Life in Cascadia

Wednesday, October 2, 2019:
Ferndale, Washington – Bellingham, Washington

Sir Oisin awakes early, making an omelette with spinach and duck eggs, bacon, and finishing off his Trader Joe’s stash of orange juice for breakfast. Then out the door for a 45 minute drive to Ferndale where he settled into the local Starbucks working on web development and client work for the morning as well as catching up on video blogs. He had no luck connecting with the WeGoLook client for the insurance claim photography session he was supposed to do on the damaged box truck. he ponders again about the troubling questions about divorce and how it affects the children. He feels for his son who doesn’t get a bonded childhood with his parents being in his life together daily. Oisin is impressed with the colors that the fall fall foliage was producing outside. As he embarks upon a full morning weaving webs he runs into issues with his Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 not downloading the e-license = no longer supported by Adobe. “Sucks” he vents frustratingly. The constant trouble of switching laptops and struggles keeping up with technology – especially the move to the cloud by so many companies. Bad choice he felt, bad choice. It will all crash someday. He luckily still has his Photographer’s 2 month trial with Creative Suite Cloud to utilize. He prefers the desktop versions though. So much easier and dynamic to use than one depending on the internet. Troubleshooting and installing the free trial of Adobe Cloud Acrobat Professional for the interim solution.

Sir Oisin hacks away at issues with Acrobat, finds solutions, then spiders and archives a client’s web site figuring out automated flowcharts and site maps, new templates, He does his WordPress tinkering, video blogs, and hacking items that is common through his day’s grind. He clocks out for the day and grabs some Redbox flicks for later. He only intends on renting Child’s Play and Driven, but somehow “the box” forced him to get “T-45” as well.

In the web weaving and development side, Oisin hunts down Auto conversion of web site URL to a flowchart site mapping programs. All of them seem to be costly with limited 50-100 page free trials available. Curiously he asks his web developer friends – any of my developer friends know of free ones? He reminisces that back in the 80’s and 90’s all of them were free, now they are costly. Oisin is also currently investigating Sitemap PDF Export, Dynomapper.com which has a cool mapper that he likes though not exactly the flow chart visual he wanted. Gloomaps.com. XML Sitemaps Generator xml-sitemaps.com which he felt was an awesome spider crawling the site and figuring out a site map for user interface on the site, but not a visual flow. Lucid Chart has the visual flow he felt, but not as great for website mapping and charting. Visme.co/flowchart-maker/ has some nice attractive parts, but the free trial limited to 10 pages.

Also on the days task was working with the Broadsheet WordPress Theme. He found it an interesting WordPress newspaper theme for a client’s site that they like. With prothemedesign.com it costs $59/year and grants access for 19 themes, support, upgrades, etc. So they’ll see how it works out. It appears clean, responsive, expertly reviewed code, claims to easily implement social links, easy to add site logo, infinite scrolling, SEO, image resizing, featured images, contact form, testimonials, custom colors and fonts, social menu, custom CSS, localization, related content, customizer, GDPR and theme privacy, custom page templates, social sharing buttons, widget visibility, translations, etc. as all perks of the theme.

Oisin also delved into Email marketing – updating his current knowledge with new programs, services, apps, and scripts. His client is currently with Weebly and paying extraordinary costs for her email marketing and newsletters. He set out to Investigating options for her in WordPress, there is the newsletter plugin which he uses for his sites, but she may need something more robust and unlimited than some of the free plugins offer. So looking into outside marketing campaigns. Some of Oisin’s other clients claim the best are MailChimp and Constant Contact? what say you web dev friends, any suggestions of new upcoming dynamic plugins or services? Sir Oisin asks.

Sir Oisin does not receive a single order or OnDemand app gig for an 8.5 hour shift of being on call. Luckily he’s being paid at least minimum wage at $12/hour to hang out at Starbucks and do his own work, he thought simply perfect mechanism for an artist, writer, and developer. After clocking out, he grabs some Redbox flicks for later settling in on Child’s Play 2019, T-45, and Driven. He Saw everything currently listed at AMC with his A-List pass and Amazon Rent to Buy is too expensive ($4-5 a movie), so uses a Red Box ($1.75/movie). He drives 45 minutes back into the mountains and calls it a night. He cooks up some Trader Joe’s Meatloaf, Calamari, and has a glass of milk for dinner. He retires for the evening, Watching Child’s Play and Driven.

Photos: (more…)

Related Images: