Time to start paying my way, I think.

I’ve realised that with a dawn of another university year, I’m shockingly close to having to live in the real world. One year away, really. This is my second year, and the third is out in the big wide upper-working class world. I’ll need to find a job, which probably won’t be very highly paying (that year in industry is about experience, not making money), so I’ll have to be backing myself. Also, an income would hurt to help pay off my overdraft.

Next year, I’m not sure if I’ll be getting much government grants at all, and I refuse to come back to living at home with my parents. I’ve just grown out of that. Which means, I’ll need at least an income of £80~ a week to pay for rent, plus food costs (damn human weaknesses), as well as bills and other living costs. That £80 a week is only if I’m really lucky to find somewhere. I’ll likely just be renting a room in student accommodation.

I have about nine months to save up enough money to keep me alive for that year. (I’ll obviously be making money during that year too though.)

With that in mind, I’ve decided to start taking a proactive money making approach, rather than a reactive one I’ve current been taking (“I need £50, so I’ll do £50 worth of work.”) with my freelance gigs. I want to actively be advertising my services, and getting in touch with businesses enquiring if they want any help improving their web presence. Though, I’m not too sure about how they’ll react to what effectively amounts to cold calling.

Since I’m most interesting in WordPress customisation though, I figured I’d create a WordPress services minisite, which isn’t finished just yet. I have a few ideas for promotion which are fairly exciting to me, and I really just want to jump into them before I’ve finished the website and proper landing pages.

I really have no desire to have a nine-to-five, working behind a cash register job. If I get to February and realise I have zero money saved, then I’ll have to resort to that, but I’m really trying to push that off. That’s kind of my motivation to earn as much money as I can, I guess.

I still think the largest thing holding me back is confidence in myself though. I see jobs I know I can do and think “but what if I make a mistake, and end up looking incredibly stupid”, or “what if I get in over my head and have to tell the customer I can’t do what I said I could in the time he wants it”. I think I just have to embrace that those situations will happen, and just be prepared for them so I’m not knocked off balance too much when they do.

You can take a bird to water, but it’ll only eat worms. Or something.

Check me out being awake before lunch time, five hours in fact. I’ve not seen the morning where the sun isn’t totally glaring in a while. I had egg in bread! I propose this shall be a good day.

I decided to come update here because it’s mine to update, even if I have nothing to say. And because I have nothing else to do till nine o’clock, when I want to start work. I’ve not decided what work I want to do though. I do have two “you really should get these done” projects though – a secret one, and a WordPress landing page – so probably those first.

I decided to do a night project (in which I see how far into a project I can do in one night), and I got my facebook people to give me the idea for it. Ended up being “porn”, so I started making a porn reddit. To be honest though, after an hour I got distracted by Alias or Greek or some other show and only got a bit done, but I still plan on continuing it.

As always, tonnes of other ideas. Mostly being stopped by my not spending enough time with OAuth though.

I’ve not really updated this blog in a while because I’ve been lazy. I’ve really improved on my politics which I really could write  about. I figured I’ll actually start vlogging, from my YouTube account, and I’ll embed the videos here. I make a lot of political arguments on reddit too, and at some point I’ll link to some of my important ones. Although, they mostly get downmodded.

If you ask me, the week should start on Thursday.

Growing up on LiveJournal and Neopets (gosh, I can’t believe it’s been so many years since I’ve used those websites) I think it’s understandable for me to forget that the Internet is actually full of people. Sometimes I think that subconsciously I imagine all this content online to have just appeared from no where, or written by people on other continents who will always remain a stranger. Even some of the people I’m friends with on MSN that I’ve never met are dehumanised in my mind.

That’s why it’s refreshing to bump around the Internet and find people who not only seem to exist, but live pretty damn close to me. I found these strangers through total serendipity. I was looking at the Fizzpop event page for today (which I can’t go to – I wouldn’t be able to get back home), and then ended up at the Digital Brum site.

They’re listing web related events around Birmingham, some of which I’d love to go to, if only to give me something really interesting to do, maybe meet a few more interesting people. Then I found out about Digital Brum which lists a whole load of other events happening around Birmingham.

