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Students: gain valuable experience for free
Most students have come into our offices talking about what’s covered in their modules at college/university. They’ve come in, sat down and spoke reasonably passionate about what they want to do within the roles they’re applying for. Though there’s no depth knowledge when questioned, no portfolio or diversity in what they say and no opinion about how that role should be done.
Here’s a few tips as to things you can do to get this experience to enhance the theory behind your degree in the real world:
- Do your own projects, set your own goals. This is a basic one but something that a lot of students don’t do. You need to set out what you want to learn by the end of the year and break it down into deadlines for when you’re going to learn it. Follow that plan as a base before any of the other things in the post and stick to it.
- Approach local companies involved in your area of desired service. It’s something that most students are afraid to do but it’s potentially a big opportunity to learn a lot about the role you want to work within later on. Observing the way people communicate, joining in on office banter and simply becoming comfortable in an office environment lends a big help towards how easy it will be to hire you. Most importantly here: work for free. Company’s don’t want to pay, but they will throw you the odd project if you work for free to gain you extremely valuable experience. If there’s an extra desk in the corner, why the heck not let you sit there and learn?
- Search out online teams There are plenty of online teams for areas like 3D, illustration, Flash and others that are dedicated to learning as a group and growing as a talent. I find myself lucky to have found myself within a team like Pixel2life early on and it gave me an extremely good base of talents to move on forwards from after I left.
- Approach local charities/business. Focus on people that wouldn’t be able to afford the services you provide if they wanted to. (But of course would find it of benefit to have those services in the first place). You offering to give them your services for free in aid of some experience and a reference may just get you another project in your portfolio/CV come interview day.
- Read a lot of blogs. It sounds basic, but you need to get yourself an RSS feed reader and add an RSS feed from every site you can find of reasonable quality into it. Read the articles that come through and study the latest trends and issues in your field. It makes you a more valuable candidate and cements your role within the team should you get a job.
What’s most important here is for you not to sit and take your college or university course as gospel. Yes there are people who get jobs straight out of their course with little help and there are courses that obviously don’t need this post. But you only increase your chance by getting up and doing something outside of your usual routine. It doesn’t have to be a full-time 40 hour workweek for free, do it a couple nights a week. Even a few hours a week is going to improve upon what you’re doing already.
If you’re a student yourself and have any comments about how you’ve prepared yourself for the outside world upon leaving your course or if you have any more advice for the students out there, feel free to leave a comment. I’d love to hear it.
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Why Virgin Media is better than Sky (from a Sky customer)
I used to be on Virgin Media, angry at Sky wishing I had Sky One and all the other quality features Sky has instead of being stuck over at Virgin. When I moved into my new house one of the first things I did was purchase myself a nice new Sky Plus box. Boy, was that a big mistake.
Virgin, please read the following and adapt your advertising appropriately:
- You don’t own the box: Virgin don’t sell you a box, they let you rent it. Which means free repairs, free replacements and no extra £10-15 a month for a support plan just to get someone out to your house when your Sky box is dead. Virgin also offer remote support on the box where by they can fix some problems over the phone. Sky doesn’t offer this, unless you’re paying extra. Another benefit to this for Virgin’s customers is that your box also gets upgraded for free too.
- Record two, watch one: With Virgin this literally means watch one program whilst recording two others. With Sky, this means record two programs and one watch of them. This is annoying as you more often than not end up watching parts of one of the programs you’ve got set to record. Another annoyance attached to this is that Sky disables all other features when two programs are recording, no information, no guide, nothing unless you cancel a recording.
- Information button? Well… not really. With Virgin, you browse to a program or channel and press the information button and it gives you information on the program you currently have selected. With Sky, it simply returns information on the program you’re currently watching. That is, unless you’re looking through the guide.
- Elevator music: Sky’s guide is boring. You press it and it removes all trace of the program you’re watching. You browse through the channels and everything else whilst listening to elevator music and are stuck staring at text. Virgin on the other hand: you have a small picture of what you were watching and can continue to hear the channel as well as watching it whilst browsing the guide.
