₦airaland Forum

teemy, happy you see my point.

Well, I would love to apply but again:
1) the job description isn't specific enough and I am afraid I would be wasting my time
2) I am not even in Nigeria
3) I am afraid they couldn't pay me enough

If they made #3 worth my while up front, I might reconsider sha

This reminds me of a story I read last year or so about a guy who robbed a woman in her car and asked her to get out, leaving all her possessions inside. Ye ye "thief", im come use d woman phone take picture. As if dat no do, im upload d photo, using d woman phone, to im facebook page As d police come recover d car, d woman get im phone back. The rest as they say, is history, he he.

There we go again with the "Mark Zuckerberg is not a college grad" comments. I am surprised you didn't add Bill Gates or Steve Jobs to the list. Again I am surprised you haven't mentioned that Google makes billions despite having a plain, white web page. Geez!

Bear in mind that Mark never applied for the facebook job. He OWNS FACEBOOK! He saw an idea and went for it and fortunately for him, others saw value in his idea. The subject of this thread is not about risk-taking entrepreneurs but a job listing and the proper way to present one. Next time you want to show us "who I am", try and get the main gist of the matter.

Now, here is a recent job listing I received, one that IMHO is much more detailed. Right there, if I am not interested, I just move it to my "jobs" folder, for future reference. Again the idea is that I don't want to waste my time pursuing a job that may not be a good fit for me. how else to make that decision? The way the listing is described above, I guess they want everyone in the universe to apply because let's face it - whereas the chaff could "have a good knowledge of web development", only the wheat will possess the actual skill set(s) for the job in question.

Note:
I receive lots of job listings, none of which are ever the same. having said that, for the most part, they all tend to follow pretty much the same format below:

JOB TITLE:
Web Developer
MAIN SKILLS:
JavaScript (AJAX, jQuery), DOM, HTML, UI, CSS, OOD, PHP or other framework

JOB OVERVIEW:
Develop using HTML, JavaScript, AJAX, PHP, integration with Content Management Systems, site maintenance and troubleshooting. The Web Developer Oracle DBA--Phoenix AZshoOracle DBA--Phoenix AZuld be able to work as part of a team or act as the sole project developer.

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES
Software Solution Design, Software Development and Testing

QUALIFICATIONS FOR POSITION
• 6+ years of web development, including expertise in HTML, CSS, AJAX, JavaScript and libraries like JQuery and JQuery UI
• 3-4 years of experience with server-side scripting PHP or similar object-oriented server-side scripting language
• Experience writing technical specifications and driving them through development

SKILLS REQUIRED
• Deep knowledge of standards-based and JavaScript (AJAX, JQuery) DOM, ,HTML, CSS, UI, OOD
• Knowledge of mobile app development
• Knowledge of server-side scripting language and framework, for example Zend for PHP, or other framework
• Proven ability to work with all members of a technical project team

Skills Desired
• Agile/SCRUM experience a plus
• Understanding of J2EE, Java Servlets, JDBC or JavaBeans

From experience, I have found that jomSocial sites, depending on host, generally takes a long time to load, especially the first time around. I don't know if the code used to write it is like JSP where initial pages may take a little while to load at first but load automatically afterwards though. Sometimes, the app crashes altogether. . .again, probably host-specific.

jomsocial!

Maybe you add a "gradiented" background as that would give the overall layout some more depth.

I don't think I have ever logged in, on the same device, for the past 6 months. Sure, Seun may (I suspect) reboot/flush the server every now and then and force me to log in but for the most part, I rarely log in.

multiple reply:
1) Sure, anyone can fudge a resume but a good interviewing session can separate the weed from the chaff. Trust me, I am an expert on this

2) If the people will put you where you fit in, no problem. At least mention so on your resume. Again, I don'tknow .NET and would hate to go through all the rigamarole only to find out that for example, it is a .NET environment.

3) What is it they say that ends with, "and a master of none"? IMHO, tis best to focus on a core competency than to try and do it all. Can you do it? Sure. Is it necessarily more efficient? IMHO, I don't think so.

