Underpants Office » Freelancing

A baker’s dozen great freelancer’s resources

Doug — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 07:26:00 +0000

Illustration: dh

Many people who work in home offices are freelancers of one sort or another, so I’ve been looking around for as many good resources for freelancers as I could find. If you’re trying to make a go of it as a freelance writer, Web developer, graphic designer, consultant, photographer or whatever, I’m guessing you’re going to find something here that will be useful to you. Here’s my list so far:

1. Freelance Switch

Freelance Switch not only sports a great line-up of articles and resources about freelancing, but they’ve also got a valuable (and inexpensive) job board. The concept is brilliant: you can advertise a freelance job for free, and freelancers pay only $7/month to apply for any of the jobs on the board–pretty much an “everyone wins” deal.

2. Freelance Folder

Oriented towards freelancers and Web-workers, Freelance Folder is another source for helpful articles on a wide variety of topics–productivity, creativity, marketing, and the freelance life in general. There’s a lot of good stuff here.

3. JD’s Blog

If you’ve got entrepreneurship coursing through your veins, you’ll probably profit greatly from hanging out at JD’s Blog. You’ll find many articles about how to build better businesses, from virtually every conceivable angle–marketing, tips and tools for entrepreneurs, finances and investing, and a lot more. (As of this writing, the last post to JD’s Blog was in October, so I’m hopeful they’re just on a brief hiatus–but there is still a ton of useful content there.)

The rest of the resources below are individual articles from a variety of blogs (including those mentioned above), but when you go to look at them, be sure to spend some time on these sites, because you’ll likely find other stuff that you can use.

4. 101 Essential Freelancing Resources

This Freelance Switch article is a very long list of all kinds of resources–tools and Web sites for things like time tracking, invoicing, project management, business tools, job boards, Web site and blogging tools, and advertising and marketing tools and resources. “Essential” is the right word for this piece.

5. Freelancer’s Toolbox–30+ Online Freelance Resources

This article from Mashable.com is another great list of useful online resources for the freelancer. Lots of great stuff to browse here.

6. 20 Resources for Freelancers

This article is from Tutorial Blog–there’s some duplication with the lists above, but you’ll find some other stuff here, too, and this site is definitely worth a look.

7. The Freelance Writing FAQ

Writing for newspapers and magazines is the bread and butter of many freelancers, and this article at Creating Marketing Solutions is a very helpful set of answers. If you’re just starting out, do yourself a favor and get up to speed with this FAQ.

8. Tools for Freelancers

This Society of Professional Journalists article is a great source of information for the freelance journalist, and the resources referenced span a wide range of topics, from tax guidelines to professional organizations to writer’s conferences and such. Put that j-school degree to work.

9. Ebook Writing and Marketing Secrets

Ebooks are all over the place, and people are buying them. If you have what it takes to write them, you could stay pretty busy and do pretty well. This site explains how.

10. Resources for Freelance Web Designers

Here’s a list of resources with a practical, nuts-and-bolts feel. There’s stuff here about dealing with clients, protecting your work, online portfolios, social networking sites for designers, and more.

11. 53 Steps to follow if you want to become a freelance Web designer/developer

No-nonsense introduction to the process involved in becoming a good Web designer or developer–good stuff, and most of the steps link to resources for further reading.

12. The Ultimate list of Freelancing Resources (1-25)
The Ultimate list of Freelancing Resources (26-50)

These articles comprise a list of 50 articles about freelancing–a lot of helpful content here.

13. 25 tips by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs

This article contains a set of valuable tips–practical stuff–but be sure to check out the collection of articles on entrepreneurship at the end of the article.

If you know of other great freelancing resources out there that I’ve missed, please post a comment and a link.

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How to learn the Web development skills that will keep you working

Doug — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 03:59:16 +0000

Photo: batega

There was a great article recently over on NetTuts called “10 Most Sought-after Skills in Web Development”–very helpful information for those of us who are trying to make it as freelance Web developers. But are those skills really within reach for someone who may not necessarily have a programming background? The answer is a qualified “yes,” if:

you have a working knowledge of HTML and CSS
you know your way around PHP enough to make simple modifications to a script
you’re willing to take some time to study and experiment
you’ve got patience, determination and a desire to learn something new
you know where to find tutorials, references and examples to learn from

And although you’re more or less on your own for the first four of those bullet points, this article is intended to help you with the last one. This is Part One of a two-part article on where to find the information and resources you need to acquire some of the Web development skills that can make you a better developer and equip you to keep working in challenging economic times.

According to the NetTuts article, the 10 most sought-after Web development skills are:

Framework knowledge
Widget development
Custom CMS themes
CMS customizations and plugin development
PSD to XHTML services
Javascript plugin creation
Facebook/MySpace applications
iPhone applications
Ecommerce integration
Flash and Actionscript knowledge

Part One of this article will cover the first five, and we’ll take up the last five in Part Two.