- Television, that isn’t on: anywhere. Sky has ‘catch up TV’ where by you have a selection of 15-20 great programs over the past week to watch through. The problem is, you require a subscription to the channels to watch them. With Virgin there’s this and a massive back catalogue including the BBC iPlayer, Channel 4’s 4-on-Demand and hundreds of other series for you to watch through. A massive, massive plus on Virgin’s side.
Feel free to share your annoyances with Sky or Virgin in the comments below. I’d love to hear your opinions.
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301 and 302 redirects with .htaccess
I’ve been asked this question time and time again, so here we are. How to redirect directories and old URL’s to new ones when moving your site from one domain to another, or launching a new version with re-structured URLs.
Here’s a sample structure of a re-direct line:
Redirect 301 /about.php http://www.newdomain.com/about
/about.php here is the local URL relative to the core domain you’re redirecting from. If you’re redirecting from http://www.sample.com/directory/about.php then this will be /directory/about.php and if you are redirecting from http://www.sample.com/about.php then it is simply /about.php.
The second part of this statement is the complete URL you are forwarding to.
The beauty of a 301 redirect with .htaccess is that if you have one big set of URL’s that have changed from one place to another with the filename/end URL staying the same it is still the same statement. For example:
Redirect 301 /test/ http://www.newdomain.com/testing/
This redirects /test/about.php to http://www.newdomain.com/testing/about.php – anything after /test/ will be redirected to http://www.newdomain.com/testing/ and placed at the end of the URL. The same applies for all query URLs (i.e. about.php?variable=1&this=that).
Tip: Always priority order your redirects. The redirects you want done first should go up top. But you should also be careful not to place inherent statements above specific ones.
This won’t work:
Redirect 301 /test/ http://www.newdomain.com/testing/
Redirect 301 /test/about.php http://www.newdomain.com/about.phpThis will result in the first statement being processed and the second statement meaning nothing. The correct order is:
Redirect 301 /test/about.php http://www.newdomain.com/about.php
Redirect 301 /test/ http://www.newdomain.com/testing/This means the specific statement is applied first, and then the inherent statement is ran afterwards.
Here’s a sample of our extensive re-directs for Sausage Roll to Rolled:
Redirect 301 /general-posts/ http://www.rolled.at/general-news/
Redirect 301 /wp-content/uploads/11/ http://www.rolled.at/wp-content/uploads/Here is what they do:
- Moves all posts in the /general-posts/ slugged category to show at /general-news/ on the new site. For example /general-posts/testing-post is now /general-news/testing-post on the new site as we changed the category.
- All uploads from /wp-content/uploads/11/ are now linked to in /wp-content/uploads/. For examples /wp-content/uploads/11/test.jpg is now /wp-content/uploads/test.jpg on the new server.
All of these lines can be applied to 302 (temporary) redirects too. Just switch the number 301 with 302 to achieve the result you need. 302 redirects should be used where the file is only moving there for a short while but will be put back eventually and 301 redirects are used to transfer the URL to the new URL permanently and work great for a site move or a URL restructuring.
I used these to transfer Twod.co.uk to JHuskisson.com and several other transfers and they have all retained by page rank and search engine strength from domain to domain with ease.
Have any other htaccess redirect tips or things to discuss? Feel free to leave a comment using the form below.
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Common mistakes of outsourcing
Through my vast amount of experiments in outsourcing I’ve made quite a few mistakes here and there that would have been better avoided if I had simply thought about it before I did it. Here are the common mistakes I’ve either been a part of or have witnessed myself through others, in a hope that you may read them and learn from them.
- Posting the wrong job application text up in the first place/wanting something you can’t get
Most people just post up a big long list of what they want and accept nothing else. To get the right result post up the bare minimum that you’re looking for and add ‘traits that would be ideal, but not required are:’ to the bottom. - Grabbing the first person that comes along.
