Archive for May, 2008

I’ve praised the new Wordpress admin theme in the past, but I’ve found a theme called Fluency that is so cool, I just have to show you. I first saw it at MUO when posting and it looks breathtaking. It has a darker approach, but I wouldn’t say the design has a dark feeling. In fact, I think it’s a lesson in design, since the only color type used is gray, and not even hundreds of shades, just about 5-6. It’s amazing that someone can create such a beautiful, simplistic, yet useful theme, out of just 5 shades of one color.

The biggest change you’ll see is that all menu options are now in a left side menu bar, which seems a bit more logical and drastically more contrasted, so you can find stuff more easily. Sub menus show up on the top, again in a tasteful, and very usable way. I know I’m ranting on and on about this too much, but this theme is so damn good.

I haven’t taken a very in-depth look, but it uses css a lot, so it should be customizable in the right hands. I may try and make it a bit more green to fit Hack Your Day later on, but right now I have it installed on my personal Ideas blog, which has a darker theme anyway. Since you just activate it as a plugin I really do recommend this, if you don’t like it, just deactivate and that’s it.

I’m an avid believer in the saying that “too much of anything can be bad”. I probably just made that up, but it’s true nevertheless. I have found though in my own experience that over-organizing may be a suitable action plan for some people.

The organizational curve

I think the against arguments are fairly obvious. Organization works like economies of scale. Up to a point the more you do, the exponentially more you benefit. After a while you benefit more, but the gradient is not as steep as it was (economically speaking, the marginal worth of your extra organizational input is declining). After a critical point, more organization brings you less benefit. So the moral of the story is, that by organizing yourself a whole lot takes away precious time you could spend actually doing something.

External factors

What the above model doesn’t, and can’t generally take into account is the fact that there are loads of other inputs in the equation. Your mood, your feelings, the weather, the music you’re listening to, everything. Generally I found that over organization helps people who tend to be disorganized not because they don’t know how to be organized, its just that they loose interest and/or, don’t like to keep to-do lists refreshed and ready for action.

I’m typically one of these people. While I have awesome thoughts about management and organization, I rarely take my own advice because I find that I hate doing regular stuff. Well, I found my answer in doing something even more regular strangely enough. I am now doing gross over organization of my work.

For example, I do a lot of blog writing, both for myself and others. I also do articles, ebooks, the occasional rewrite and so on. From the beginning of May every single piece I release is filed away. It is formatted in word to a specific format, same scheme, same everything. They all contain links to the published version if any, and all files are categorized, titled, tagged with Vista’s interface. In addition I am also entering all the details into a database, which contains a load of info about each item.

Why this works

On the surface it may seem like I am a tardy person because of this, and on the surface, I have to say this is true. The driving force behind this though is that I feel I am organized only if every single detail of everything is organized, not just my to-do list. What I have created is the total and complete organization of my blog life, which takes up about 80% of my time, so at least this part is now under control. This “sitting on top of the mound” feeling helps me continue organizing and working happily.

In addition, I have a very up-to-date database of everything I have done, and it fills me with joy to see that I’ve written 20 published blog entries in 5 days. I can also see how much this will pay off in terms of hard currency, which is of course another impetus.

In the end I am organizing way too much. This extra effort tones down my short term productivity, but in the mid to long run, I am definitely doing better. I hesitate to suggest this to everyone, but if you’re struggling to stay on top, why not give it a try?

Apart from blogging I actually used to do (and am starting again) to do a fair bit of freelance writing. There a lot of things you can do for yourself that enables you to work better, get better work and to organize yourself better. Let me share some tips I’ve accumulated to make your job easier.

Find work

I used to rely solely on one site to get work and that is Elance. Since then I am doing a lot of guest blogging, which I attained through relations with other bloggers, but even if you’re new to blogging you could apply, many blogs are searching for good writers. If you do want to become a guest writer I really suggest not pushing the envelope. If you’re an all round nice guy and offer to write a guest post or two for them (without mentioning employment or money) they will probably take you on anyway if they need the writers and you do a good job. I suggest being polite friendly and sincerely helpful.

Elance is a great site for finding many types of work, not just writing. There are web design projects, administrative projects, legal work and a whole lot more. Application is simple, although you will have to pay for a subscription later on. The basic one for writing is around $9 and I can vouch for this site, they are not ripping you off. In addition to the $9 you will have to pay a fee which is based on your earnings, so that’s “just” a deduction. Anyways, it’s a great site, if you’re thinking of signing up and giving it a try, I would be grateful if you could send me your email address and I could refer you, it would mean $50 for me after each $1000 you earn (or spend on someone else’s services).

Organization will be a key feature for finding good work on elance, since with a solid and well managed portfolio you are much more likely to find work than someone who has a messed up one, or none at all.

Organization and productivity

I have about 4-5 projects running simultaneously and I could manage it without organization, but I have a few good reasons to spend the extra time. I use a database to follow my projects right down to the actual stuff I write. My database goes along with folders which contain all the articles, blog posts, e-books I have ever written. This allows me to quickly find anything for a past client, or to construct the best possible portfolio for prospective clients to view.

