What, Why, Who?
Mostly Retired
Unlike many, I am actually not looking for new business. I am mostly retired from business pursuits. However, if you are struggling to fix a WordPress website and your mission is to help humanity, wildlife, democracy or the planet, I may be interested.
Make the Web a Little Better
Over twenty years ago, some were saying that “www” stands for “World-Wide Waste.” In some cyber lands, it’s far worse than that now. People are tracked, tricked, and exploited in ways that were impossible before the Web. While fixing that is complicated and probably a never-ending battle, I know enough to have saved people from a few outright scams. However, that is not my general focus.
I want to help people who are using the Web to help. I have studied accessibility issues and, although I not an expert in that area, I know enough to find some obvious accessibility problems, especially related to navigation and page structure, and I know how to fix them. I know how to fix a lot of other problems as well, especially related to CSS, JavaScript, PHP, WordPress, and WordPress plugins.
I like puzzles, so if your WordPress site is puzzling you, you want help, and your cause is good, contact me. You don’t have to represent a nonprofit. I will consider small businesses offering products or services that help people or the environment.
If you want ongoing maintenance, sorry. I’m already doing enough of that. Look for someone who specializes in maintenance. There are two basic approaches there: pay each time you need maintenance, or pay a monthly fee for regular things like keeping plugins updated, regular backups of the site, and broken link checking. A monthly maintenance agreement may or may not include an extra charge for things that come up beyond that, depending on how high the maintenance fee is to begin with.
If you maintain your own site, I’m happy to help. I love teaching people how to do it themselves.
Who Am I, Anyway?
I became an adult half a century ago, and I still don’t know the answer to that question. I am not what I have done, but I have done a lot of different things.
I was a mainframe programmer/analyst. What’s a mainframe, you ask? I don’t even know if any computers are still called that. In the 1980’s they were relatively huge computers, many made by IBM, that were mostly used for storing data and calculation formulas. Then came mini-computers, which, like mainframes, allowed multiple “dumb” terminals to connect to them at the same time. And PC’s, many of which ran on the MS-DOS operating system that made Microsoft and Bill Gates rich and famous.
I was a teacher for a little while. Shortly after I got my teaching certificate, I took a job not as a teacher but as an educational assistant in a (mostly) self-contained special education classroom for children with severe physical disabilities and some apparent or imagined mental disabilities as well. I had worked with special needs kids at Camp Easter Seal some years before and I wanted to experience what was going on in special ed before I committed to studying for a special ed endorsement to add to my basic K-8 teaching certificate (with K-12 endorsements in math and biology). That experience led to my involvement for five years with a young man with severe cerebral palsy who had a wicked sense of humor and who was quite smart, but whose body made showing that very difficult. It also led me to Montessori, as I discovered Montessori can work wonderfully well with special needs kids.
I taught in a private and a public charter Montessori school. I left both, largely for health and other personal reasons. I admire Montessori teachers. I am philosophically even more aligned with democratic free schools.
Programming is much easier for me than is teaching a large classroom. I can do programming when I am tired and my back hurts. Logic challenges wake me up and take my focus away from my body, which is good for finding solutions but not always so good for my body. Being around crowds when I am tired does not work for me. I decided my body could not take another year of teaching.
The requirements made of first-year teachers, at least in California public schools, are ridiculous. Other professions expect people to improve over time with experience and additional training. Public education seems to expect all teachers to know everything from the beginning and be as excellent at teaching as a 20-year veteran teacher who has won awards. Huge numbers of first-year teachers leave after that first year. I was one of those. Professionals burning out is not good for the children in school, but teachers are treated as replaceable commodities.
Unfortunately, other professions seem to have moved in that direction as well. Everyone has been reduced to a machine. Everyone can be swapped out. Heck, AI robots will replace us all. (Their “intelligence” may be on par with the loudest propaganda found on social media. Humans may be doomed – or perhaps humans will yet save humanity.)
So much for some of what I’ve done. At core, I’m a human, and we may be more alike than either of us would care to admit. I am still learning what a human is.