These are the three sides of the project triangle- Good, Fast, and Cheap- and these three sides are things that every client wants. But, there are trade-offs to each one, and many people outside the development world don’t see that. The catch is you can only pick two.
As a freelancer, I don’t have an office, or employees, or all the extra stuff that one might have as a business. I work from home, with my laptop, my cell phone, and if I need to offload some work, I have a group of subcontractors I can call. This of course makes it harder to separate personal and professional life, especially if I’m giving people my cell phone number as a means of contact. That has changed with Google Voice.
This seems like a silly title, since GMail is an email client and all. However, wouldn’t it be nice if you could have all of the conversations you’ve with with the same person in one place, at the click of a button? As it turns out GMail’s search and a labs function called Quick Links makes that very easy to do.
WordPress is becoming an increasingly popular content management system on top of it’s popularity as a blogging system. More developers are choosing it as a solution to enable clients to update their own websites. And while WordPress out of the box is an excellent system, it could use a few tweaks to give most clients the freedom they need. Here are 7 plugins that will make your client’s job of managing their own website easier.
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At the beginning of the year I wanted to find all-inclusive, online accounting software. That is, something that kept track of invoicing, other income, and expenses. As much as I loved Zoho Invoices, I needed expense tracking. So after doing some research, I settled on Less Accounting. Here are my thoughts.
Pros:
Cons:
All-in-all I’m not to impressed by Less Accounting, despite all the rage about it, and the fact that they sponsor a site called, “We All Hate Quickbooks.” The design is nice as are some of the features, but they took some liberties on user experience (or poorly designed their databases), leading to some pretty big grievances.
Did I miss something? Am I doing something wrong? Comments are open.
Recently I took it upon myself to learn JQuery. I’m toying with the idea of a redesign of both this site and my company’s site, and would like to do some cool stuff. I’ve written before on learning a new programming language but not new skills in general. I’m a big fan of the “learn by doing” approach.
The web is ubiquitous with tutorial sites (see envato for some great ones), which makes it easy to learn by doing. For JQuery, I will be doing one or two tutorials a week to get myself acquainted with it, then adapt what I learn to my own sites. This has worked well for me in the past- find good tutorials and it should be pretty easy (at least to learn the basics).
The key is to find some good, linear resources for doing tutorials. While the web is good for finding a specific tutorial to do, if you’re just starting out you should start at the beginning. I’d recommend picking up a book for that. As far as they go, there is no be-all-end-all series for anything. For programming, I like the Absolute Beginner books. For Adobe products, the Classroom in a book series is very good; but it’s really up to you to find something you’re comfortable with.
I’d say the hardest part is sticking with it. Learning something new can be time consuming and frustrating, especially when you have other things you need to do. However, once you do learn it you’ll be pretty happy you did.Â
Finally, I only touched on resources for computer-based skills because that’s what I know best. If you have some “real life” skill, like how to build a deck, feel free to leave how you learned in the comments!
A lot of people who use Windows have access to Microsoft Works, Microsoft’s free ‘solution’ to Office. Today my brother asked me how he would convert a Works word processing document (.wps) to a Word document (.doc), since he did his homework using Works but didn’t have access to that at school- they only have Office. I have Works and was going to convert it using that when I noticed GMail gave the option of opening the .wps using GoogleDocs. As it turns out, GoogleDocs supports .wps documents, which you can then convert to .doc by going to File->Download file as->.doc. It’s as simple as that!
While it may not always be an option people go to (since you can save a .wps as a .doc in Works), it is one that is readily available just so long as you have an Internet connection. I feel it’s one of many smaller features Google adds into the products that give the user a whole lot of convenience.
Over the last few months I’ve been using Twitter a lot more to get updates from people and fill others in on stuff I’m working on. The best possible thing I think Twitter did was open up the API for others to integrate it. Here are a few things that have made my life easier because they use Twitter.
Twitter has literally hundreds of other websites integrating it, other apps to use it, and plenty of hacks if you’re creative. It helps you stay updated and stay productive- wherever you are. So what do you use Twitter for?
One thing that was really driven home during my first year of grad school was the importance of reusable code. Not to say that it wasn’t taught to me as an undergrad, because it was; this year it just seemed to hit harder. As a freelancer in a niche market (small businesses, facebook apps), I tend to generate a lot of similar code. Just recently (within the last few months), I’ve started to generalize that code into reusable PHP objects, and it really helps.
I point out freelancers in the subject of this post because I feel, at least starting out, it’s not something freelance programmers (or designers for that matter) think to do. I know my concerns were more getting those jobs so I could code, not the process of coding. But whether it be a list of objects you can use on each site, or a HTML/CSS template with variables for the title, key words, headers, etc., you can save a lot of time in the long run by taking the extra time to abstract out the details and come up with something general you can use over a number of different sites. I, for example, have general code for: XHTML/CSS templates (NOT the design, just the general tags that should be applied to every site), [basic] contact forms, [basic] google maps, database objects, image uploading objects and XML parsing objects. Right now I am taking the time to look at other code I’ve done to see how I can generalize it.
This doesn’t only save time in writing the code either, but in testing. If you have core code that you know works, you don’t need to test for the general cases, or debug that code; just what you’ve added to customize it for that site or app. It’s stuff like this that will increase your productivity and your profits in the long run.
So generalizing code helps- and not just with time, but productivity and profits. And just about anything can be generalized to some extent. So the next time you code, take an extra moment to think how you can abstract away the details of that project (the variables if you will), and how much of what you are doing is reusable.
Lately there’s been a lot of talk of Getting Things Done, or GTD. Lifehacker recently asked the readers about the five best GTD apps. My feed reader has also featured numerous articles on the topic of GTD; so in traditional blogging fashion I thought I’d weigh in. My best GTD ‘app’ is Google.
Really it’s broken down into three different, nicely integrated parts with Google as the main player. Google, Firefox, and Remember the Milk make my life significantly easier. With GCal, GMail, Google Notebook, and Remember the Milk I don’t need a desktop application. And each app is accessible from within the others. Remember the Milk even has a Firefox extension that integrates it with GMail so you can not only view or edit your tasks, but add an email right to your tasks list. And of course, we can’t forget Google Gears.
Gears allows me to access sites like Remember the Milk, Google Reader, and Google Docs even when I don’t have an internet connection. If/when they integrate Google Calendar, it will be perfect; I won’t need a desktop calendar program (sidebar- GCal also autosyncs with my Blackberry, so I don’t need to connect it to my computer either).
All in all, Google has made my life easier and is quickly replacing the desktop applications I use. I’ve even been considering using Google Docs instead of MS Office, but that probably isn’t likely- though I am using it more frequently.
(and use it to your advantage instead)
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