Sometimes it’s genius but the majority of time it’s just lack of patience. The first person in your inbox isn’t always the best. If you can’t find anyone and are desperate, then you need to start thinking about how you’re posting and where you’re posting. - Posting in the wrong places
Do your research first and take a look around at the other job listings being posted up in the same place you’re putting yours. If you find jobs that aren’t similar in the majority, then it’s the wrong place. If the others look completely different to yours (less detailed, much more detailed, including images, not including images) then adapt your posting. - Trying to fit the wrong person into the wrong position
Don’t hire an Expression Engine developer to be a Wordpress developer if they don’t already have experience. Don’t hire someone who specialises in non-framework based development to work on a Code Igniter powered site. Get someone who already has the experience otherwise you either get: a) more expense for nothing, or b) a completely poor result. Sometimes it’s both. - Make sure you know their hours
When, in their timezone, are they online? It should be one of the first questions you ask and you should know when each of your outsourced team will be online or offline. - Know how to get in touch
Do they want to Skype? Do they want to be contacted by phone? By AIM? MSN? GTalk/Jabber? ICQ? Know that they fit what you want and don’t have their own standards. I once worked with a developer who decided to let me know that he only wanted to be contacted when he decided to come online, on MSN. No phone calls, no Skype, nothing. When he was called, he pulled out of the project. Clearly a bad choice.
I will follow this in a series of other articles about outsourcing. If you have any other mistakes or experiences to share, feel free to leave a comment on this article as it would be fascinating to read.
No Comments » - Posting the wrong job application text up in the first place/wanting something you can’t get
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Job openings, full-time or part-time
It’s that time of year again! Business is bursting at the seams and we’re looking for a new team member or two to come in either part-time or full-time (depending on your preference) to join us going forward into the future.
We work with Linux, Apache, PHP 5 and mySQL 5 technologies; deploying Wordpress, Expression Engine, Magento or Code Igniter applications where necessary to meet our client’s needs and we’re looking for someone to join our team as a developer. Note: you don’t have to know all of these to apply, so don’t be shy.
Qualities we’re looking for:
- Good sense of humour
- Good English, at the very least
- Good work ethic
- Ability to handle multiple jobs at the same time
- Able to work to tight deadlines, and deliver on those they themselves set out
- Ability to work within a development structure that is set out for each type of job
Requirements of the positions(s):
- Take part in our daily banter in our staff campfire
- Ability to use Basecamp, for project management
- Specialist experience with Magento, Expression Engine, Wordpress or Code Igniter
- Available part-time, or full-time
If you’re interested send an e-mail with your rates (hourly, or monthly), location, availability, why you want to work for us and experience to <removed>. Make sure the subject contains the words ‘Job opening’ in it somewhere in there.
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Rolled acquired by Juno Media
I’ve just announced over on Sausage Roll that Rolled has been acquired by Juno Media.
It’s an opportunity to join an established company in the area with a good solid set of existing clients and revenue. Carers Federation and The Coffee Fairy are the two favourites that I’ve worked on so far, being the social entrepreneurs that they are.
There’s also a big opportunity to change the company from the inside into taking on board blogs, RSS feeds, open source, “web 2.0″, web apps, social entrepreneurialism and all those other “modern” things we’ve been doing at Rolled in the past. Myself and Dave (owner/director of Juno Media) have sat down and formulated a plan of attack for this and have already started applying it to new clients.
It also means you should see me at conferences from now on, which I was unable to do at Rolled due to lack of excess funds. We’ve already started by attending the fantastic SHINE unConference on the 9th of May.
Of course, a regular wage and lack of business-induced stress is also a big plus. With weekends off and work ending at 5:30pm everyday – it’s going to be completely different from the twelve hour work days and seven day workweeks I worked at Rolled as Managing Director.
Here’s to, yet again, a new stage in my life.
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New profile: Kongregate
Everyone who’s been reading my posts know that I get most of my developing ideas from the many web apps and social networks I visit around the web. So it’s no surprise then when while flexing the muscles of my newly installed and still speedy broadband, I chanced upon another cool website.
I stumbled upon Kongregate today and after looking around at the place I’ve decided to try it out. If you’re gaming on there or just have a profile you visit once every five months, add me to your friends list: http://www.kongregate.com/accounts/jhuskisson.
