Jocko – Page 2

Jocko January 29, 2016

Thumbtack is Spammy

I’ve had a Thumbtack profile for a couple of years, and have been receiving their RFQ emails, but haven’t responded until recently. After the holidays I had a little lull in new business, so took them up on some of their free credits. There were a stream of RFQs for Logo Design, mostly from the East Bay, so I started responding.

After a couple of days I received a message from Thumbtack that the first two quotes I sent hadn’t been opened, so my credits were being refunded. I never heard back from the others, but started to notice a steady stream of RFQs coming in with very similar specifications. Possibly a result of Thumbtack’s submission form, but suspicious nonetheless. Right now, in fact I’m looking at 3 requests from people in the east bay, submitted within the last 3 hours, who need a logo designer, and are using Thumbtack to find one. I’m sorry, but I find that rather hard to believe. And now my credits have run out so I would have to pay to quote on these projects? I think not.

Jocko January 28, 2016

Deploying WordPress Database Changes

I must admit I got a little excited when I first started watching this video on getting off of making changes to Wordpress via FTP and on to deploying using GIT repositories in Beanstalk from a local development version. The screen cast was posted by Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks. It’s pretty old, and granted it was made on the fly, but I was disappointed to see that the two of the three aspects of deployment I was excited about – 1) plugin updates and 2) database changes would not be included in this process. Although credential sync crashed and burned during the demo, it could easily be handled by telling the software to ignore the wp-config.php file. Otherwise the process would be good only for CSS or other template changes, which is probably what the author of CSS-Tricks was after anyway.

Just to confirm this wasn’t what I was after, I took a look at the Beanstalk Guide to Deploying WordPress, and confirmed that database changes would need to be deployed manually. Bummer.

When I worked on a corporate web team for a large company, we had a custom script we would run that would publish changes made on the development server to the live site. It was very nice. With that stuck in my memory banks, I was still excited at the prospect of learning how to do that with WordPress, so I searched on.

I found an article on Carrie Dils Blog. I am very familiar with Carrie’s blog, which contains many helpful articles about working with the Genesis Framework. Unfortunately, her deployment of WordPress changes is very manual as well. Additional searching was unfruitful.

So for now, I guess I will stick with my current process, which is manual but solid, and keep looking.

Jocko January 26, 2016

Designers Are Mind Readers

Despite protestations from many others to the contrary, I want to let everyone know that designers are indeed mind readers. It seems amazing, but given only a phone call we are able to come up with exactly what our clients are imagining in their heads. We don’t even need a deposit! Say for instance someone wants a webpage designed that consists of information to be named later. A web designer will be able to guess what that content is, and create a mock-up that will look exactly like the final page, no matter what content eventually is presented, be it a single sentence, or 3ooo words of text.

This power that all designers possess makes it very, very easy for our clients. They do not need to exert any effort at all in the design process, and still get exactly what they are expecting on the very first try!