The work database contains tables for projects, clients and so on, but I also have a table named “items”, which contains all the detail for each project. A typical entry (say a blog post I wrote for someone) )will contain the ID of the item, the project it belongs to, the date it was written, the date it was published, an attachment that leads to an Office document of the text in question and a hyperlink which leads to the post itself. If you’re just using an Excel sheet that’s fine too, in this case you might want to add the client name and email too, in my database this is in a separate table.

My folder structure contains folders named after projects (not clients). I have many repeating projects (like guest blogging), in this case I advise sub folders with month names. In my database the project entry for my gHacks guest blogging is “gHacks blog posts May” for example and the folder structure is “gHacks” -> “May”. I then create doc files for all the separate posts. Nothing fancy, they just contain the title, the body of the post and the URL. This is helpful for me because I can search through the whole body of my life’s work very easily, but I can also send any one of them to clients, and they can also navigate to the post itself.

I manage these files using Vista because it gives me the advantage of tagging and categorizing doc files. I usually use the following categories: “Project name”, “Type of text”, “Project type”. For gHacks posts this would translate into: “gHacks”, “blog post”, “work”. I distinguish between blog posts for my own sites, which are not work, they are categorized as “blog”. This ads a level of complexity to it, but I want to be able to separate work which other people pay me for, since an error there means a dent in my reputation.

I use tags to describe the contents of individual posts, but I need to explain my method a bit further. I use two levels of depth here. For posts which are similar to the content found on Hack Your Day my level of tagging is much deeper. I would tag with “Remember the Milk” and “Tomboy” for example. I am writing a few posts on auto parts right now, but that is outside my normal writing field, so I just label all of them as “automotive”. My reason for this is that I want to use tags mainly to build custom portfolios. So if I see a job that pays $10.000 for auto articles I just zip those up and send. For productivity and geek oriented posts I do want to sort sometimes to find stuff by tag, so I need the extra level of detail.

Creating an image

A good tip for freelancers is to create an image. Create a color scheme, a specific design that becomes your staple, something that can be found anywhere in your work. It doesn’t matter if you can’t design a logo, or have no Photoshop skills at all, this can be as simple as using the same font regularly, always using green as the title and always underlining the last paragraph so it can be followed by a resource box. The point here is to create something by which you and your work can easily e recognized.

This comes in handy because it both looks good, and once people will get to know you, they will associate you with your style. People might not remember your name, but they might remember the awesome writer they once worked with with the green color scheme.

Here are a few things you can work on that could all be customized to the same look:

• Email design (headers, footers)
• Returned article/assignment formating
• A creative tagline
• Company logo
• Website for yourself
• Profiles on other sites
• Business card (vCard too)

Remember to customize many things which are not assignment or task specific. The reason is that many clients prefer a specific format which will most likely not allow for your customizations.

Manners and work moral

Always, always, always be nice. This is a universal rule, and I don’t just mean this when you start earning $100 a month and you rely on people to give you work. Being nice will pay off hugely in the long run, and you will get a lot of unexpected job offers or job prospects in the future.

I have had countless cases where I did a good job and the same client offered me other stuff too. If my quality is good but I’m a horrible person, this wouldn’t really happen. Also, try not to assume the worst, if a person doesn’t send an email response to you for a week, he may be sick, or have other things on his mind, just be patient.

Productivity as a freelancer

Overall, the moral of the story is that in my opinion there are four factors that go into being a good and successful freelancer. Number one is quality, which rules all. I also mean punctuality and other traits which add to the quality of specific jobs. Number two is manners, and disposition, which can get you more work than you think, and can get you out of pretty bad situations too. Number three is organization and management which will make your life much easier and help you create your portfolio and stay on top of things. Number four is image which is not a requirement for people who want to earn a few bucks on the side, but if you want to boost your income, it’s an easy and smart thing to try. Good luck freelancing!

Now that the new Ubuntu release has come out triple booting has become very easy. I am now trip booting XP, Vista abd Ubuntu. I have a multitude of reasons for having all three, I am making Ubuntu my full time OS as you know, but Vista still has its merits. For starters, I know it better, so if I need something done quickly thats still where I go. I use XP for the little gaming I do, about once a week I get together with a friend and play some games, XP is still the best for that.

If you take a look at APCmag, you’ll quickly find instructions for double booting Xp and Vista, regardless of which one you have installed first. Then comes the beauty of Hardy Heron, the WUBI install system. This enables you to install Ubuntu from within the Vista environment and Ubuntu will be added to the Windows bootloader. Since I really hate trying to find out how to get Grubb to boot Windows this was a Godsent and now I’m happily and easily booting all three systems.

As a side note, my Feisty used to take at least 3 minutes to load, an error which I read about, but failed to resolve. They seemed to have fixed it in Hardy, so now I don’t spend more than a minute booting any of the three, hip-hip-hooray to Hary and the Ubuntu team.