Archive for the ‘Work’ Category

What this freelancing lifestyle is missing

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

In a word – “Feedback”. Plain and simple.

It’s a given that while we work with our customers and clients we get some feedback along the way – “This is good”, “This needs to move over here”, “Make this red”, etc. That sort of feedback, however, is a little superficial in the grand scheme of things and not quite the feedback we’re in need of most. The feedback I’ve been missing for the past few years is the piece of the traditional employee-employer (“working for the man”) relationship. We might bitch and moan about it when we’re there within that context, but to be frank – the annual review is crucial. How else are we to know what we need to improve on?

As a freelancer – these constructs no longer exist if we don’t want them to. Which is nice to begin with. We’re free! Right?! Right. But, over time the novelty and the doubt will creep in and you’ll be left wondering – “What is it that I could do better?”. I’ve found myself longing for this feedback as of late and, while it’s a little scary and my lizard brain is wailing like a banshee, I’m pulling the trigger.

I’ll be asking my clients upon project completion just what it is that I did well on, and what I done poorly or could use some work. To some it might be counter-intuitive – “They hired you, right? They had to have confidence.” – but I’m more interested and excited to know for sure. No gray area. No guessing. No assumptions. Running a business is just that – it’s business. There’s nothing personal about this. Tell me how my business can be better.

I’m sure a good number of my fellow freelancers have been doing this for months (years) and wondering what’s taken me so long. I really wish I had an answer for that, but I don’t. Would those of you who have been doing this have any suggestions? Are there any questions you’ve asked that get the most constructive and helpful reaction?

Continuing on this theme, but a different post for another day, is feedback from a different slice of our professional life – our peers. To be continued …

Posted in Work | 6 Comments »

Meta descriptions and keywords for each page and post in WordPress

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

After searching for a plugin that might accommodate this in WordPress and coming up empty, I went digging for a possible easy way to do this with the means available.   Logic dictates that with custom fields this should be rather easy to accomplish.

The only snag might have been that in retreiving a custom field for a page or a post you need the page or post’s ID.   Usually this id is readily available within “the loop”, but what about when we’re up in the <head> tags?    A little searching in the codex reveals that we can grab your pages’ ID with $wp_query->post->ID.  Fantastic – because, with that we’re pretty much done! Adding the following in your theme’s header.php file between <head> … </head> :

<meta name=”keywords” content=”<?php $key=”meta_keywords”; echo get_post_meta($wp_query->post->ID, $key, true); ?>” />
<meta name=”description” content=”<?php $key=”meta_description”; echo get_post_meta($wp_query->post->ID, $key, true); ?>” />

.. and “meta_keywords” and “meta_description” as custom fields with your desired content for each will get you to where you want to be.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Web Development, Work | 1 Comment »

WordPress hosted on XO Communications.

Friday, March 27th, 2009

Suffice it to say – it’s not a winning combination.   There are two definitive hacks you’ll need to get things to work.

First, a plugin to disable canonical URL redirection.  Second, a hack to wp-settings.php that circumvents the XO php configuration’s not having $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'].

Update: the second hack will break the non-admin part of the site in the context of the current site I’ve been working on.  So your mileage may vary.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Web Development, Work | No Comments »

« Older Entries |