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

Mac OSX Dev Space – Basic Commandline & MySQL Imports

This will be the first in a short series about knowing your development environment and how to make it your bitch! Now I know some of you designers out there, and you know who you are, have not a clue about where to begin when creating virtual instances on your Apache environment. You just downloaded MAMP and suddenly you think that somehow that is enough. Save me your BS encrusted psycho babel about how this is information that only the server wizards need to know. Even if you never become completely proficient in this area, it is worth breaking your install to test these tools and become more fluent in the ways of the Terminal, or shell to the UNIX crowd.

Today we start with MAMP and move to the TERMINAL. In the next article I will go over some cool commands for GIT and SVN as well as setting different editor applications to run in your TERMINAL.

Quick sob story, a few months back I forced my machine into corrupted library purgatory and had only the Install Disks and Terminal access at my command. At 3 in the morning I faced the obliteration of months of work due to my lack of diligence keeping back-ups. After examining the TERMINAL and asking it for simple information like if it could read my file library, I found that I could copy files from my dying drive to the portable entirely in command line.

TERMINAL

Simple commands that you will use day in and day out:

• cd — change directory
• ls -al — list all items in a table that shows ownership and permissions alphabetically ascending
• [control key] + [C key] — cancel the command that you just entered
• sudo ‘command’ — tell the system to overwrite all permissions and authenticate yourself as the admin
• ln -s /path/to/item/you/are/linkingto ‘nameofalias’ — make a relative link to something, can be a folder or a file
• rm -rf ‘filename’ — remove anything with the file name

Another neat thing in TERMINAL is the built in auto-complete feature. When entering in a path or a filename, you need to only enter up to the last unique character and then press TAB to complete the name. (eg /pa TAB results in /path/ or something like that) Also, pressing the UP or DOWN key on your keyboard will cycle through the commands you have used, super handy if you are using a lot of the same ones over and over.

MYSQL

First you need to create the database and user that will be associated with that database in your MAMP phpMyAdmin interface. Then you need to import some data. For smaller db’s you can easily accomplish this through the same web interface but for larger databases (anything over 3mb) you will need to do this entirely from command line. Crack open the terminal and run this command:

mysql -u dbuser -p yourdbname < /path/to/backup.sql

What this command does is tell mysql to use the specified database “-p ‘yourdbname’ ” and associated user “-p ‘dbuser’ ” and import the backup sql file that you have pointed it to.

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