Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-11-29

By Chris | Published: November 29, 2009

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-11-29

By Chris | Published: November 29, 2009

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Posted in Tweets | Leave a comment

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-11-29

By Chris | Published: November 29, 2009

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-10-11

By Chris | Published: October 11, 2009

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-10-04

By Chris | Published: October 4, 2009
  • RT @slickiris: Today is @Next­Space 1st Birth­day! Thx to every­one in the com­mu­nity for mak­ing our 1st year so remark­able. http://bit.ly/fbmn5 #
  • Tagline for any very low-quality prod­uct: “… When you just don’t care any­more.” #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-09-27

By Chris | Published: September 27, 2009
  • RT @esdev: Visual #The­matic page structure/actions/hooks: http://bit.ly/bfgD6 — Great for work­ing w/ #childthemes in #Word­Press #
  • I’ll admit, this is frig­gin awe­som RT @tferriss: New — Finally: The End of Food Jour­nals? The iPhone Food­Scan­ner Arrives http://su.pr/1ZT4WK #
  • Have been lov­ing Archi­tec­ture in Helsinki. http://bit.ly/bO3LW U have to love indie sweet­ness #music #
  • A gread #word­press plu­gin if you care about typog­ra­phy: wp-Typography. Excel­lent. http://bit.ly/uflxP #
  • Only 8:30 and done for the day . Woooooo! #
  • aWe­ber slooow again. Toooo slowww for a paid prod­uct .….….. #
  • *** Lep­rechaun Party! **** #
  • I’m sorry, open office is a pain :-( #
  • RT @atomicshed: great #word­press #plu­gin Sup­ple Forms : cre­ate cus­tom forms for for your admin — tidys up your cus­tom forms. great for CMS #
  • Over­hheard: “You pocket-called me”. Means, her phone acci­den­tally dialed him. #
  • Oh, this is cool (if ur a pro­gram­mer), an exhaus­tive list of Hello World pro­grams #web­dev http://tinyurl.com/6gn5yv #
  • Hmm, Fire­Bug Lite lets you use some Fire­Bug stuff in IE, Opera, Safari #web­de­sign http://getfirebug.com/lite.html #

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Review: I Love Harvest

By Chris | Published: September 24, 2009

Har­vest is an online time track­ing and billing appli­ca­tion. See­ing as I am look­ing at these things all the time, and am very picky, I thought I’d write a short review. More of a “shout out,” really.

Harvest Time Tracking Page

Har­vest Time Track­ing Page

Har­vest is designed on the keep-it-simple model: Have just the fea­tures you need, when you need them, and noth­ing else. It is designed for inde­pen­dent pro­fes­sion­als, or teams, and is priced very reasonably.

For a sin­gle user—an inde­pen­dent con­sul­tant, say—it’s only $12 a month. You can add 2 addi­tional users for $10 each per month (let’s say you wanted to have a cou­ple of sub­con­trac­tors help­ing you out.)

For a team of up to 5, it’s $40 a month.

Design­ing an appli­ca­tion that is both sim­ple, and does what you want it to, is no small task. Ask any­one who’s tried to design good soft­ware: It’s a lot eas­ier to make some­thing that you throw the kitchen sink into, than it is to make some­thing that has just the func­tions you want, and noth­ing else. And yet, that is what makes an appli­ca­tion the eas­i­est to use. No extra­ne­ous details.

Har­vest lets you track the time you have spent on any num­ber of clients and projects. It lets you set project bud­gets by time, or money. This is one of my favorite features—because what this lets you do, is see how much time  you have used up on a project, in a lit­tle visual read­out, like so:

Visual Project Readout

Visual Project Readout

In the exam­ple above, I am over my project bud­get by over 3 and a half hours. Not good! But I love to be able to see this sort of thing, at a glance.

What is also won­der­ful about Har­vest, is that it does invoic­ing. Its invoic­ing fea­tures are excel­lent: Sim­ple, and nat­ural. Just click a few but­tons, and it sends out a very atr­rac­tive invoice. It will send an email to the client, help you keep track of who’s paid and who hasn’t, and also tell you which invoices are overdue.

It also does recur­ring invoicing—either auto­mat­i­cally send­ing out a new invoice, or remind­ing you about it, so that you can send it out yourself.

