[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

<snippage> I said "Thanks for the warning. If he tries it on me I'll close the door and scream back." (These days that sort of behavior would produce a lawsuit.)

Never did deal with him. I got rejected by his son, and likely just as well.

I've done this with screamers. There doesn't seem to be any other way to deal with them. At heart, they are schoolyard bullies, trying to pick on people that they think are "weaker" than they. Usually one good shriek back works, but I did have an employer/client that required an additional step. I think I'll pass on explaining that in detail, as I'm pretty sure it makes me sound like a loon.

I try not to have that sort of rat's nest.

Agreed. It's pretty inexcusable. I have all of my rats' nest occupants labled and bundled, but it's also true that they DO seem to have a mind of their own, somehow--SOMEHOW--getting jumbled up.

There were whole litters of dust puppies in it.

Hell, I name mine. Cute little buggers. I do find, however, that they are difficult to tell apart, darn it. Perhaps I ought to get them color-coded collars...hmmmm.

With the Internet and self-publishing, the Internet is now the largest slush pile in the history of publishing. There are reasons why trade houses now mostly only look at submissions from established agents. Reading slush was always an editor's least favorite chore, and much of it was "gouge out eyes with a spoon after reading" quality. Nowadays the unwary reader is subjected to it.

An old friend was former executive editor at a trade house, and is now a full time writer. She spent a few months as a freelance editor at a Harlequin books eBook imprint (and a unit of Harlequin was one of her publishers). She resigned, and said "I guess I didn't miss editing as much as I thought." The eBook imprint's deal was "no advance, but higher than normal royalty, and a well received title can be picked up by Harlequin for print edition." What it got in consequence was stuff that would hit the slush pile, and stuff established writers had been unable to sell elsewhere.

My take was "You do miss editing. You miss making a good book better. What you don't miss is reading slush, and that's what you were doing."

GMTA! That's what I tell people all the time (the slush pile comment), nearly verbatim. And, after 7 years of this now, I've come to have FAR more sympathy for editors and slush-pile readers than I ever did before. OTOH, let's be honest--you can rule out a bunch just by reading the cover letter/inquiry; and my theory is, if the book doesn't show decent promise by the time you've slogged through 5-10K words, it never will. I don't mean the oft-discussed "hook;" I just mean that unmistakable ebb and flow of a GOOD writer. The mastery of the word, the phrase, dialogue, etc. I can tell in one page if a book is worth even trying. That's a skill I'm sure we've all honed through Amazon's LITB.

Doesn't even have to be "50 Shades Dreck" (which was done definitively 25 years ago by "Elizabeth McNeill" in "9 1/2 Weeks", in one much shorter volume, and got a bad movie adaptation.)

<snip>

As long as publishers make enough money to continue offering what I do like, I'm content.

Agreed.

Templates are fine. No point in rolling your own if something off the shelf is applicable. The trick is recognizing it needs to be done and picking a good one.

I haven't looked at Joomla, but my suspicion is that the problems are mostly in understanding how to make it do it. An old friend is a noted open source advocate, and was griping about the quality of the lot of open source (which Joomla is) documentation. I proposed a drinking game. Look for open source projects. Take a drink for every one where you don't understand the documentation on how to use it. Take two drinks for every one where you can't even find a description of what it's supposed to do. You will be under the table in short order...

Hooooooooo, no. You're not gonna get me plastered with that one. I've been around websites for so many years now that I've SEEN all those promised but grossly-undocumented platforms, programs, and the like. BTDT.

The Easter-Egg Hunt for destructions or information or ANYTHING is certainly part of it with Joomla! (J!). But that's not the biggest issue I have with J!. My first biggie is that it's entirely "article" based. (Think of a blogging system, essentially). So, you create articles, then you assign them to a menu item. So far, normal, yeah? Oh, but wait--you create menu items through telling the system what particular "articles" it's created FROM. Yes, that's right--there's no way to craft an article/entry and see what the hell it will look like, live, nor know it's final URL (particularly if you're using a lot of rewrites for SEF's). You can't just create a menu item, like one would normally do with HTML. You have to create this content, or pile (category) of content, and then MAKE a menu item from that. For example, menu entry X is compiled from all the articles in category y, or all the featured articles in category Z, or...it's endless. From my perspective, that's precisely the opposite of how it ought to be, this subsuming of the power of code to these end-user-type workarounds.

ANYWAY...(oh, and yeah--99% of the users of the cursed thing know less than I do. So their end-user forum is filled with people calling themselves "Joomla experts," but that seems to equate to someone who can put plug-ins into a Wordpress framework/theme/template.)

You learn things after you do them long enough. And the issues are inherent in any client oriented business.


Any time.
______
Dennis

Yes. I'm simply accustomed to a completely different client base, and TYPE of client base. I've been lucky, working with some of the top hotel companies, RE Developers, architects, et al, in the WORLD, much less just here. My clients were always some of the sharpest guys in the room. Obviously, that's a pretty far piece from what I'm doing now, although we've been very lucky in clientele for this line of work, too.

Best,
Hitch