Need a quick break from the grind? WWD sister site NewTeeVee Station brings you Watercooler Clips, a selection from our collection of what’s good, interesting and/or of note in the online video world — whatever the web is talking about at the virtual watercooler.
Today, we offer The Website is Down’s dramatization of that most epic of clashes — the sales guy versus the web dude. Told from the perspective of the Web Guy’s monitor, this breakdown of office relations will seem all too familiar to those on either side of the screen.
With many software applications as bloated as they are these days, I still favor many tiny applications that I can get in and out of quickly for specific tasks. I’ve written before about you can stock up on many interesting mini applications to keep on a USB key. In this post, I’ll discuss four other free, mini applications that are very handy.
Foxit Reader is a very small and snappy PDF reader. I often prefer this application to Adobe’s tools when I simply want to get in and out of PDF documents in a speedy way. Despite its small size, it has some unexpected bells and whistles. For example, it has a multimedia player that lets you listen the audio and video elements that sometimes accompany PDF files. You can also download versions for mobile devices, Linux and more.
If you’re looking for a simple way to get stuff online in blog format, look no further than Posterous. How simple? Just email post@posterous.com. Your message subject becomes your blog post title, the message text the body of the blog post. The service treats attachments smartly – images turn into image galleries, while documents are rendered via Scribd. If you like, you can set up a custom site title and URL and tweak a few things like comment settings, but you don’t have to.
Given the extremely low bar for posting to a Posterous site, it might be a good alternative to a wiki or traditional blog for a new or less-technical team trying out distributed work for the first time. Of course, whatever you post is public, which makes it impractical for sensitive information. The service is free, though there’s passing mention of charging for future premium features.
Web workers save on the daily commute especially now with the high fuel cost. But there are times when we need to go out for meetings. I chanced upon RideSearch.com, a free nationwide carpool matching website, that helps carpoolers save money on gasoline and help reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the daily commute.
I signed up with the free service, hoping to score a cheaper ride when I need to go out. The service is still new so there isn’t that much members yet offering carpool services, especially in my area. I’ll be keeping an eye though.
Meanwhile, here is their Gas Calculator for you to gauge if it’s time to carpool.
I’m not qualified for the work I’m doing. It’s only luck that I got this far in my profession without being found out. I’ve forgotten just about everything I learned in school about how to do this job. Other people really know what they’re doing, and I’m just faking it. One day they’ll find out, and no one will ever hire me again.
If you think I’m writing about you – don’t worry, I’m not. Well, not intentionally. I could just be writing about myself, or about the thousands of others out there with a dose of Imposter Syndrome. Because we work without the benefit of in-person co-workers to compare ourselves to, web workers may be peculiarly prone to this disorder. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be scary.
For freelancing web workers, we sometimes get caught in the contract work aspect of our careers. Clients require your services, you provide, they pay. This cycle can get too comfortable that sometimes, you can’t imagine making money any other way. After all, you’re mobile and you own your time. This is something the average cubicle dweller dreams about, and you’re living it. What more can you ask for?
Despite the benefits of doing contract work, there are other ways you can capitalize on your web working skills and make an alternative source of income. It could be a great change of pace from the hard work that often goes into contract work. And what could be better than a passive source of income?
ScreenSteps is a desktop application (available for both OS X and Windows) designed to make it easy to document processes that take place in a step-by-step fashion. After installing ScreenSteps, you can create a library of lessons; each lesson is made up of steps, and each step can have a screenshot and explanatory text. The application includes built-in image capture and annotation tools, and lets you apply tags to create some organization in the library.
ScreenSteps comes in Standard ($39.95) and Pro ($59.95) versions; both can export to HTML, but Pro adds the capability of exporting whole sets of lessons as HTML or PDF manuals. Both versions can work with ScreenSteps Live, a web service that hosts your steps and allows JavaScript integration for online help in your own web applications. If your documentation needs are fairly lightweight and you don’t have a dedicated help person on your staff, ScreenSteps is a low-friction way to get started.
Quickly realizing her home is not conducive to a productive working environment, Belkin experimented with coworking at Stamford CT’s Soundview Coworking, (actually a little more formal than regular coworking spaces, probably due to it’s location inside a lounge at the local Marriott).
Belkin goes on to explore some of the downside of coworking, relating the story of Cubes & Crayons founder M. F. Chapman:
“I wasn’t getting any work done when I was there,” because clients wanted to stop and chat. When she has real work, she now heads home.“
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
