Category Archives: Technology

Blogging, Technology

Pros and Cons of Using WordPress

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I began my career many years ago as a mainframe COBOL programmer.  One of the hardest parts about programming on the mainframe was creating the user interface; consequently, an industry soon sprang up to create software which would automatically generate the code for the user interface.  The programmer then just had to write the unique business function code required for that particular application.  This greatly simplified the task of programming, as long as all your applications were similar and easily fit into the functions of the standard user interface code which was generated.  In the 21st century things haven’t changed all that much.  There are many software packages designed to automate or simplify specific programming tasks.  As long as you keep your designs simple and follow their paradigm things work very well.  Unfortunately, in the real world users don’t always want simple designs and they definitely don’t always want to follow prescribed processes or paradigms; they often want to create something unique and all their own.

Thus it is with WordPress.  I love the simplicity with which I can quickly throw some words and pictures together and crank out a simple blog post.  The software is tailored directly for this particular process and enables a beginner to quickly come up to speed and set up a blogging site with little training.  If you don’t like style of your blog, you can experiment with the many free templates or even invest in a premium template to get the look that you want.

Unfortunately, when you start trying to move beyond mere blogging, things can become more difficult.  Several years ago, my sons decided to create a charity bike ride for a friend of theirs who had Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.  I had this brilliant idea, that I could quickly throw up a WordPress site so they could not only blog their trip, but collect pledges/donations from people on a per mile basis (http://twelvenineride.org/2014/07/16/day-1-a-bumpy-ride/).  I found a theme and threw in a twitter plug-in which allowed them to tweet from the road so that people could see their progress in real-time.  Everything was going pretty well until I tried to add in the e-commerce donation piece.  I remember spending several late nights and early morning hours working on it.  I wanted people to be able to click on the donation amount in a table based on a per mile figure and pass that amount directly into the donation page.  I passed the amount to the donation page but it would never show up in the donation amount box, so I ended up displaying the table and just putting a “Donate” button underneath it that took you to the donation page where you had to key in the donation amount.  In the end it worked well enough to raise about $8,000; nevertheless, it left me feeling very frustrated that I couldn’t get it to behave exactly like I wanted it to.

I think for small to possibly some medium size businesses that WordPress can be a good choice if you’re willing to adjust to its quirks.  For a larger enterprise or a small business with a picky owner that wanted his website to look or behave just so, I probably won’t recommend it.

 

 

Journalism, Technology

How Traditional Journalism is like Old Technology

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I bought my then state-of-the art SONY Micro MV camcorder approximately 15 years ago.  I had a difficult time choosing between it and a cheaper, bigger camcorder, that would have produced higher quality video.  In the end I decided to pay the premium to get the smaller camera and sacrifice some video quality, because I reasoned if it wasn’t small enough to take with me, I wouldn’t use it.   It came with a sleek “one hour” battery, which really lasted closer to 45 minutes.  Early on I replaced the original with the larger “two hour” battery (pictured above),  loosing some sleekness, but providing enough energy to last through my kids’ school events.  It was a great video recorder for its time, and served me well for about 8 years.  In the end its final fatal flaws were its use of proprietary hardware (Micro MV tape cassettes that SONY stopped making and selling in the US market) and software (SONY never upgraded it so it only worked on Windows operating systems circa the year 2000).

As I thought about the tradeoffs I faced and the choices that I made in selecting my camcorder, I was struck by the thought that many of the changes which have occurred in the journalism business were caused by similar consumer choices. Over the past decade, consumers have consistently chosen speed, convenience, and ease of use over quality. Mobile phone voice quality is still significantly inferior to landline voice quality, but your mobile phone is always with you wherever you go.  Traditional journalism produced high quality newspaper and magazine content, but today it’s much more convenient to retrieve news from your smartphone.  It’s there with you when you want it, and it even offers current, up-to-the-minute news updates.  There’s no need to wait for tomorrow’s newspaper or next week’s magazine to receive these.  The number of grammar and other mistakes has accelerated as well, but it’s more important to publish something quickly (on the internet) than to spend extra timing honing the quality.

As I read my text books written by journalists, I sometimes get the feeling that in spite of all the attention paid to acquiring the skills of the new age digital journalist, there is still a certain pining for the good old days of journalism.  I think it’s safe to say the good old days aren’t coming back and maybe weren’t as good as remembered in many cases.  Yes there are more mistakes made in the rush to get news out the door today, but they’re also corrected easier and faster (e.g., remember the famous “Dewy defeats Truman” newspaper headline?)  Yes, we have to consider the source of our news and perform more of our own “fact checking” nowadays, but news never was totally unbiased.  So, yes, I loved my SONY Micro MV camcorder and it was a great system for its time, but I wouldn’t trade my current iPhone for it.  In the same way, I loved the old style journalism represented by my daily newspaper, but I wouldn’t trade it for getting the news off my iPhone in real-time, even if it comes with a few grammar errors thrown in.