IT Girl Geekiness a Good Yarn
Perl is a dynamic programming language created by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. Perl borrows features from a variety of other languages including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, sed and Lisp. Perl is widely adopted for its strengths in text processing and lack of the arbitrary limitations of many scripting languages at the time.
Yet Purl on the other hand is the same resulting stitch as the knit stitch if you were to look at the knit stitch on the reverse side. There’s the Continental Method aka the German method or The English Method aka as The Throw Method or The American method! Confused? Yes, I understand completely, your confusion I mean. Actually I just threw that in to string you along!
My friend Frazer and me have been developing a website for my friend Maryanne who’s a therapeutic massage practitioner. It’s been a journey I’ll tell you. First of all, anything to do with computers and technology can be confusing and if you’re so inclined, fearful. Now, the latter is entirely understandable. Ever experienced that ‘now you see it now you don’t’ (if you push the wrong button) feeling? Yes it’s heart-stopping! Let me tell you, it feels even worse when you don’t save code you’ve been working on.
As it happens, I don’t mind taking the bull by its horns since I’ve had a bit of practise when I was a kid growing up on a farm. I’m serious! By way of an explanation, my older brother was always testing my gullibility to its limits and in all due fairness to him, I was, totally! Often my father had cattle in the stockyards waiting to go to the freezing works (for slaughter).
My brother would goad my brave insensibilities by suggesting I couldn’t stay in the yards long enough to rile a beast up, allow it to charge at me and dive out between the wooden yard palings just in time, just like an adventurer. Adventurer be blowed! I should have had my head read.
My brother would have made a great psychologist. He could read me like a book. He knew I’d do it! And actually, I think some big ol’ angel was waiting outside the railings ready to arm-yank me out to safety and were they of the disposition probably wanted to box my ears themselves. I’ve lived thus far only by the grace of God!
I’ve had occasion in the recent past to experience IT geeks up close and personal in other projects. Some of them have terrible table manners and can be the worst communicators I’ve met in an Industry funnily enough focussed on communication. We could split hairs on the fact that they’d say they’re developing technologies but in my opinion, the bottom line is that those developments are designed to faciliate better communications in a broad spectrum sense.
Some can be arrogant and unhelpful, full of jargon. Watch out for those ones, they’re the paper tiger types. Plenty of IT people out there, make sure you find one that listens. Some are very bad listeners and that’s not good for a business, especially if its yours because the financial outlays can take your breath away.
“Tim Berners-Lee is credited with having created the World Wide Web while he was a researcher at the European High-Energy Particle Physics lab, the Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN), in Geneva, Switzerland. A tool was needed to enable collaboration between physicists and other researchers in the high energy physics community.
Berners-Lee wrote a proposal called HyperText and CERN and circulated his proposal for comments at CERN in 1989. The proposal was his solution to the technologies that would enable collaboration in the high energy physics community. He had a background in text processing, communications, and real-time software. He further refined the proposal with Robert Cailliau in 1990.
Tim’s proposal was an extension of the gopher idea but incorporated many new ideas and features. From about 1992 through to 1996 Gopher was an Internet application in which a series of organised text files could be brought from Servers all over the world to a viewer on your computer.
Especially in universities, Gopher was a step toward the World Wide Web’s Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that effectively replaced it. Http is a request/response standard between a client and a server. A client is the end-user and the server is the website. The best way I can think of to take the fear factor out of that kind of definition is to relate how in the old days when you could phone your grocery order in here in Waipukurau, you’d get someone on the end of the line, usually Jack McCleary who you’d tell your order to.
When you finished he’d read your order back to you to make sure he’d got it right, you’d say yes he’d got it right or not and a few hours later your groceries would turn up in your letter box (in case you’re wondering, yes it was a large letterbox, it could fit four ‘up-to-mischief’ school age children in it) delivered by the rural milkman. Nothing fearful in that, it’s all in the delivery. Consider this my geek listening post.
Three new technologies were incorporated into his proposal. Briefly, they were HTML (HyperText Markup Language) used to write the web documents, HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) to transmit the pages and a web browser client software programme to receive and interpret data and display results. An important concept of his proposal included the fact that the client software programme’s user interface would be consistent across all types of computer platforms so that users could access information from many types of computers.” In plain speak, you and me got to speak to each other today.
With Frazer we’ve nearly completed my first website, it’s not fancy but it’s functional, everything that should work works, it looks good and has features that communicate everything an enquirer needs to know to make transacting in Maryanne’s business easy for them. It’s not going to blind them with technological wizardry but our goal has been to create a web presence with the intention of converting enquirers to users of her service among OTHER marketing strategies.
I’m not an IT geek but it’s highly satisfying and I got to guide Maryanne through a sensible strategy about what her website will contribute to her overall business plan. She’s a small business and I have to say website designers, web hosts and domain name sellers don’t do small business any favours. Here in New Zealand, they’re over priced and in my opinion border on stealers of candy from babies.
We saved her hundreds of dollars, I kid you not. So a word of advice to Small Business owners, yes have a web presence but do your home work first. Not all that glitters is gold. Yes, one day have bells and whistles but PLAN for it and don’t let anyone talk you into anything different. Put simply, ask yourself whether you’d rather have a small headache first and a chance to recover from it or a huge one that’s more like a migraine and will go on for days on end. I know which one I’d rather have so think about!
