About 60 workers were left in a Eastern Washington field yesterday after they decided that $25 was not enough money for four to five hours of work.

They had to walk an hour and a half just to get to the street so they could wave at cars to find a way home, which is an hour and half away.

The same day, another story starts like this:

Even after deploying 105 prison inmates this week to help pick apples in Eastern Washington, Gov. Chris Gregoire said growers still need from 3,000 to 4,000 workers to help harvest before the season’s first major freeze.

A quick look at the map shows that the prison workers in the Wenatchee Valley were an hour and a half away from the Mattawa Orchard, where the “unimprisoned” workers were stranded, the same distance the they had to hitchhike home.

The prison workers are getting paid $8.67 an hour. The “unimprisoned” workers were told they would be paid less than $6.50.

According to the TriCity Herald, Governor Gregoire’s rationale for using prison workers was that “growers could not find enough workers, even after advertising jobs with pay of $120 to $150 a day.”

If the workers in Mattawa had seen those advertisements, I have a feeling they might have passed on the opportunity that left them stranded for an entire work day.

As a web designer with an interest in marketing, I would like to offer my services to any of these growers. Let me promote your $120 a day jobs. I will find workers for you. I think I know some people already (although we might have to take an hour and a half walk to find them.)

If the dissonance has not yet made your head explode, another look at Google Maps reveals that the prisoners were driven at least 6 hours, 290 miles, from the other side of the Puget Sound.

The grower is paying $22 an hour for each prisoner. A lot of that money goes to the security, seven guards, transportation, housing and food. The average prisoner will see “net pay of $1 to $2 per hour after money is subtracted for child support, taxes, crime victim compensation, incarceration costs and any other legal and financial obligations,” according to state officials.

This does not compute.

A video about the stranded workers can be found here.
The story about the prison workers can be found here

Suddenly, what i have to say is less urgent.

I love the site. The comment about the article was insightful but I have some great perspective to bring.

I want to tell them that they should read the book Blappity Blooppity, by Awesome McBrilliant because it brings a whole new perspective to the issue.

Is my username tinynow or oddremark?
…
…
Fk it. I’m watching some Hulu.

Not much to say about these videos, except that I really wish I was the actor and thanks to Zoe from Sacred Soul Hypnotherapy for putting it in her newsletter.

If you’ve done any investigation at all into building a website, it is likely you have heard of WordPress. This post explains what WordPress is and why it is so useful to the creation of  accessible and upgrade-able websites.

The Two WordPresses

If you google WordPress, you’ll come up with this: WordPress.com and WordPress.org. For a lot of people this is confusing. What is the difference between these things? What do they have to do with each other?

.org – This is where you go to download what is know at the WordPress platform. This is what I use to build websites. By itself, the download is a bunch of files. You need to upload the files to a special computer, or network of computers which are connected to the internet, known as web servers. Usually you would use a hosting provider – a company who “hosts” your files on their servers. So, in short, WordPress.org is the place for web developers or even slightly techy people to get the latest version of the platform (bunch of files) called WordPress. I’ll get into what a platform is and what that bunch of files looks like in a minute.

.com – This is a site that is a kind of pre-hosted version of WordPress.  You can sign up for a free WordPress site here and have a it built in a few minutes. By default they have addresses like http://tinynow.wordpress.com.  It is a great service for personal blogs or for other non-techy folk to test out WordPress for free. For a business, it has two disadvantages – 1) it isn’t nearly as customizable, even if you pay extra for their customization options, 2) you don’t have as much control over your data or hosting provider.

WordPress as a Platform

Some more techy than I might not like the over-generalizations I’m about to make, but I am not writing this for them. I’m writing it for you, someone who hasn’t learned to talk to machines (or talk like machines).

Turtles All the Way Down

There is a story that Stephen Hawking told in his book A Brief History of Time:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?”

“You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

What does this have to do with WordPress?

Not much. I just think it is a cool story.

Actually, it does have a little to do with platforms. Platforms describe different things on the world wide web. Probably because the word is a pretty accurate metaphor for describing what all these techy folk build. They build platforms that other things can be put on. Windows and Linux and Mac OSX are considered computing platforms because on top of them, millions of programs have been built. That is one kind of platform. Interestingly, these platforms are built on top of other more obscure programs, which in turn are built out of code that talks to the electronics of the computers themselves, and the computers themselves come in different flavors known as hardware platforms. Turtles all the way down…

…and all the way up – WordPress belongs to a family of platforms that might be called a web platform, that is closer to the top of the turtle pile. On top of this platform, you build a website.

Some Terminology that Makes Sense

Content Management System (CMS) – WordPress is a CMS. It means that it allows you to post images, text, links, videos, or audio to your site.

The “management” part means a few things. First, it manages a lot of the code that a layperson would need to learn to be able to post to a website. Second, it manages to keep you from “breaking” the site, preserving the look and the feel and automatically integrating your new content into the existing navigation. Finally, it can do a whole lot more with your content by using categories, tags, and a new feature called custom post types TK.

Or at least Google.

Designer A selling an “interior decorating service” will always lose out to Designer B selling a “home makeover package.” It’s why Coach A selling “life coaching packages” will always lose out to Coach B selling “easy career transition packages.”

-Dave Navarro