Ultimately I ended up at the Birmingham Social Media Cafe website, where they were listing past attendees. An entire list of people in interesting positions, most of them with links to their products and blogs. There are some people like Rob Day who’re 16 years old and have two projects that are looking really awesome in the pipe line. Kind of makes me feel like I’ve wasted my teenage years. This is totally the age of the teenage entrepreneur, and so I’m disappointed in myself for not doing anything amazing. Still though, it’s inspiring for me to do something now.

Found Calum Brannan’s blog too. He has a meeting table. A meeting table! It’s weird how small things like that really get me excited about eventually working for a company. Hopefully a small company. He’s working on Youmeo, which really looks interesting. I was thinking the other day how annoying it is to have both my Facebook and Twitter to update. (A few people who attended that event are working on Youmeo on second glance. I’d love to work on a team project…)

All in all, I’m mad hyped about eventually having a career. At the moment (well, especially at the moment, whilst university is finished till October) my work load isn’t that big. Heck, I sleep in till one o’clock most days just because I have nothing to do. It’d be really nice to get a job at a web start up or something. Places like arc90 who have amazing ideas in their lab (but they’re American).

I guess I could actually full time start freelance work; looking for new clients from nine to five, rather than taking on the clients that come to me (which is only a small number really). When I’m not looking (I’d probably get bored with eight hours of cold-emailing people from job boards), I should be developing my knowledge on general stuff. There still stuff about WordPress I’d be interested in poking around more with.

I’m going to make tomorrow busy.

A desk is definitely required for productivity.

Since I’ve been back for Easter I’ve been working by sitting on the sofa, with the laptop in front of me. It was cool to start with; all comfortable and what not, but now it’s getting annoying not to mention painful. I think that’s mostly the reason my concentration has massively been waining more than usual.

There’s definitely a few things that a programmer needs, despite my thinking anyone could do it when I first started. A desk is one of them, with lots of space for my laptop, and a second monitor (lots and lots of screen space), and a notebook (I’m always doodling things that make no sense to most people, but really helps me program).

I can’t even call it “taking a break”, but I’ve given up on trying to work and decided to download Wrath of the Lich King. I’m not even sure if it’ll run on my 8MB shared memory for graphics, but we’ll see I suppose. I plan on deleting and uninstalling it after this month’s subscription dies out, which should be sometime soon.

Downloading it shouldn’t be a problem whilst at my mum’s either. She recently got her connection speed bumped up… I’ve never seen anything this fast before…

I wonder if this'll be constant...

How to make sure you don't fuck up

I’ve been doing a lot more freelance stuff lately, and I feel like I’ve learnt something new (or a lesson has been stressed a lot more unto me) with every client.

Work off-line.

This definitely feels like more trouble than it’s worth, but trust me on this. I work with WordPress addons and fixes mostly, and I’ve found it’s always best to just grab their copy of WordPress, including their plugins and database, and run that on your localhost (or where ever). That way you’re running their installation warts and all (in case they changed some of the WordPress code without noticing or something),  so you’ll even have the same bugs as them.

Although WordPress mostly looks after itself with respect to the php.ini settings, if you’re working on something that doesn’t you may even want to yoink those settings and change your localhost to those. Same for .htaccess.

This way you know when you upload your changes it’ll work exactly the same way on their server as it did yours. There’ll be no nasty surprises because they have magic quotes turned on or their pages are redirected through another.

Whilst you’re at it, back all that stuff up.

Drag and drop all their files over FTP, export their database, nab their settings. Before you even start work, archive all of that. Put it in a /clients/ClientName/ folder and leave it there.

That serves two purposes; first you’re definitely not going to break their entire website accidental. And if you do, you’ll be able to restore, hopefully before they even notice. Second, you don’t have to keep nipping into their FTP server to find out how that old file was, or to revert back to the server version. Some people have tight bandwidth options and they won’t be happy about you using all that up.

Even after you’ve finished, keep the back up.

Honestly, you’ll be thankful you have. After you’ve done the job and your fix works perfectly on the live site you should still keep all the backups you made of their data for a little while. I’m planning on keeping mine for about a month or so. You might have missed a dire circumstance that you’ve broken, and in a few weeks you’ll get an “URGENT: YOU BROKE SOMETHING” entitled email.

Remember to encrypt that backup somehow. Just a simple password when you archive the file is enough. If your laptop gets stolen with hundreds of client’s MySQL passwords and things it’ll be fairly embarrassing phoning them all up and telling them they need to change them. I’d imagine that’d be more embarrassing than telling an ex you have herpes.

