6 Tools for Changing Your Writerly Rhythms (1)
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Samuel Dean (103)
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I remember reading an interview with Sting one time where he said that writing is like a muscle you must exercise every day. That’s true, but writing every single day can also turn into drudgery if you don’t mix up your skills and the applications you work in. Many web workers spend a lot of time writing. In this post, I’ll round up six tools that can help you mix up your writing habits and ...
Foxit Reader: A Free, Lightweight Adobe Alternative (6)
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Samuel Dean (103)
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If you’ve spent much time with Adobe’s applictions for working with PDFs, you know that they’re not the fastest applications under the sun, and they provide their share of annoyances when doing updates, and when uninstalling. For a free, alternative application you can turn to, Foxit Reader for Windows is a good choice. (There are also versions for Linux and mobile devices.) Foxit Reader is much smaller than Adobe Reader, so one of the best ...
LimeExchange: A Social Network for Freelancers and Entrepreneurs (9)
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Imran Ali (44)
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2 days, 14 hours
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A few weeks ago, LimeExchange launched its online outsourcing marketplace to the world. The service is essentially a social network for freelancers, service providers and entrepreneurs that helps service providers matchmake themselves to buyers looking to outsource activities within those service categories. Though marketplace services such as Guru and eLance have ably served freelancers and web workers for some time, LimeExchange seeks to differentiate itself from its predecessors by moving service marketplaces beyond simple matchmaking ...
Searching Google and Yahoo! Concurrently (4)
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Samuel Dean (103)
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3 days, 4 hours
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I’ve written about alternative search engines here before, and because I spend so much time searching, I always keep my eye out for good new search ideas to try. Recently, I’ve been using SearchBoth, which has an interesting spin on the concept of searching multiple sites at once. SearchBoth lets you search a few different types of sites concurrently, but the one web workers may find most useful is searching Google and Yahoo at the ...
Telework: Still Looking Up (1)
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Mike Gunderloy (226)
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4 days, 8 hours
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The wave of adoption of telework as a routine work alternative continues to roll over mainstream businesses. That’s one of the messages of this year’s WorldatWork survey of its members - over 2500 human resources folks. The specific standout number for this particular survey is the proportion of organizations who say they offer their employees telework as an option. In the US, this number went from 30% last year to 42% this year; in Canada, ...
When Work Ethics Collide for Cultural Reasons (1)
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Pamela Poole (4)
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5 days, 7 hours
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I’ve had an interesting summer, and not all of it was good interesting. But I learned some things. As this summer comes to a close, I am enlightened about one thing in particular: if you’re working with the French, don’t expect to accomplish much in the month of August. In fact, when you’re working with people from any culture other than your own, you should be prepared to deal with assumptions and expectations regarding work ...
Which Browsers Matter? (2)
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Mike Gunderloy (226)
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1 week
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Now that Internet Explorer 8 is in serious beta, web workers who develop or design web pages are faced, once again, with a knotty question: which browsers (and which versions) do you design for? The basic problem is understanding your market: browser usage statistics are unreliable, but they all seem to agree that the market belongs to Internet Explorer and Firefox, with a smidge of Safari thrown in (Opera advocates, I know you’re out there, ...
Which Browsers Matter? (1)
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Mike Gunderloy (226)
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WebWorkerDaily (542)
1 week
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Now that Internet Explorer 8 is in serious beta, web workers who develop or design web pages are faced, once again, with a knotty question: which browsers (and which versions) do you design for? The basic problem is understanding your market: browser usage statistics are unreliable, but they all seem to agree that the market belongs to Internet Explorer and Firefox, with a smidge of Safari thrown in (Opera advocates, I know you’re out there, ...
Mouse vs. Keyboard: The Great Divide (3)
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Mike Gunderloy (226)
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1 week, 1 day
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OK, so you work on the web. That’s a given. But what are you doing when you work on the web? Most likely, interacting with some application on your computer. Now drill down one more level: are you using the mouse (or other pointing device) or the keyboard for most of that interaction? There’s the question that has the potential to bring users to blows. I was reminded of this debate by a blog entry ...
Getting Delinquent Clients to Pay You on Time (6)
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Celine Roque (38)
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1 week, 1 day
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“Where’s my money?!” That’s a phrase that I used to scream at my monitor whenever difficult clients would skip payments for weeks at a time or, worse, if they would skip paying completely. Many things have changed since then, and my experience with such clients early in my web working career has made me savvy to such escape tactics. In the end, only one client was successful in evading me. I didn’t let him get ...
