Web Worker Daily

Even in the best of times, a freelance web worker’s income can be spotty and irregular at times. Unlike salaried employees, contractors are subject to sudden and frequent variations in the amount of revenue they can generate at any given time. Those variances can be mitigated, however, by buttressing your revenue through a few out of the ordinary sources. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of us who make our money working from home or telecommuting have our fingers in a number of different pots, so to speak. In fact, very few of the remotely employed depend on a single stream of income or project. The trouble is finding enough components to make up a financially and personally rewarding whole.

When I think about projects, I always separate them into two categories: revenue generating and non-revenue generating. A non-revenue generating project is almost always going to be a professional development activity, although revenue generating activities can be classified as professional development as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spell checking functions are built into many tools these days including Microsoft Word, blog editing programs, and even now into browsers such as Firefox and Opera.  However, this doesn’t stop web publishers or bloggers (including me!) from slipping and including an occasional spelling error into our posts.

NetMechanic aims to help. Begin using this service by entering in your URL on their website. Their robot checks your site for spelling errors and gives you a report based on its findings. You can specify a custom dictionary if you’d like the service to ignore certain words. Additionally, you can set NetMechanic to check either a single page or go drill down 20 pages into the site.

A new site called Spellr.us goes one step further.  The site, currently in a closed beta, will offer hourly, daily, or weekly analysis of your site and will give you a visual image of the page containing the spelling error, annotated with strikethroughs.  Pricing is hard to find on Spellr’s homepage but if it’s kept at a reasonable rate, I could easily see publishers paying for this type of service.  Perhaps a more efficient way for Spellr to operate is to scrape a blog’s RSS feed and provide error notification using this as a tool.

How do you keep track of the grammatical health of your site?  What’s your method of monitoring these types of issues?

[From Net@Nite via TechCrunch]