New report says: employees like to do extra, dirty work

Call me a masochist.

But for the past two days I’ve been in ecstasy at work for having gotten the wonderful chance of laboriously cleaning up after someone else’s mess. It’s not even my fault, it’s a lot more work, I have to painstakingly go through dirty and ugly code, but I’m LOVING it! I’m the employers’ dream-worker!!

I’m not real serious about that dramatic opening, though, so I’ll explain.

That huge load of junk was getting in MY way. All those gazillion redundant, ill-commented, ill-defined, sorry excuses for classes were making my absolute LOVE for work drop to a shameful procrastination spree. And now I finally got the chance to make it nice and clean and elegant and pleasant.

So here’s a tip to employers and managers out there. Don’t just give your awesome tech guys something cool to work on. Give them the power to clean up the trash they find along the way. They’ll stay hours after work and they’ll love it! And after cleaning up they’ll work with a lot more passion on whatever it is they had to do.

Excessive tagging

In this new WordPress experience of mine I’ve allowed myself to be pretty loose on the tagging thing. I even read in someone’s blog something like “tag away!”; that the more you tagged, the best, because it’d make clearer what your posts were about in a few short words, and that it’d be easier for crawlers to index your blog.

I can see the advantage of this on a per-post basis (the tags showing in the bottom of a post must indeed tell something about it – although if it’s long enough people will read it before getting to them).

But look at this plentitude of tags on the sidebar. There are just too many of them. And they take too much space, pushing other stuff down below the “cut” (the place where the reader has to begin scrolling to go on). Wouldn’t it be better to use them tags just for the main subject, like one or two at most?

Or maybe find a way to rank them based on importance, so that you would show only the top important ones, which would be the ones you used for the main post subject. I don’t know.

I’m open to suggestions. Anyone? :-)

Mainstream and viral marketing incompatible?

Just a thought that occured me when putting that last post against the link in it: if viral marketing is for niche targeting, how come Gmail, a mainstream web application (everyone uses email), got to make such a good use of it?

First post

I’ve created this blog primarily as a simple way for getting to know WordPress better. I’ve seen some pretty nifty and popular weblogs around the web2.0 circle using it, so I came to check out what’s so good about it.

One thing I just saw now is that you can actually import your whole Blogger blog into a WordPress one. If this works out nice and I really enjoy using it instead of Blogger, I may move my personal blog to this service.

Also, the reason I figured I could use a new blog (it probably won’t last much though) is that as I’ve been reading a bit more on tech stuff lately – especially web2.0-related – I’ve also been thinking more about it and, as it’s in the top of my mind, it has poured more often onto my supposed-to-be personal weblog. I think that kind of mixing up isn’t that healthy, so I’ll just try and keep Elucubrações Vertiginosas what its name says: a blog for vertiginous elucubrations.