4) Web developer is vague, with respect to what you will actually be doing. Anyone who spends 30 mins of the HTML section of w3schools is automatically a web developer, by technical and strictest definition. Does this mean the person would qualify for the job above, even after fudging their resume, I don't think so.

these days i work with people rather than for people, nothing beats the life of freelance except where job security matters,

The whole essence of freelancing is the risk. You can't eat your cake and have it too (is that how the saying goes? I've never bothered to know). That is why like the proverbial ant, you work hard and save hard. Every business has ebbs and flows. You don't want to be caught off guard.

naija! una too dey like suffer on purpose. Una go c better way but like the proverbial goat, if u know hit d breast really hard, milk no go flow

People have already done the hard work for you. Download akeeba/kickstart and you will be good to go.

clem:

You can't even apply as you don't want to waste your time as nothing is specified. I mean, web developer is vague. What of if your expertise is in PHP but they are actually looking for .NET? Think about it.

Aboki,

I hope this posts proves that I am not the stingy type and am willing to make progress, though as I have stated before, those who would love to post aren't doing so because of the new direction the board has taken.

OP:
How did you transfer your Joomla site from local to the host? Are you aware of Akeeba backup? If not, you need to:

1) Go to your server installation and delete all the tables in the database you created (spare the actual database itself)
2) Download akeeba backup, and run it on your local installation (the akeeba backup's documentation is actually very good)
3) transfer the "zipped" backup to your server
4) Part of the akeeba install comes with a kickstart.php file. Follow instructions on how to run it
5) If all goes well, your transfer will be a success.

Note:
Akeeba backup is actually very cool and easy to understand. Learning curve is low. Except for the first time that I ever ran it, I haven't encountered any problems since.

good luck!

After I got banned by adsense, I switched to adbrite. Whereas the former paid me after 30 days, the latter paid me after 60 days. On those grounds alone, I will say adsense is better

Very interesting job listing. I mean, not even a mention of skill set required or educational background. Scary

yamakuza, how can you get to the future, if you don't understand the past, how it relates to the present, and learn from it?

As I have written on similarly sounding threads, IMHO, it is about lack of quality posters, lack of quality posts and the new layout of the site. For me, the main thing is the new layout. There is really no good way for me to determine what posts are new or are worthy of response. Everything looks like one large, long post.

I personally visit this board no more than 4 times a day, spending no more than 10 seconds (with the exception of now, of course ) each time. I guess NL can afford to lose a lil google adsense money from this board as I am sure it is making tons in the sex, dating and romance sections.

Quick question:
Should an event/company that is promoting mobile trends have a website (in this case, mobilewestafrica.com) that is optimized for mobile? In other words, wouldn't it be nice to practice what you preach?

OP:

Dual has spoken best here. Listen to him.

This has happened to me b4, on an opencart site I did for someone 3 or so years ago. The embarrassing part is that I was in the process of showing a client on whose site I wanted to use opencart, the said site and of course I had to use FF. "Luckily", this issue didn't popup in IE and I still got the biz though needless to say, it was highly embarrassing.

dhtml, I thought "someone" quit web dev yesterday

yeah right! dhtml not coding "until further notice" is like saying a red blooded male will not (in the words of dbanj, "hmmm" until further notice.

Who are you deceiving man?

Good luck in your next endeavor though. Remember what I told you - you have 5 fingers and each has its purpose. Don't be like the cow who didn't appreciate its tail till it got caught off

Interswitch site being hacked is like PayPal's site being hacked - in "serious" countries, this would lead to the permanent loss of faith in interswitch. Are they still the big fish in the pond over there? If so, this would be the time for alternatives to sprout up.

url to the site would be handy here so we can check the underlying code. Browsers are meant to read html so it doesn't make sense that is displaying the actual html code. . .unless, you are using some kind of cms or wysiwyg and it is doing a literal interpretation. hmmmm.

As I said, paste the url make we see.

