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Why I need your URL

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I do a lot of forum support. Actually, it’s the main part of my day. One of my most frequent responses is some variation of, “Can I get your URL so I can go look?”.

Most people just paste in their URL and we go on our merry way, solving problems together.

Sometimes it doesn’t go so well. Some people are confused. “You mean you want a backlink from my site?” No, I just want your url so I can click on it. Some people are shy. “Well it’s in development and doesn’t look very good.” I know, I expect this. You’re not asking me to critique your design, you’re asking me to help fix something that went wrong. Some people forget. “Well it’s linked in my username!” Yes, but the site being worked on is not always the one associated with a user profile, so I can’t assume.

Some people – thankfully only a handful – get irate. “WHY ARE YOU ASKING ME USELESS QUESTIONS??? I JUST WANT HELP!” (paraphrased to protect the guilty)

So in order to lessen those times, I thought I’d write this post in the hopes that some light bulbs may come on and we can all get back to the yellow brick road of problem solving happiness.

I ask for your URL to cut down on the amount of educated guessing and to cut down on the amount of back-and-forth questions I might need to ask otherwise. Maybe you’re having a hard time explaining the issue as a non-tech person. As a tech person, it’s actually *easier* for me to just go look and use tools I have at my disposal (like Firebug) or poke around the actual file structure or look at the rendered HTML of the page.

YES! i can do that! And once I’ve done that, I would very much love to show you how I did it so hopefully you can learn too. Here’s an example:

User: “I made some css changes to my site but they don’t show up.”

Choice 1: “Can you give the the URL to your site please?”

Choice 2: “Are you sure you edited the right file? Are you using a caching plugin? (some people say no and they actually ARE using one and forgot) Is your css syntax correct?”

Choice 2 can be done all at once or in tiny steps, pulling each piece of information out.

Choice 1? I visit the site. I see they are running a caching plugin and suggest they disable it or clear the cache. I use Firebug on the front of the site and can’t find the css they insisted they changed I view the source of the page, find the URL to the stylesheet and see they also made a typo, so the css change isn’t rendered anyway.

Choice 2 results in a thread 20-30 posts long that lasts from a full day to a week. The user gets frustrated because their issue isn’t solved in a timely manner. I get frustrated too.

Choice 1 usually results in a thread a few posts long – anywhere from 4 or 6 to maybe 10. We wind up the issue as resolved within the afternoon. We’re both happy.

Another reason why I ask for a URL is because I get asked a lot of css/design type questions. It is extremely difficult to troublshoot css paddings and margins from a screenshot alone. Even the best designer (of which I will freely admit I am not) will still have difficulty explaining exactly what element you need to find and exactly how many pixels of padding will fix that gap, just from looking at a screenshot. At best it would be an educated guess, even from the theme designer, who knows the code inside out, but does not know exactly what else you did to it.

So, with your URL, I can quickly visit your site, open up Firebug, find the *exact* element you are asking about. I look at the right pane and see it had padding-bottom (for example). I change that number and the gap you asked about goes away.

I go back and answer your question with, “Find #nav in your stylesheet and adjust the padding down by 5px.” See? Exact. Everyone is happy.

And it’s not just theme related – with multisite issues, I can just go look at your site and see exactly what you meant by a blank theme on sub sites, or with domain mapping I can run some diagnostics on your DNS records when I have your URL and see where it’s failing.

And because Ipstenu and I share a brain sometimes, I told her I was going to write this post, so she wrote about asking good questions.

But I will still ask you for your URL. 😉

Going to Toronto

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Or, as the locals say , “Taranna”. 🙂

Ron and I have been to Toronto multiple times, so no sightseeing for us. This is good, because there are many friends to catch up with at WordCamp, as well as family in the area. Did you know Ron was actually born in Guelph Ontario? Well now you do.

We are actually really excited to come to Toronto and speak about the multisite / network feature of WordPress because we both feel WordPress itself can be a great opportunity for Canadians to shine at home, and not have to go abroad for success. WordPress is easy to learn, highly rewarding and could be the answer for a few Canadians to create their own jobs.

Saturday we will give a presentation on how we got involved with WordPress, ho we dove into the deep end of the pool with multisite and look and the kinds of things multisite can do for you.

Sunday, Ron & I will lead a workshop where we will instruct users how to set up multisite. We’ll go over the entire network admin area, as well as cover the more common plugins used. Of course, we will talk about domain mapping, wpebooks and answer tons of questions.

The sauce in your site

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I like to cook a lot of foods from scratch, and back when we had 3 or 4 growing and constantly hungry children underfoot, I spent a lot of time at it. At one stretch, we even grew many of the ingredients ourselves. This meant I had acquired a lot of kitchen gadgets, many tools to do different things to make the process of getting the vegetables to the table easier.

Over the years, the kids have grown up, our needs have changed, and many of the neat kitchen gadgets and weird tools have been cleaned out. there are some, however, that I’ve kept – even though I use them once a year or less. I have a pasta maker I whip out for special occasions – and they have to be really special, because taking 3 hours to make homemade ravioli that disappears in less than 15 minutes can be a little daunting. I also have a tomato strainer. It’s large, has many pieces, and the box frequently gets in the way unless I keep it on top of the fridge.

But keep it I do. Why?

