Diversity

To start I would like to get a definition of diversity. Diversity is a commitment to recognizing and appreciating the variety of characteristics that make individuals unique in an atmosphere that promotes and celebrates individual and collective achievement. I feel diversity is important in every aspect of your life. You will learn so much more from others that may or may not have things in common with you. Having a diverse influence on how you live and work will have profound effects to you and others.

How we address diversity and embrace others and their influence will determine our successes in business and life. In our profession we should always strive to be influenced by diversity in both how we relate to others in the workplace and how we try to meet the needs of all. We need to hear the needs of others to be able to successfully communicate with them. A diverse culture makes a rich environment for learning regardless of your own beliefs. Being diverse does not mean you give up your own beliefs. We must always be in tune with all of those around us. Open communication is the key.

“Diversity: the art of thinking independently together. “  Malcolm Forbes

Goal Setting

Goal setting is the first step for success. You have to first set your goals before you can make a plan to how to accomplish them. If you do not set any goals you will go through life with not much meaning. Setting goals gives your life more meaning, purpose and passion. A person who does not set any goals goes through life drifting from one thing to another. Setting goals for yourself will have a positive impact on the quality of your time choices. Well chosen goals take you out of your comfort zone. Anything that does this presents the greatest opportunity for growth.

“The tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goals to reach.” – Benjamin Mays

The process maybe difficult or even painful, but you will discover truths about yourself and the world around you. The want to do something about it provides growth. But the journey is often as good as the destination. You choose the direction your life takes – you take full responsibility for your actions and it’s consequences. Life makes a habit of habits. It is too easy to do the same things day in and day out. Make goal setting and plans to attain them a daily habit.

Why Should You Use PHP?

I am currently working through a book on PHP and at first was completely confused about the language. But after seeing what it is capable of it is truly powerful on what you can do in PHP. Some of the reasons that PHP is a great choice it is free, well-supported and available everywhere. Being supported by almost all of the web hosting services is a plus. This makes it easy to move your sites to different hosting services when needed without having to recode your site. Another great reason is there is a lot of great open-source applications available on the net ready for download and use. Plus, there is a great community of support. There is plenty of people to consult to find fixes and help.

All web applications needs a place to store its data – and what better place to do that than on the best open-source database platform, MySQL. Together PHP and MySQL is a potent combination. It also relatively easy to use but very powerful in what it is capable of. By the way the top three content management systems (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal) are written in PHP. So I guess the question is why wouldn’t you use PHP in your websites? Learn the language and you will be glad you did.

Choices

Throughout your life you are confronted with choices. How you decide on the choices you make will affect the path you take. There will be times when you make the right choice and times you will make the wrong choice it is how you handle them that develops the character you have. Wrong choices turned into positives can really make you grow and make you adapt to many situations.  Your decision-making should be based on knowledge and if not sure about it research to find answers. Confide in others, look at those who have already taken that path. Choices made with informed decision-making is always more successful than hap-hazard thinking.

Taking the time to think through the choices you are about to make will always go along way towards being successful. How you decide on the choices you make should be consistent whether it is life choices or business. This is how you develop integrity by the way you are in everything you do. Smart choices usually always are made by being informed and weighing all the consequences associated with them. everyone’s goal is to make the right choices all the time. Although, this sounds great it will not always be true even the most successful people make some wrong choices. It is how they convert those choices into the positive that reaps success. Choose wisely.

“You cannot manage your life if you do not manage your self. You cannot manage your self if you do not manage your choices. Manage your choices, and you will manage your life.”

Job Shadowing at T&S Web Design

Job shadowing is always a great experience because you get to see how other professionals work, what their workflow is, how they relate to others and what their approach is to a concept or design solution. We were able to shadow one of their web developers:  Adam Booth. He was working on their own website redesign. They use wordpress for their CMS and he showed us how he takes the redesigned page templates from Fireworks and splices them to layout their new design. I found it very interesting to see that how you design a page is very important to think about how it will splice apart and to be very careful when selecting colors to keep it consistent throughout your pages. He showed us how he analyzes what to splice and what to code trying to keep file sizes to a minimum.  He prefers using Chrome to check his work and code. He showed us some tools that he uses that can be very helpful. He uses netbeans http://netbeans.org/community/releases/70/ to write his code in. Some of the other tools are: pipette http://pipette.en.softonic.com/ color picker and imageoptim http://imageoptim.pornel.net/ optimizes images.

Overall it was a great experience looking over the shoulder of a web developer to see their approach to this business called web development. Thanks T& S Web Design and especially a thank you to Adam Booth.

Excellence

What can you say about this month’s topic: Excellence? It is something that can be achieved although I feel it is something that is ongoing. You are always working towards excellence. To never be satisfied with where you are at but to work towards something that is greater. Also the standards for excellence is always evolving. Excellence cannot be what you set as a benchmark but what your peers set. To achieve excellence is never being satisfied but continually working to improve. It is like a mountain you are climbing but never reaching the summit. To break down the word it has excel which is a motion verb. Constant motion for improvement. Excellence is like going above what others have set as a benchmark.

Soon as you think you have reached excellence the bar will be raised to that new goal. It is always about going above what is standard. Excellence is not ever what you think it is but what others judge you at.  Excellence is attained by being extra ordinary. Never being satisfied with the norm.

