On the website project I’m doing, I identified the flaw I alluded to yesterday and will test out a fix for it. This group has staff working at different locations. They want to show for each location which staff are there. Each staff member also has a specialty and they want to display specialties by location. Ideally they want to go behind the scenes of the website, to the administrative world, and set up a staff member and give them a location and give them specialties. Then the appropriate web pages can show the right data all without getting a programmer to do the hard work.
In theory that is what was built. In practice, the guy who spent far too much time, in my opinion, building an awfully labor intensively custom website didn’t quite do it right. And you can’t adjust one of the dimensions of location from the admin side. I finally did it by reaching deep deep inside of the database by hand and changing one instance of the number 170 to 250. Or maybe it was 240. I don’t remember. It was a bit of an educated guess but it worked.
Problem is, I can’t teach anyone else to safely do that. And in finding that I learned how to re-design a small part of their site so it will be easy for someone with a much lower pay grade than mine to make a similar change safely and repeatably.
In other news, I had 4 calls including my Mastermind group. Everything went well. I may have made a new friend in Baltimore of all places. He does marketing and tried to sell me on his services previously. I said I do that stuff myself already but liked his approach and suggested we should chat. Had a good talk, he and his partner are doing some interesting marketing stuff and we’ll keep in touch.
Other calls were good but less to write about.