I think the achievements being built into the Flash games combined with upcoming card game based on challenges that happen now and again ultimately sold me on this site. Combined with a fantastic catalogue of games it’s unique, it’s taking an existing tired old idea that has been done over and over again and advancing on that using a complete integration of the games on the site with social profiles. It’s a great idea with an excellent execution and I hope to be seeing further advancements in the future to build what they’ve already got.
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JHuskisson 2.5
It’s not exactly a version 2.5 but we may as well stick with whatever Wordpress version I’m using instead of counting the exact amount of times I’ve changed around this site. It just makes things easier. (Update: WP 2.5.1 released four seconds after making the site live, good timing).
I had David over at Rolled put together this design about a month ago based on one of Nofie Iman’s free Wordpress themes that I ran into when looking for a temporary refresh. The design will change over time, and it is planned that it will be added to as time progresses but for the moment this is the clean slate that I am to start again with.
Some interesting numbers that I’ve noticed whilst paying attention to the site properly over the past week or so. I’ve just hit 1,100 comments on posts from users and over 28,000 have been blocked via Akismet in comparison. I’ve also seen my subscribers number hit above 150, and hope to see this rise further the more I post up.
Things are moving forward on a significant amount of things in the background that I’ll be posting up about, but in short it mostly means I should be able to post much more freely in the future without worrying too much. I hope to be able to talk about the changes from freelancing to small business, how I coped with it and how I should have done it differently so that people doing the same may benefit.
I’m going to release this design as a free Wordpress theme in a few weeks, along with a Wordpress plug-in or two that I’ve put together. I also have some Code Igniter helpers/libraries and Expression Engine modules/plug-ins that I hope to be documenting online. So lots of releases all round.
For now, enjoy poking around the new layout and feel free to follow me to Twitter or any other social networking app you may be using. I’ve taken the time to list a few of my profiles I have around the net on my contact page.
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Clients: things you need for a site launch
The following is a general list of questions that can be updated towards what client’s need to do to help people launch their site on time and without any problems.
Decisions need to be made well in advance when it comes to launching a site, and this article covers just some of the most important things to consider when it comes to getting your new site online. These aren’t things to leave until the last possible minute, and should all be dealt with well in advance to launch.
Content
Are you going to re-write it? Are you going to use the same stuff with some problems? Are you wanting us to arrange a content writer for you?
Audio
Have you got all your audio files ready in the correct format to be put into the CMS? Are they on the online web service you’re going to be using to host them ready?
Video
Do you know how to get video off your CD’s and DVD’s stored? Or anywhere else for that matter? Do you know what format they need to be in? What codec to use? Do you know how to convert this format into the one you need everything to be in?
Images
Are you going to be using a web service such as Flickr? Or the CMS provided? What size do they need to be in? Do they need resizing? Or are you going to use the originals? Do they need watermarking?
Training
When will you be trained? What on? For how long? Who needs to be there? Do the people doing the training really need to be coming back several times? Or can you get all done at once? Will it cost you less if this is the case?
Contacts
If there’s more than one source for the requirements going into a project, then there needs to be a sharing of all these sources between the companies involved.
These can include, but are not limited to: accounting, hosting contacts, IT contacts, domain name registrars, designers, developers and directors.
The timeline
Make sure your timeline includes strictly set deadlines that aren’t slipped. When will you have your contacts ready? When will you have a training deadline set? Your images ready? Videos? Audio? Content for this section? That section? The other section?
Make sure they are realistic and not rushed, when deadlines are rushed they are often missed. If the staff are managing other things at the same time then they need the time to do that, not be forced to make decisions about other things too.
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WoW :o
I officially became a fully fledged geek the other day when I signed up and started playing World of Warcraft. The reason I’m making this post is that I know a lot of Final Fantasy Online players (though I don’t play), but I don’t know anyone on World of Warcraft.
If anyone wants to get in touch, my character’s name is Twodder (what else would it be?) and I’m on the Darkspear European server. I’m already up to Darkshore, heading into Ashenvale.
Feel free to post anti-WoW comments if necessary.
Update: Gave up after a month, it required far too much time.
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