Well, once a year, maybe two, we either grow, buy, or get gifted with more tomatoes than we can handle or even eat in a week. And our family loves tomato sauce. Yes, you can buy tomato sauce cheap, and we go through a lot of it. But until you’ve tasted fresh homemade sauce, you have not truly tasted tomato sauce. The way this machine works, it gets the whole family involved. Someone clamps it to the table and put the thing together, someone starts quartering tomatoes, and one of the kids starts tossing the pieces in and turning the crank. Seeds and pulp come out one end, and beautiful crushed tomatoes come out the other, right into the pot. Then I give it a simmer, add spices and there we go.

making tomato sauce

So why go through all this effort, and maybe more to the point – why talk about tomatoes on my business blog? 😉

Underlying all this is a process that highlights where something comes from. It’s easy to buy a jar or can of tomato sauce. It’s harder still to grow the tomato, process it and make the sauce yourself. My tomato machine helps me in that. But mostly it helps me, and the children, understand how involved that final product came to be.

And today that got me thinking about WordPress. Sure, I could hand-code an entire website in HTML – and I’ve done so. It takes an enormous amount of time. WordPress, on the other hand, is like my tomato machine. I set it up and just.. crank.

There are other tools I’ve used in my work life that also make my job easier. Sometimes I go back and do things the hard way, just to keep my skills sharp. Yesterday, I coded. I could have asked Ron to do it for me. And he could have done it in 20% of the time it took me to do it. But I wrote that function so I could still remember how to write a function, and thus get better at explaining it to others. Even if it was a really simple 3 line function. (Two of them, in fact. Go me!) I had tools at my disposal like the codex and forums to help me.

What kind of rarely-used tools do you have that can make your work easier? Even on tasks you don’t do that often? What tasks do you do occasionally to keep your work brain sharp?

Work hard, play hard

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Funny how both Ron and I have worked at home before, but it’s taken this long to figure out how to work together, and work efficiently.

Since I have been at home for pretty much most, if not all, of our marriage, transitioning to working at home wasn’t a huge step. I mean, I was on the computer multiple times a day anyway, right? Those times just sort of got longer and melded together. Eventually, my routine became this:

get up, stumble to office, turn on computer
go to the bathroom, get tea
sit in front of computer
notice stomach is growling and tea is cold
notice the kids are up
get Ron up because he is up different hours
talk to people I live with and get breakfast
check computer
get dressed
check computer
cook lunch
eat lunch in front of computer

And so on… It was really easy to fall into a reactionary routine of being what I referred to as “on call”. Am I up? Yes. Is the computer on? If so, I’m “working”. then I realized this was most of the time.

On my more lucid days, I started paying attention to employees from places like StudioPress and Automattic, saying how they were enjoying their breaks and time off. This coincided with a week of trying to plow through a huge lists of tasks to get caught up, and not doing anything else but that. Seriously. Then the light bulb *finally* struck me:

I can’t work effectively without a decent break.

(Whoa,. Earth shattering, no?) I’d already figured out that I cannot function without a certain amount of sleep. that happened very fast, actually. I’m one of those people that need a good solid eight hours or no amount of anything would be done properly or effectively. I can’t even fake it on little sleep.

Ron and I first noticed this in my habits when I tried to not sew all week. I was miserable. Not just because I really do like sewing that much, but it was the regular mental breaks from work task that really helped me. I really do have issues with focusing on one task for a long period of time, so breaking things up works just dandy for my brain.

We clued in that play time – time to rest, recharge, recoup, and recreate, is essential for productive work time. It’s all related, just like everything else. And your play time or when you take it does not have to look like mine, or be at the same times.

My weekend schedule – and I figured I do need a weekend, that time to focus on my household, the people in it and me outside of work – starts on Friday afternoons and goes to Sunday noon. Yes, I work Sunday. 😀 It’s a GREAT time to focus on those “extras” because there’s not a lot of online distractions like there are on, say, Tuesdays.

Ron has also changed his work time in that he gets up and does *not* turn on the computer first thing. He takes care of himself first, then does some things around the house until lunch time. He works more effectively later in the day, so his work hours are afternoons and evenings. I start on a high note in the morning and go downhill from there. 😀 This way, we both have alone time in the office, and have a joint time.

Not only that, we’ve been forcing ourselves to have a break from work – even if the first few tries either one of us were meandering aimlessly around the house. And now, I can do tiny little breaks throughout the day .When it’s mealtime I stay downstairs. None of this rushing back to the office to check one more thing, just in case. People can wait! And it’s not worth burning my dinner over.

Also realizing I don’t have to handle everything at once is good too. Especially before breakfast. Oh, and breakfast is important. Knowing I have a break coming up where I can forget about work items really does help me work hard, as well as knowing what to shut out. I make my lists, I double-check them and cross check them with my partner to help keep me on track. And when it’s play time, knowing that things are fine or will be fine work-wise helps me to really enjoy what I’m taking my break on. Even if it is laundry.

And! As a perfect example while I was writing this, our internet speed tanked. Before, we both would have sat here refreshing, trying other things, stopping certain programs. Now? We walked away and came back in an hour. The world didn’t end, the connection worked itself out (like it always does) and neither of us were frustrated. Plus we got our daughter’s bedroom painted. Yeah, that’s winning.