Again, it does all this very intu­itively and nat­u­rally, in my opinion—without a lot of extra­ne­ous bells and whis­tles, but doing every­thing you’d actu­ally need it to do. And again, this is not an easy job!

Major kudos to Har­vest for mak­ing a great app. In the past month and a half since I switched to it, I am just lov­ing using it.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-09-20

By Chris | Published: September 20, 2009

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TwitterFox Addon Makes it Super-Easy to Tweet Your Favorite Pages

By Chris | Published: September 18, 2009

I’m all about the fast process, and I’m pretty impa­tient. There­fore, I love things like the Twit­ter­Fox addon for Fire­Fox (get it here).


From 12seconds.tv

It’s always in my browser, so when­ever I see some­thing I’d like to share, all I have to do is click on its lit­tle icon at the bot­tom of the page, and type my com­ment. Then, click the “link” but­ton, and it inserts a link the page I’m on.

And, it’ll turn the link into a short URL if it needs to, for space.

Very fast, and that’s the only way I like it!

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Tips for the Unscrupulous Web Developer, Part 1: Code

By Chris | Published: September 17, 2009

Unskilled at Plumbing

Note: For those not as famil­iar with irony, this series of posts is intented to use humor to illus­trate impor­tant points about get­ting a web­site that works for them, and the poten­tial pit­falls along the way. —ed.

One thing you fig­ure out pretty early on in the web biz: You don’t really have to know how to code web pages all that well.

All those peo­ple who talk about web stan­dards, CSS lay­out, and build­ing sites for effi­cient updat­ing, blah blah blah—that’s not stuff that’s going to get you a hun­dred dol­lars today, and it’s not stuff you should worry about. Your mechanic doesn’t tell you what’s going on under the hood, and your small busi­ness client’s not going to ask you what’s going on under­neath the hood of their web­site either.

Believe me: The vast major­ity of small biz clients who want a web­site, just want it now, and the last thing they want you to worry about is learn­ing about “best prac­tices,” “usabil­ity”, stuff like that. Just get in, get out, and get on to your next web­site. Duh!

What I’m try­ing to say here, is, most small busi­nesses know next to noth­ing about what it really takes to build a good website—one that will last over time, give them what they truly need, and match their real busi­ness objectives.

And that’s where you come in: Since they know so lit­tle, your not know­ing a lot, or keep­ing up with stan­dards in the indus­try, that’s really not that big a deal.

Sure, over time, the next web designer that works on your code might be a lit­tle frus­trated because you laid the entire site out using tables (the web wun­derkind of design for 1999).

Sure, it might take them three times as long to make a change to your HTML. But what I’m say­ing here, is: Your client is never going to fig­ure this out, so you may as well do it the old fash­ioned way, and save all that pre­cious learn­ing time, which you could more prof­itably spend… churn­ing out some more websites!

Sure, out­putting your client’s 20-page site as a series of sta­tic HTML files might not seem very effi­cient to the effete “web pro­fes­sional” who has to make a tiny change in all 20 of those files later on. I can just see the poor sap whin­ing to the client—“but the rea­son this is tak­ing so long is because the code wasn’t archi­tected well.” (They love using big words like “archi­tected!”) Wah, wah, wah.

Mean­while, you’ll be on to some­one else’s site, and they’ll be toil­ing away. What’s it to them, any­way? They can just charge the client more to make the changes, because it’ll take so much longer! It’s a win win for every­body! Well… almost every­body! :-)

*

Last year, my wife and I had a con­trac­tor come out to our house and add an extra room. He seemed like a nice guy, and since I know noth­ing about build­ing stuff, I just pretty much trusted him. He worked and worked, and said, “that’ll be $xx,xxx.00″. Fine, and we paid him. I found him through a friend of a friend of my wife’s uncle, and we went with him because he offered us the cheap­est price by far!

And what’s wrong with that!?

I am won­der­ing what the strange smell com­ing from our new room is, and if you look at it from a cer­tain angle, I bet you’ll notice that it doesn’t quite “line up” with the rest of the house.

But … so what?

Arti­cle Resources

Posted in Beginner, Small Biz, Web Design | Tagged | 5 Comments