Hello random joy

There are times when the internet confounds me. I work as a freelance developer and often spend time surfing and surfing to find things to inspire me or make me more engaged with my own inner creative. Last week something happened that started normal and then suddenly spiralled into some genuine interaction leading me to new a bright future of endless influences.

The catalyst a short trip to cssmania.com for some clever inspiration led me to Mr. Dan Klammer’s personal portfolio http://danklammer.com/, which is captivating in its own right. After a couple of usual poking around examinations I really started to look at his site. Read content, see social icons, etc, and discovered a little link to 8tracks.com or more specifically to a mix he had posted on 8tracks. The mix was great and his followers also had profoundly good taste in music and so I proceded to listen to their work and made an account for myself.

Someone out there is snidely thinking, “Good job grandpa, you finally made into the mixtape digital age.” Shut your food hole mouth breather.

I really truly love this site, if for no other reason that its elegantly simple and utterly usable interface allows me to take the art nerd passion of Rob Gordon and share it with friends and family. The selfless nature of making things for other people (like mixtapes) is a great exercise and it can turn you on to all sorts of great artistry that you didn’t know was there.

Thank you internet for making me believe in the mystery and magic of information, again.

Best, Z

A note worthy leap in technology

Content management systems are as fickle as the communities that support them, and often their improvements reflect general trends in the user base, but not many of them have the courage to leap out of their comfort zone and evolve into something else.

WordPress’ Thelonoius update, is something interesting. The once playful attitude of the blog software turned semi-cms is now making a turn into a big new world. With addition of taxonomies, custom menus and now custom post types, the once blog synonymous system is looking like its fellow Opensource juggernaut Drupal.

Good things come to those who love to wait for great improvements. I hope that this upgrade doesn’t foreshadow a negative change in the WordPress community.

Z

Show me the money

Freelance has a lot of interesting barriers to overcome. First you have to find a client, then you must determine what the scope of work will be, then you must determine the price for your work and when all is said and done you have to COLLECT!

It seems like, even when you agree to something with your client,  you may encounter some last minute changes in schedule that weren’t apart of the original deal. Namely, they don’t want to finish paying you because they think that they don’t need to pay you for your work. They don’t remember negotiating your rate, or asking you to perform the work in an unreasonably short amount of time. I’m almost convinced that they don’t care. They used you for what they wanted to accomplish and now suddenly they want out of the deal.

No matter how fairly you have treated someone, they want to take their guarantee back.

So here is how everything happened;

1. A gentleman asked me to create a WordPress theme in one day for a client of his
2. He agrees, after many back and forth conversations, to the price for the work
3. I complete the work that I could do, and even generated artwork to complete the design
4. I am on call as a consultant modifying theme settings and php templates
5. I send the final payment for the other half of what the total job was priced
6. Customer says that he is waiting for his client to pay him
7. I politely tell him that this is not my problem
8. He doesn’t agree

From my perspective, if you have hired me to do something and you agree to pay a certain price then it doesn’t matter to me what other arrangements you have regarding the same project. I am willing to go a little bit for people, but if you have agreed to pay me for my time, you had better follow through without any condition attached.

I will keep you posted as to whether or not he actually follows through.

Thanks for letting me complain a bit,

Zach “the unpaid” Freelancer