-paying corporate job is the ideal dream, for many having a degree (be it an Associates, Bachelors, Masters, etc.) doesn’t necessarily pave the way for your success.

Getting the degree is the first step, applying your skills and yourself is the most important in this process. From those I’ve talked to, this can be difficult and because of age restraints in the business world, you’re guaranteed to lose a lucrative position to a younger person who equals your qualifications. It’s a sad fact but it is reality, and many times as I’ve mentioned, it’s who you know and not just what you know.

There are no magic beans. You can’t always expect a beanstalk to grow and lead you to higher ground. However, what you can do is believe in yourself and improve your skills on a daily basis — refrain from becoming stale — and watch as new opportunities lay themselves before you. Just remember one thing; do this for yourself.

As Bill Cosby once said:

I don’t know the keys to success, but the first step to failure is trying to please everyone.

Over the past few days I’ve been busy re-coding and tweaking for the big move. At last, I’ve managed to port over the archives and site to Wordpress.

Essentially my most challenging task was trying to make it appear seemless. However, most of the time in this transition was spent re-coding various aspects of the site that I felt could be tighter. For instance; I never was entirely pleased with the Navigation menu, which has now been updated, thank you very much and as far as the style switcher is concerned it’s being re-coded as well to work smoothly with Wordpress.

My reasoning behind making the jump from MT to Wordpress wasn’t because of the recent pricing scheme released by Six Apart but mostly due to the fact I’ve always wanted Wordpress to power this site. I’m a supporter of Open Source software and use it everyday at work and at home, whether it be Firefox for web-browsing, Thunderbird for email, or Miranda IM for instant messaging I believe Open Source has a lot to offer, not to mention superb community support.

In regards to Six Apart’s decision to conform to a paying model, I say more power to them. Movabletype is an excellent CMS and in the near future I plan on deploying MT 3.0 on this server and powering the main kartooner.com site, which will serve as a portal of sorts. I realize I could have stayed with version 2.61, but I’ve heard great things about Wordpress and felt the need to make the plunge. Change my perspective if you may and work with something different.

Already I’ve noticed several noteworthy features of Wordpress. For one, the interface is beautiful and streamlined to the point where your entire site needs only one template. In MT it was necessary to set up Individual and Date-based archives. WP dynamically generates the URIs according to how you’ve set it up, therefore eliminating the need for several templates or includes for that matter.

The MT Import feature worked flawlessly as you can see. All 300+ articles have been transferred to Wordpress and it only took a matter of seconds. No re-building, no muss and no fuss. The only thing I can think of at this point would be that some of the articles used different plug-ins, but that’s an issue I’ll deal with in time.

All in all it was a successful transfer and merits special thanks to the team of Wordpress developers who’ve devoted their time and energy towards a wonderful product.

Let’s face it, customers can be finicky. Let me first explain that I’m working on a project that was initially built with Frontpage and therefore contains malformed code and other abtrocities I’d rather not dicuss.

The project was handed off to me like an Olympic torch. The client basically instructed me to create a new section of the site, and to make sure it looked consistent with the rest of the site. Working with the code I can tell you that I’d rather just redesign the entire site, but sadly this isn’t in the budget. Rather, the customer whose lead designer left the project, wants to keep the core design intact; nothing changed except for a few textual updates and section additions.

Working through the code and attempting to decipher it, I can’t help but visualize myself somewhere in the backwoods of Lousiana, knee-deep in a murky swamp. As I slosh my way through the weeds and overgrown plant-life, I finally build a small shack on unstable ground so to speak.

If the site was build with standards and semantics in mind, it would have taken half the time to construct the new section. However, because Frontpage created the code it took me double the time and effort to make it work. Wading through UPPERCASE tags, sloppy code and sytax just isn’t my idea of efficiency. Rather, at least to me, it’s HTML-Hell.

I can’t wait for the greenlight to re-build their site with XHTML, CSS and web standards. Until that point, however, I’ll have to live with trying to work my way through uneven ground, and put up with finicky customers who demand any outside links be removed.

Three or four years ago I set up an account with Blogger. Initially it was used to maintain news updates at a younger version of kartooner.com. Whenever I’d find a tidbit from the vast archive of the web I’d write about it with Blogger.

At the time I used an ‘iframe’ to incorporate Blogger’s blog*spot into my site. This was before Pyra Labs used banner ads and it didn’t look as obstrusive as it does today. Eventually I outgrew Blogger so to speak and contacted Six Apart to install Movabletype. Prior to this I had heard good things about Movabletype and it was either MT or Greymatter, which had fallen by the wayside due to lack of features.

I paid Ben Trott (second half of the Trott overlords) 20 bucks and he installed it in about 24 hours time. I remember feeling a sense of accomplishment that I was now using a CMS, flaunting it to my wife, who, understandably could care less. She was just happy I had something to write my thoughts with, so to speak and all was well.

When I switched hosts I remember the feeling of dread, thinking; “Oh no, I can’t shell out another 20 bucks for MT. What to do?” and so after a few Google searches I learned how to CHMOD (or change mode properties) on files via either FTP or a Linux/Telnet client. With my newfound power of CHMOD I studied the Movable Type installation documentation and taught myself how to get it to work.

Since that point I’ve had great success working with Perl, PHP, Javascript and a slew of other web scripts. It was only a matter of investing the time to learn how it worked and applying this knowledge accordingly.

Flash forward to May of 2004 when Douglas “Wired” Bowman and Adaptive Path announce the unveiling of the redesigned Blogger (I almost spelled blooger). To put it lightly and quite honestly I am floored by the re-coding and design tweakage that Bowman and team have accomplished.

In fact I dusted off my Blogger accounts and I’m happy to report that it’s fun again to work with Blogger, much as it was years ago.

The fresh and inviting design makes me want to explore it further despite its limitations. Unlike MT it doesn’t support plug-ins but utilizing Blogger code you can just as easily change the templates to your liking or use the 25+ new templates created by none other than Dave Shea, Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Cederholm and others.

Thank you Google for breathing new life into Blogger.