GDPARGGHH

At last, the 25th May 2018 has passed and a little known acronym of a European Directive has come into force.

After weeks of panic from companies, being forced into asking us if we would like to hear from them, and having to write paragraphs of privacy statements to outline exactly what it is they will be doing with our information, and of course reminding us of our rights to request immediate deletion of that data. We are now in the post-apocalyptic era, a new Europe, a new World.

So now we are in Europe 2.0, the U.S aren’t quite sure what to make of it all, and I’m sitting here with weather somewhat comparable to a nuclear winter, despite 3 record breaking weeks of sunshine, in a country where every other word is Brexit (which shouldn’t be a word, but some OED hippies added it anyway) and I’m reflecting upon that last few months of insane marketing ploys and inbox overload.

I get GDPR, I like what it stands for, philosophically, not the literal letters, those can sod off. But I am utterly fed up, like most people of how it has been handled. Whilst some of the more hip companies out there have bothered to embrace modern culture and throw in a pun or two along the way, the underhandedness of almost every business, big and small to use out inboxes as a way of confusing us over whether we are opting in to opting out, or opting out of contact, or opting in to our information being shared to 3rd parties and who knows what other combinations, the lack of consistent messaging has really messed us around.

Quite honestly, I am pretty sure the vast majority of us, who have never really read all the terms and conditions of software or understand the direct debit agreement in full legal context, have just inadvertently signed ourselves up to years of inbox terror and torment.

My advice going forwards, forget the inbox, speak to people instead.

SQL Server Tip of the Week – Winter Break

Unlike the Premier League, I will take a winter break from the SQL Tips,

Most likely I will use the break to build up the quality and quantity of content for an awesome 2018.

On that note I’ll leave you with this link to get your systems ready for the weather… 

https://wateroxconsulting.com/archives/prepare-for-winter/ 

 

Thanks for visiting!

WordPress Development

I’ve spent the last 3 days improving my WordPress (and basic web) development skills, almost to a new level. The RedSumo Blog was previously used as a place to post technical findings, a little like how this site started out. There’s posts about PHP, MySQL, Linux etc. But with the way the company has changed, especially recently it was decided to use the blog platform as a way to promote products and services of not just RedSumo itself, but of all the customers who are hosted on the RedSumo servers and/ or designed by the very skilled team.
I have spent numerous hours manually re-coding the “Slicker Press” theme to make the site look a little like a newspaper/ magazine – taking inspiration (on design only!) from The Daily Mail etc.
There’s still a long way to go, however, the site is fully functional and has a few neat little features such as the Yahoo based weather widget, the Featured Posts slider and the customer logos sections.
If you’re interested to see how the developments going, head over to http://www.redsumo.com/blog now!