I Wonder If I'm Good At My Job, Or Bad?
I thumbtacked this guy's fantasy map of internet processes and products to the wall of my cube, and pasted a little Lotus Notes logo in "Vendor Jungle (Cannibals!)" I would love to turn it into a text adventure but I don't know what half of it is trying to say about certain products, especially around the middle. And there are some terms I don't know at all.
You probably already know from my previous blog posts, but back in August I started a new job. "Digital Media Specialist". I've now switched from print to Internet-- taking over editing a website, intranet and secure extranet for a cutting tool company.
It's an enormous task. I'm struck by how different the expectations are for a corporate site than a more casual group or organization site. It's pointing up to my awareness just how inexperienced I am in professional internet work and its mindset.
I am not allowed to install free software that would help me do my job; it requires a multi-week process of approvals. I am required to work in a custom in-house WYSIWYG GUI CMS that operates within Lotus Notes. I never can be quite sure when a change is going to go live so I could check to see if it works for the rest of the world the way it looks when I am a logged-in editor. Its inadequacies are too numerous to list right now; but my boss agrees and is trying to work around corporate requirements, to build a separate site with HTML, CSS and FTP. I am also learning Flash and Javascript, and they're willing to send me to a seminar if I can find one. Unfortunately the parent company's tech department blocks FTP from the office and seems to be blocking the necessary ports for cpanel as well. But anyway.
The web certainly is different from the print mindset. Content is king, rather than presentation (and yet our offerings are not searchable because the sites are almost entirely PDF). There are no deadlines because it's a process, rather than a product with a beginning, a proofing, and an end when the presses roll. It can never be complete or finished, it has to be good enough to be ready, and then improved. Overwritten information just vanishes as if it had never been there. Also you never know when a piece of hay (a hyperlink) in the ever-accumulating haystack will turn into a needle (a dead link). And without knowing anything about the product, I don't personally know when information has become wrong.
Sometimes I think some of the people I work with don't necessarily get the mindset, and I'm trying to think of ways to explain it to them. Then other times I think maybe I'm just spoiled by getting to work on casual group sites with my friends. Should I really read the entire haystack and know everything in it?
Monday was quite stressful because our support hotline had been collecting these "needles" from our customers' calls for months, and finally dumped a huge pile of "needles" in my boss's lap.
I re-did all the links and they suddenly worked. I came up with an explanation, but it feels like a superstition to me. I don't know what other things could unexpectedly break links, because the CMS is based on rote memorizations of processes. It conceals the underlying technology in a way that prevents deep understanding. All I have learned is one particular rule, which cannot be generalized to an entire family of problem cases.
Fortunately my boss understands this. But I wonder how much I have to resign myself to having a hospital at the bottom of the cliff instead of a fence at the top, in regards to these issues. Then I wonder if I should ask those to whom I am answerable to resign themselves to it as well, as the nature of digital media.
I like my job, I just can't tell whether I'm any good at it by industry standards.
Comments
thatguychuck on Dec. 11, 2007 5:56 PM
I can't help with the rest, but I can help you find your needles. Do a google search on "link checking software." I found it invaluable while checking a huge website for broken links. (Huge as in over 40,000 pages.) I can't remember which tools I used, but I remember finding some things out there.
atdt1991 on Dec. 11, 2007 6:03 PM
If it's a public site, you can let the web do it for you, naturally, with web-based applications that may not be blocked.
matt-arnold on Dec. 11, 2007 6:11 PM
I already submitted a request for Xenu's Link Sleuth. That's what I use on my own sites.
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