Every Day a Networking Day

Happy Canada Day, everyone! I was out there enjoying myself and happily taking picture after picture with my camera when I ran into person after person that I have not seen in a long time.  In addition to many new interesting people , I had the chance to meet ever so briefly with Neil Beaumont of CHYM FM, the local Rogers station.

The short version of the story is that marketing is about people and bringing value to their lives and marketing yourself is no exception. When you have a full-time job like me, you should still be out there meeting as many people as possible and networking with them to expand your list of contacts.

That does mean I can expect more traffic to hit my website at adam.reislunde.com, which is a good thing and a bad thing. The website is HTML 5 and designed to be web standard, so to simplify: it works in browsers like Firefox, Chrome and Opera, browsers that focus on adherance to the W3C web standards.

The flip side of that coin is that Internet Explorer, the browser with one of the biggest market shares, has never been designed with standards as a forefront concern. Mangled box models and other basic CSS 2 display issues were never fixed until Internet Explorer 7, when compliant browsers like Firefox started to draw users away. As of Internet Explorer 8, HTML 5 is still not supported, as it is a draft.

Are any of these good reasons to write bad markup? Or poor code to deliever and modify the markup? Or hacked-up CSS files that exploit the differences in web rendering? All of these are practices of a past when that was the only option. However javascript can be used to modify the markup to HTML 4, then commented to be sent only to browsers based on IE.  A similar method can be used to send a secondary CSS file that fixes the IE incompatibilities.  These cause longer loading times in IE, and there is an additional hitch. They take additional time.

Frankly, the website works everywhere on every browser, but its not ready for prime time. There are several minor IE glitches that still need looking after, and there is a great deal of content that still needs to be uploaded. Other, older content needs to be updated for a new version of PHP. In short, the website is not perfect.

So if my life depended on perfection, I'd be in a bit of a pickle, but I understand that perfection comes from working towards an ideal, a goal, and that the last 20% of what is seen is often 80% of the work. Adapting, updating, always changing, that is what drives towards perfection. Even if it's never touched.

In other words, the site does everything it has to. Even if it doesn't do everything I'd like to. That will come with time and effort. What is important is that even on Canada Day, when I was out and enjoying fireworks, I remembered to do what every person should be doing each day: networking. Getting to know someone new and setting up a reason for contact in the future.