“Excellence is the unlimited ability to improve the quality of what you have to offer.”
Rick Pitino

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
John W. Gardner

HTML 5 & CSS3

Wow! the future is bright for web development. What HTML5 and CSS3 has to offer is great unfortunately like all other new technologies it takes a lot to get implemented and adopted by all browsers. There are many things I liked about HTML5 such as: new structural tags (section, article, aside, nav, hgroup, etc.), new content tags (video, audio).  The new application tags: meter tag, process tag, time tag and command tag. Also the introduction of drag and drop API, Geolocation API and web storage API. Also, something that was small that I overlooked but sure makes it easier is the new doctype syntax.

CSS3 has as much if not more to offer. New selectors such as specific targeting with child and parent selectors. Many other features such as: alternating row columns, new color module-control transparency, gradient fills, typo capabilities, non-standard fonts, add columns, page layout- flexible box model, multiple backgrounds and  media queries.

What I liked the most experimenting with was transitions and animation functions. Some of the things I will start using now are: @font-face, transparency, new color formats and the flexible box model. All in all it is time for all browsers to get on board.

Workplace Ethics

We have all heard about workplace ethics and what is most commonly understood about ethics is there are ethics and there are workplace ethics. But what most people don’t realize is that there is now such thing as workplace ethics; ethics are the same (or, should be) whether in the workplace or in personal life. Ethics have every bit as much a place in the public as they do in private. How is it there should be separate sets of ethics, depending upon whether it is your personal life or your work life? The answer is that there should not be a separate set and in light of recent events that we see on our televisions as of late, more and more companies are realizing this fact.

The word “ethic” is defined as, “The body of moral principles or values governing or distinctive of a particular culture or group” or “A complex of moral precepts held or rules of conduct followed by an individual”. It has been said that having ethics is doing the right or moral thing when no one is looking. Ethics is a personal choice and therefore, how workplace ethics are governed depends upon the personal ethics of those who are in authority over that workplace and also those who work in that environment.

Workplace ethics are an extension of the personal standards or lack of them that is inherent in the people who make up the workplace.  It seems that the current worldview deems that the only wrong thing about shady business dealings and immoral workplace ethics is in getting “caught.” So wouldn’t it just be easier to have integrity with everything you do and not have separate morals in regards to the workplace.

“The measure of a man’s character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.”
Thomas Babington

Drupal vs. Joomla

Having just studied about Drupal and how to use and integrate it as a solution to web design and development it brought a curiosity to this subject. Having also heard about Joomla I thought I would do a little research to find some answers. There are many aspects to compare from both of these CMS applications. I will just touch on a few then provide a link to a more thorough article on the subject.
Of course, some of these are opinions and you may need further data to support their findings.
Best CMS for ACL
Drupal is far better for ACL, and also handles high page numbers better.
Best visual CMS
Joomla is the best visual CMS around. Nothing can beat it in the appearance stakes. It’s quicker and easier to get a great-looking site up with Joomla than with almost any other solution.
Best CMS for ease of use
The easiest full-feature CMS for the end-user* (the site owner or webmaster) is Joomla – the admin usability is unbeatable. Drupal is not so good, and becomes much trickier to manage when any kind of ACL is used, as that always obfuscates things to a certain degree.
Most stable CMS
Drupal is the winner here because it scales well and is rock-solid under heavy load. he description ‘most stable CMS’ implies the one that scales best, ie handles large numbers of plugins, high page numbers, and heavy loads best. Joomla is not as stable when heavily extended (lots of plugins).
Best CMS for high traffic
Both Drupal and Joomla handle high traffic well.
Easiest CMS to learn
Joomla wins this one. It’s partly down to the nice admin, and the fact that everything you need is clearly presented in the admin panel.
TCO Drupal vs Joomla
Total Cost of Ownership for both Drupal and Joomla are among the lowest of all mass-market CMS.
Joomla wins out here but if you need ACL and high-load with high page number stability, Drupal is the best choice.

In brief:
Drupal CMS — best ACL, high page numbers, stability.  Not so good on templating, visuals, sysadmin usability.
SEO is good.
Joomla CMS — best on features, media capability, repurposing, templating, visuals, admin usability, ecommerce. Poor ACL and high page number capability.  SEO is very good, and in practice better than Drupal.

Learn more here: http://www.a3webtech.com/index.php/compare-drupal-v-joomla-cms.html

 

 

 

 

Respect

This is one attribute that you have to give to receive. It is never a given I really think you have to earn it. What you do to give respect is directly how you are treated in return. How you conduct yourself towards others will reflect back to how you will be treated in most cases. I was always taught to respect others especially my elders. Being an army brat this is one subject that was constantly taught to me. I learned at a young age how you treat others with respect. But on the flip side for me to respect others is a reflection of how others gave respect. I would follow others which I did respect and try to mimic how they handled themselves.

All of life’s lessons are applied to our work and business relationships. To respect others is to be respected. We will always be rewarded for showing respect. It does not necessarily mean that you will always get it in return but with the majority of those you will. It is kind of weird if you give someone respect and they do not give you it in return you lose respect for the other person it is weird how that works.

Respect a man, and he will do all the more. John Wooden