Whilst we’re talking about encryption, most servers have SFTP enabled and you should take advantage of that. I should expect most FTP clients have that feature, but I use WinSCP. It’s just the added extra security you can give your customers, and covering your back if anyone is ever listening in on your connection.

Keep track of your changes.

When you’ve finished your work do a diff or something similar on the work you’ve done compared with your old backup. If you’re client comes to you and says that since you’ve done your work some abstract thing on their blog has broken, you can go through that diff and either use it as evidence that it wasn’t you that broke it, or see specifically where you went wrong, and how you can fix it.

Also, it might be comforting to the client to see what work you’ve actually done. And you can always use it as a reference later on in other projects (“how did I make the post title change a few clients back..?”).

There are some others that I’ll add later.

Read it, disregard it, drive into walls.

You know what? stfu, valleywag. I know you’re the Internet’s answer to The Sun, so I’m just going to disregard everything you just said in that article. I mean really? Alex is “forgettable”? Please, Alex is far more interesting than Kevin. If I had to pick one of them to go out and grab something to eat with it’d definitely be Alex.

If it’s true about Alex wanting to leave Diggnation, then Diggnation is dead. No really. Just Kevin sitting on a couch, with Glen and Prager? That’s not interesting. Alex’s retorts and spontaneous jokes (which sometimes are so spontaneous they don’t make sense) are what make that show interesting. They can’t get another co-host, because they just can’t afford to. They’d have to come from in house, and I’m not sitting thrugh 40 minutes of Martin Sargent.

Anyway, whilst I’m here. My ‘Freelance’ label in my gmail has never been more active. It’s quite intimidating. Priorities say I have to finish that website assignment first though. Well, first food, then website. I’ve decided on just using CC and GPL content to fill the pages. Perfectly legal, if a little lazy.

Last minute coursework again…

Now I’ve finished that freelance gig I was given (well, almost finished, I just need to convert the guy’s old pages to new ones) I can actually start on my coursework. Which is due in Friday.

It’s basically a website. So long as it’s valid XHTML and CSS, and has form pages, I’ve been told anything can pass. I’m actually not going to be putting much effort into content due to that. I just want to make sure that I have it finished. Maybe later, when I have more time I’ll add better content.

It’s basically a website about Leicester from the prospective of a fresher – someone how just needs some information about Leicester and where to go and what to do.

I’ve already done the actual template. I just need to add content. Laura and Chris have already taken photos, which we need to include in our website, so I’ll just use some of theirs. They certainly took enough.

Hosted webcomics

Webcomics are hugely popular – I can name about five that I read regularly – and I’m sure there are a lot of other people that write comics and just post them to ImageShack and link to them on their crummy LiveJournal. The thing stopping them having a website is because that’s kind of scarey to a non-tech-savvy person. Most people don’t even know where they’d look for a good quality hoster. I guess that’s where I come in.

This idea is currently still in the alpha ideas stage, so some of this may change. It’s basically my hosted WordPress package but tailored for people who’ll want to be posting comics, instead of lots of text. Here’re the changes I’d make, I think.

• The current package gives 300MB of media space (that excludes databases storage and plugin files, etc – that’s unlimited). I’d drop that to 100MB of media space for video, audio, binaries, etc. However, They can have unlimited image file space; that makes sense because they’re going to be posting lots of images.
• Still unlimited bandwidth.
• Still full access to all the features (so, they can run the site as an image-heavy blog if they like).
• Still get help with anything they get confused about, including setting up and upgrading plugins, and options.
• A different default theme from the typical package, to give the best views for a web comic. All this stuff can be change if they like, this is just default.
  • Front page is static, as to not give any spoilers of the comic.
  • Show one “post” per page. Remember that each post is one strip
• Advertising options, where the user gets a majority cut from the revenues.
  • No advertisements at all.
  • Google AdSense: Autogenerated advertisements.
  • My own ad system: I find direct advertising clients; meaning higher turn prices, and more control.
• Cost around £5 a month (more than typical package due to increased hard drive space)

First three people that comment here about this service can use it free for three months (saving you £15), and you’ll most likely make money during that time. If you’re artistic, and have an idea for a webcomic, this service is perfect for you!