Ever heard the phrase “Spend less than you earn?” Personally, I like to take it a notch higher and spend much, much less than I earn. I can’t help it. I think I’m frugal by nature and that contributes a lot to my feeling of security with online work.
Frugality and web working go hand in hand, especially in a tough economy. Even if you find your business thriving, the cost of commodities tends to go up and some clients might unexpectedly close up shop. I also find that frugality comes with freedom — any extra money I can set aside goes to fund new opportunities or allows me to take some time off.
So whether the economy is struggling or thriving, it’s still a good idea to keep your expenses as low as possible, without sacrificing the quality of your work or your life. Here are some things you can do to keep the cost of web working as low as possible:
Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve all heard talk about remote work being more sustainable than sitting in an air-conditioned office block with your car parked in the basement. But just how sustainable is your remote work?
Here are a few ideas that might help you cut your greenhouse emissions and bump up the sustainability of your lifestyle.
You’re probably aware of the “three Rs”: reduce, reuse, recycle. Keep this mantra in mind as you approach an assessment of your remote working lifestyle. What can you do to you reduce your resource usage? Can you reuse objects rather than discard them? And where and how can you recycle the items you want or need to discard?
I use another set of criteria to assess prospective purchases of things like computers, office furniture, and so on: Read the rest of this entry »
You wouldn’t be reading this post if it weren’t for web designers. It’s web designers who help make it possible for us to have the best and easiest web experience possible. Web design is a large and growing field; despite the downturn, Dice.com currently lists nearly 1,000 vacancies for web designers. Demand for skilled web designers is only likely to increase in the future.
Could becoming a web designer be a good career move for you? Read the rest of this entry »
Just in case you missed any of them, here are the five most popular posts on WebWorkerDaily this week:
Celine outlines seven simple steps you can take to make your home office a more pleasant working environment.
Aliza shares her 10 Golden Rules of Social Media to embrace, debate, pass around and refine.
If, like Pamela, you find GTD overly complex, try this simple task categorization strategy.
The latest version of Google Chrome is blazingly fast — go check it out.
Although we’d like everyone to return the favor when we click that “Follow” button on Twitter, it doesn’t always happen. Meryl asks: why don’t you follow back?
The practice of wireframing is common to most web production professionals. Oddly, there’s no clear market leader or category-defining product in this space; even solutions such as Adobe’s Creative Suite lack dedicated wireframing or rapid prototyping tools.
There are, however, a number of useful smaller options. Late last year, Mike Gunderloy evaluated the popular Balsamiq Mockups and its deliberately sketchy wireframes. I recently discovered FlairBuilder, another up-and-coming wireframing tool which, like Balsamiq, is based on the Adobe AIR platform.
While lacking Balsamiq’s cutesy, sketchy style, FlairBuilder has a number of interesting features useful for wireframing: Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been said that the apps that break out at Austin’s South by Southwest festival are those that help festival-goers navigate and orient themselves within the sprawl of parties, panel sessions and gigs.
The 2007 edition of SXSW was Twitter’s big moment, the tipping point for the now iconic service. The following year, many thought that SCHED*, a web-based event calendar and agenda builder, would be the breakout service of 2008 — the “new Twitter.”
Though such expectations were inflated by the media, SCHED* provided useful personalized schedules that have endured through two editions of the festival. The latest edition of the app now includes mobile support, iPhone compatibility, and the ability to integrate with iCal and Google Calendar. Read the rest of this entry »
In earlier posts, I provided some tips for improving your Twitter efficiency and mining Twitter for information. While both of these provide useful ways to utilize Twitter, you also need to be prepared to respond to other people quickly. Twitter is a short-attention-span medium, where tweets that are minutes old may already be obsolete. You don’t want to skip over any important information or miss the chance to respond. Here are my top three real-time monitoring tools for Twitter.
Don’t Underestimate Twitter Search
For simple monitoring, this is the way to go. If you only want to monitor a single keyword or a small number of keywords, you can easily use the built-in Twitter search in your web browser. You can even use a fairly complex set of search operators to construct great searches. It updates frequently and lets you know how many new items have arrived since your last refresh. It also displays the number of new items right in the browser tab to make it easy to notice without paying much attention to the page. Sometimes you just can’t beat simple and unobtrusive. Read the rest of this entry »
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
