An interaction with Mr. X, Doctor by profession and a Social worker by heart, at the airport waiting for our flight. Discussing ways to empower people from remote/ backward areas
Me: So why do you think the majority of the people that are hunger-stricken or poor unable to think big?
X: Okay! Tell me are you a ‘Glass is half-full’ person or ’ Glass is half-empty’ person?
Me: ‘Half-full’ may be!
X: Well, for a person that is thirsty, doesn’t care if it’s half-full or half-empty, He would just drink it.
Wrong type of Audience!
This interaction has got me thinking for a long time, and would like to know more of your thoughts on this.
Me: So what do you think is the problem with helpful articles, inspirations or advices on social media.
X: There is no problem with those articles, but the problem is with such articles reaching wrong audience. and people being inspired from sources that are not relevant to them. For example, advice needed for baby boomers is different than that of millennials. Posts related to an established tycoon are different from a teenager.
A person responsible for multi million corporation taking advice on budget/ organizational structure from a nobody on snapchat or youtube is a problem. …
*After thinking about this statement for a while, here’s my take on this.
Imagine a coach training a group of students to run a marathon, that needs a steady pace. Imagine one of those students is running extremely fast, burning out himself and another student is just casually walking. Now, what happens if the coach shouts just ‘Go Slow’, and the person that’s casually walking follows that advice? or the coach shouts ‘Run Faster’ and person that already running fast take that advice? It is the same with Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn, WhatsApp groups, or any other social media. *
A Wealth Of Information Creates A Poverty Of Attention
Drupal 7 Migrate Taxonomy to Organic Groups
Organic Groups module for drupal, enable users to create and manage their own ‘groups’. Each group can have subscribers, and maintains a group home page where subscribers communicate amongst themselves.
A website of a federal client, that I worked on, had custom groups functionality, implemented using taxonomy. It became out-of-scale to manage that way, any longer and also they with restricted, by that. This module, crawls through each taxonomy term, create an organic group, based on those terms. Also migrate all users, posts, likes, comments, interaction history, … from being assigned to taxonomy term to being part of organic groups.
Project URL: https://github.com/bhar1red/Drupal-migrate-from-taxonomy-groups-to-organic-groups
Technology : Drupal
Drupal 7 Tags Cleanup
[comment]: # (Project should contain Summary, Description, Repo and Live urls, Screenshot or demo video and Tutorials( if any.))
One of the problems, user’s face is too-many similar tags. Since tags can be created by multiple people, there is a posiblity of two users, creating same tag, with a minor difference.
For example, informationTechnology, Information Technology, Information-Technology, information technology,… are all valid tags and mean the same. When a user wants to tag a content, they often gets confused with which tag to use.
This module, is created as a drush command, scans through such tags, identify which one to keep and deletes other tags. It also updates all content tagged with such similar tags to now tag to real one. For above example, Module would keep Information-Technology and delete all other tags.
Code is available as an open source module on github. All installation and usage instructions are mentioned there.
Project URL: https://github.com/bhar1red/drupal-7-tags-cleanup
Technology : Drupal
I don’t usually get offended or irritated, but interactions like these, make me feel uncomfortable.
As you might already know, we are establishing a web-development firm and is currently looking for more projects. Met X, who is opening a new shop and called me to discuss his branding and development needs.
…
After a lengthy discussion on how we can improve his shop’s digital footprint.
X: So, how much would you charge?
Me: Well, I can’t say right away, need to analyze more, but for similar services, we are charging $***** for another client. (Wouldn’t reveal the price but it is in thousands)
X: Are you kidding? I can get it in Squarespace or Wix for less than a 100 bucks.
Me: well then, please go with it. (Stood up and started leaving.)
X: Wait! You still haven’t answered me for your price difference.
Me: I would like to remind a couple of things here
- Web Development doesn’t mean just including a theme. It includes customization, SEO, SMO, Deployment/Hosting, Security, testing, content-entry, …
- Our discussion is not just development, but also branding and marketing which includes a lot more like the logo, lead generation strategies, content…
X: Well I can get them done for much cheaper prices on freelancer or fiverr. Looks like you are expecting way too profit margins.
Me: Imagine you have a medical problem. You can do your own research on the internet and use a house-therapy suggested by someone on Quora or go to a pharmacist, tell him your symptoms and let them give a generic medicine. But you would instead go to a doctor who does a thorough diagnosis, sometimes the problem is not what you thought it was, might refer you to a specialist if needed, treat as necessary, support you until you get healthy.
This is the same. It is your decision if you want to do your own diagnosis or consult a doctor but please don’t compare them.
X: Looks like you have got offended. All I am saying is you don’t have to spend or invest much, why charge …. money then?
Me: We do. We invest time, expertise and skills.
These kinds of interactions we all face every day, across multiple fields. As freelancers, recruiters, artists, photographers, models, copy-writers, mentors, … Thing is we don’t mind doing it for free for our friends or non-profit causes, but if you are adding value to your product/business, with our services, we do expect to get paid for the value we add.
There are always 3 sides to an argument. Your side, other side and the right side, which is usually in middle of the two sides.
Acquisition Gateway GSA
[comment]: # (Project should contain Summary, Description, Repo and Live urls, Screenshot or demo video and Tutorials( if any.))
The Acquisition Gateway is your workspace for acquisition professionals and federal buyers to connect with resources, tools and each other to improve acquisition government-wide.
This website is built in Drupal 7 and AngularJS, in a progress decoupled architecture. Aside from regular updates and changes, I have enhanced search functionality, developed custom modules to remove duplicate taxonomy and to create organic groups based on taxonomy.
Project URL: https://hallways.cap.gsa.gov
Technologies Used : Drupal, Apache Solr, Github, Amazon AWS, AngularJS.