Photo: kansas_city_royalty

Before we dive into the list, here’s one more thing to chew on: most of those of us who do this stuff for a living do it partly because we love the challenge of learning new technologies. But if you’re already a busy Web nerd, it’s going to be difficult to find a lot of time for learning new stuff. I would suggest that you give yourself plenty of time to learn something new, so that it doesn’t become frustrating to you when you have to be busy with other things for a while. Be realistic about how long it takes to learn this stuff. In some cases, your prior knowledge will be such that you can learn some of these skills very quickly, and that’s cool. But don’t set yourself up for failure by expecting to learn something like Django in a week’s time when you’ve got three other project deadlines coming due next week. Be reasonable, take your time, and do it right.

Now let’s take a quick look at each of these technologies and some of the best places to find information, tutorials and other resources. And by the way, all of the resources that are listed here are available on the Web for free. We may also compile a good list of books on these topics at some point, too.

1. Framework knowledge

Photo: oskay

A framework, in this context, is an application framework–it’s sort of like having the basic structure of your application already built for you, and your job is to flesh it out with functionality. The idea is that you, as the developer, won’t have to spend your time working on the standard stuff that is essentially common to all applications–you can invest your time on the specific functionality of your application. In my early days as an Apple II programmer, if my application needed a menu interface of some sort, I had to write it, pretty much from scratch. Now with Apple’s Cocoa framework, for example, the appearance and operations of things like buttons, toolbars, application “drawers” and such are handled by the Cocoa framework in pretty the same way for any Cocoa application–that work has been done for you. In general, the use of a framework makes application development faster, easier, and more consistent.

Here are some popular frameworks and resources for learning how to use them:

CakePHP

Cookbook (official docs), video screencasts, and several tutorials
The Bakery (tons of articles about working with CakePHP)
Sitepoint article: Your First Bite
NetTuts: Getting Started with CakePHP
Wildflower, a CakePHP CMS

CodeIgniter

Django

Rails

Symfony

2. Widget development

Photo: whiteafrican

There are all sorts of platforms that are ripe for a huge variety of widgets–Mac OS Dashboard widgets, widgets for Wordpress or other blogging or CMS platforms, Google widgets, Yahoo! widgets, Vista sidebar gadgets and more. You can get a feel for the variety and scope of the widget market by visiting the Widgipedia site, among others. Here are some places you can find information about how to develop widgets for several different environments:

MacOS Dashboard widgets

Wordpress widgets

Google gadgets

Yahoo widgets

Vista sidebar gadgets

And check out this general article on Widget Best Practices.

3. Custom CMS Themes

Photo: geishaboy500

Okay, so there are already thousands of themes out there, but there will always be a need for more, and for custom theme creation. If you can learn to create and manipulate themes for Wordpress, Drupal, or other blogging and CMS platforms, you’ll stay busy, and you’ll make money. Here is where your CSS skills will really come in handy. Here are some resources:

Wordpress theme creation

Drupal theme creation

Joomla theme creation

4. CMS customizations and plugin development

There are many platforms and applications that use plugins as a way to extend functionality and customize. Developers are writing custom plugins for Wordpress, modules for Drupal, JQuery plugins, extensions for Expression Engine, and other platforms.

5. PSD to XHTML services

A quick search will show you that there are a lot of people out there making money doing this, so be prepared to be good and to compete in the marketplace. But a lot of Web designers do site design mock-ups in Photoshop because it is a relatively quick way to show a client how things could look, and it’s relatively easy to tweak the design before you translate it into style sheets. The ability to start with a Photoshop document and turn it into a Web document is not that difficult to learn, and here again, your CSS chops will help you get the gig.

Go to Part 2…

In Part Two we identify resources for learning

Javascript plugin creation
Facebook/MySpace applications
iPhone applications
Ecommerce integration
Flash and Actionscript knowledge

In the meantime, if you find any other great resources in any of these areas, please add them via comments. And if you want to make sure not to miss the next installment, why not subscribe to Underpants Office?

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Intellectual property resources (guest-post at Freelance Switch)

Doug — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:20:30 +0000

My latest piece at Freelance Switch

Although I don’t have any real data to back this up, I suspect that many of those of us who work from home offices are engaged in one form of creative endeavor or another, which means we are creating intellectual property that has value. In some cases, we retain ownership of that property, and in some cases we do it on behalf of someone else and they own it. If the very thought of what that means is beginning to make your head hurt, you might want to go check out my latest guest-post over at FreelanceSwitch.com, titled “7 Intellectual Property Resources Every Freelancer Should Know About.” It may not stop your head from hurting, but it will point you to the kind of information you need to intelligently discuss your intellectual property rights and issues with a lawyer, or to protect your creative work.

If you like the article, I’d be ever so grateful if you Stumbled it while you’re there. Thanks!

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Could a podcast help promote your business?

Doug — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:56:48 +0000

If you’ve ever considered putting together a podcast to support your home-business, freelance work, or other passion, you might want to check out my guest-post on FreelanceSwitch.com. Podcasting might be a great way to promote what you do!

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