There is also a lot on youtube. If you can afford the bandwidth, I would advise those. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million pictures.

Good luck!

NL on fire again. . .Alright!

TO view CSS, use firfox. Just view source and go to where the css is declared. There will b a hyper link associated with all linked files (css, js, etc). CLick it and you will see all the code you want.

Another option: Get web developer toolkit. This will give you a dropdown called "CSS". You can either select "edit" to see the code side by side your page or you click "view css" to see the read only version.

NL is alive, Amen, it's alive. NL is alive for now, it's alive Amen!!

omo:
You probably don't know the answer to these but I will ask anyway, in case someone else has the answer:
a) What is the target audience of NL?
b) Who forms the bulk of users on NL, with respect to geographical location? I bet you they aren't in Nigeria.

In other words, was there a feasibility study to determine what best would work for at least 90% of its users? Yes, the world is gradually moving to mobile and as developers, at least in my neck of the woods, we are advised to design/develop with mobile first in mind but that doesn't mean we throw away the baby with the bath water.

In terms of quality posts, I guess I wasn't that clear, for which I apologize. Here is what I was trying to say:
Even when members didn't post anything original, they at least posted stuff from external sources, stuff we could all benefit from. I used to do that a lot too. So worse case, we could at least post those and generate some kind of intellectual conversation. In terms of posts this year, I agree with you 100% that for 4 months now, there haven't been more than 5 quality posts on this board.

Time will tell, I guess.

As I said, the "main" issue is the lack of quality people. As to the posts, we can grab them from anywhere though without the people to respond, it is like a plane without a pilot.

I hope I have helped clarify things

Btw, how do we get quality posts/topics that will attract quality people?

we don't lack quality posts. Worst case, we can post from google searches. The main issue is the lack of quality people, IMHO. Such people will be a natural source for quality posts. These people will return the intellectual discourse that has been lacking here for a while.

Bring back the people, and the posts (and consequent google adsense traffic) shall surely return. How do you bring back the people? You have to convince them that this board is a relevant one. How do you do that? If I knew the answer (which I think I do, he he), I would be running my own board

To quote J. Martins:
"I don tell una say, dis board don die o, d koloko, iyo we. "

On a serious note, and I hate to say it, is anyone surprised? I brought up my reasons earlier on this year when the new layout was revealed. Now, I visit 3 times at the most, per day. Compare that to at least 10 times a day last year.

As I said then and will say now, considering the number of boards on here, an "economic" decision has probably been made to ignore this board as others are the ones bringing in the money (google ads). In fact, it could be "by his grace" that this board hasn't been shut down altogether.

If the main issues aren't addressed (already discussed on other threads), it will continue to be this way.

Time will tell.

^^^ Same difference.

OP,

I am not a fan of positioning. It can be done but it gets tricky. Just lay it out as I have specified and you should be fine. Better yet, do what I did when I was starting out - go to a site you like and save out the complete page. Then analyze the underlying code and modify to see what will happen. With time, you will be able to branch out on your own and write your own code.

good luck!

I think OP is a lonely fella. What other reason is there for anyone to take such an email seriously, and seriously enough to copy and paste it in its entirety on the webmaster section of NL when there are sex, romance and relationships sections for this kind of (fake) stuff?

Maybe something like this (Note: I won't go into details of css or how to code a navigation menu or set widths. You will need to figure tha tout on your own):

<div id="container">
    <div id="header">Header</div>
    <ul id="navigation">
        <li>menu item 1</li>
        <li>menu item 2</li>
        <li>menu item 3</li>
    </ul>
    <div id="content">
        <div id="sidbar" style="float: left;">side bar contents</div>
        <div id="main" style="float: right;">main content area</div>
        <br style="clear: both;" />
    </div>
    <div id="footer">footer</div>
</div>

phew!

yamakuza, most of the "old timers" left this board around 2007, with many more following in 2009. I personally remember not visiting for around 3 weeks around that time but due to reasons described in my first post, I had no choice, so to speak, but to return.