ReadWriteWeb has a really good article on how Gen Y is the future of the web. That’s kind of an obvious statement, but the change is happening now. One of the paragraphs that really stood out to me was:
Work Isn’t Their Whole World: Sure, they’re going to go to work, but it had better be fun. For Gen Y, work isn’t their identity. It’s just a place. Gen Y sees no reason why a company can’t be more accommodating, offering benefits like the ability to work from anywhere, flex-time, a culture that supports team communication, and a “fun” work environment. They’re also not going to blindly follow orders just because you’re the boss. Sometimes dubbed “Generation Why?” they need to “buy in” as to why something is being done. Old school bosses may find their questioning insubordinate behavior, but they would be best to just change their management techniques and adapt. Gen Y hasn’t known much unemployment and they’re not going to put up with being treated poorly just for sake of a paycheck. (Bosses, your survival guide is here).
That made me laugh because I’ve been frontin’ that attitude since ‘97. But the one thing this paragraph overlooks is the money factor. The internet industry is so hot that it’s not hard to increase your salary by $10k-$20k every year just by switching jobs.
FontStruct is a very cool online app that allows anyone to create a font using their flash font creation tool, then save it as a True-Type Font for free!
With so many ways to aggregate and consume content, there needs to be a better way to filter the wheat from the chaff. This is the next hot idea starting to bubble around the net. ReadWriteWeb has a great article on the topic.
As mentioned in my previous entry, I converted davidchiu.net from MT to WP. The migration was pretty easy and I just followed the instructions I found on Wordpress.org. The only thing is that I didn’t care for their solution for redirecting previous MovableType permalinks to new Wordpress pages. So I came up with my own solution: create a custom WP 404 page which redirects the user to a search results page. The effect would be this:
If a user comes from an old MT permalink such as http://davidchiu.net/2003/05/some_old_title.php that does not correspond to an existing Wordpress page, convert the filename to a title fragment (ie, some_old_title.php becomes “some old title”) and return a Wordpress search result.
This should take care of all old permalinks. The corresponding code is pretty simple. I just added the following code to the top of my custom 404 page:
<?php
$filename=basename($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],”.php”);
$filename=basename($filename,”.html”);
$title=ereg_replace(’_|-’,’ ‘,$filename);
header(”Location: http://”.$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].”/?s=\”".$title.”\”");
?>
The first two lines strip either the “.html” or “.php” extension from the original request URL. The ereg_replace() function converts any underscores or dashes to spaces. Finally, the header() function redirects the user to the Wordpress search result page for the title fragment.
In my initial tests it works great. Let me know if this code could be better.