Negotiating the Web Worker Way (3)
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Celine Roque (38)
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1 week, 2 days
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Not long ago, all negotiations were done over a meeting or a meal. For today’s teleworkers, it’s almost impossible to do this if your clients are all over the globe. We’ve all had to make do with online negotiations most of the time, leaving out the nuances of face-to-face meetings. The good news is, our online communication tools can work equally well for negotiation - if we know how to take advantage of it. Have ...
Two Time-Saving Firefox Extensions Get Nods from Mozilla (2)
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Samuel Dean (103)
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1 week, 2 days
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The other day, we covered the winners in this year’s Extend Firefox contest, which is Mozilla’s annual effort to recognize the best extensions for the Firefox browser. In addition to the new ideas that won, though, Mozilla has also recognized a couple of strong updates to well-known Firefox extensions. Two of them can be very handy for web workers. Read It Later is a quick way to save web pages of interest to read later, ...
Is Nortel’s Next-Gen Collaboration App Too Ambitious? (10)
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Samuel Dean (103)
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1 week, 4 days
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While it’s still in incubation stage, web workers will want to keep Nortel’s web.alive project on their radars. Codenamed “Project Chainsaw,” web.alive is virtual world software, but it’s aimed at online business collaboration and e-commerce applications. Web.alive is being built by a team within Nortel and appears to be focused on next-generation extensions of many of the collaboration tools we’re already used to in tools such as online meeting applications. While it doesn’t appear to ...
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Eater said:
Can I still use my talking-penis avatar if it's an 'e-commerce virtual environment'?
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MiramarMike said:
Wow ... if you're having issues getting a work wiki this isn't gonna go anywhere within 10 years :-)
A Tuneup for Your Windows PC–Free (9)
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Samuel Dean (103)
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1 week, 4 days
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If you work in Windows, you’re probably well aware of how it litters files around a hard disk, is often flaky in uninstalling applications, and just generally slows a PC down over time. I’m always experimenting with utilities that counteract this, and I’ve written before about one of my favorite free applicaitions: Glary Utilities. Now, I’ve found another good, free collection of utilities called Advanced WIndows Care Personal. Like Glary Utilities, Advanced Windows Care Personal ...
Do You Want More Web Work? (1)
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Aliza Sherman (54)
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1 week, 6 days
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Ah, the age old business question: “Do I want more work?” The question, of course, is actually “Can I handle more work?” or even “How much more work can I handle?” Do you know how much more work you can handle? Are you at that tipping/breaking point yet? How much more work will get you to that point? And when you get to that tipping/breaking point, what then? Do you: 1. Learn to say “No” ...
Web Worker 101: Working with Subcontractors (7)
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Mike Gunderloy (226)
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1 week, 6 days
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If you’ve reached the point of having more work than you can handle, there are several ways to handle the overflow. One of the easiest, in some ways, is to hire subcontractors to do part of the work for you. But before you rush out and offer part of your next job to your closest web-working buddy, there are a few things that you need to consider. Here are four of the biggest pitfalls to ...
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mitchgroup said:
this is a great post. if for no other reason...you should do this to ensure your ability to maintain YOUR level of customer service/satisfaction/timing/delivery of product, etc.
The Risks vs. Rewards of Cloud Computing (7)
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Aliza Sherman (54)
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2 weeks, 1 day
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I was listening to a story on NPR by Laura Sydell called Computing in the Cloud: Who Owns Your Files? The story brought back all of the fears I’ve had about working in the clouds but have suppressed because: A. I want the convenience that cloud computing offers; B. I recently experienced the Computer Crash of Doom and want to know I have reliable backups; C. I want to get more work use out of ...
Learning From Every Job (3)
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Mike Gunderloy (226)
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2 weeks, 1 day
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There are many reasons why web workers (and other independent contractors) choose to accept one job over another. Sometimes it’s simple economics: if you’re not overflowing with offers of work, you may not be able to afford choosiness. Other times, you might choose on the basis of your emotional chemistry with the client, the pay rate, or the way the job fits into your schedule. But as a longstanding contractor myself, there’s one rule of ...
