Latest Thoughts

• I didn't realize how wonderful it is when you have built a mini-CMS, an admin scaffolding, you draw all your GUI pages up front before coding, and you understand common concepts like file upload, TinyMCE rich editing, paginated grids, and jQuery. It makes a world of difference. And it seems that the best approach on building sites is to start in the admin system, then the page templates for the end user experience, and then build the gadgets in the end user experience that interact with the data.
  
• I see a bright future for me once I get two projects out of the way. I'll have about $4500 in here from those projects, but then I'll turn around and have a reusable CMS and/or admin system (whichever I need to use) that I can do for countless projects in the future.
• Another thing I need to build is a mini-Product Catalog which ties into PayPal's Add To Cart and Checkout buttons.

Tough Right Now

Things are tough right now. I think after earning my entire salary of last in year in just 6 months, I was severely burnt out. However, then I had a contract loss in July that ate up $5K of my normal quota, and then here it is mid-August and I'm at $0 income right now.

However, here's what's going on...

* I'm working out the details for a $10K to $20K contract. This is going to be a tough one. I don't think my client has the $20K to give me if that's what the project hours will end up coming to once I estimate this. However, I'll also have an equity stake on the project for a period of years so that I can get residual income. It's a job seeker site, and those usually do well (I think).

* I started on a project for $500 starter websites made entirely with WordPress and some fancy tricks, and I was going to farm that on Craigslist. However, I got stuck on the time consuming part of building the form for them to choose options, the ad I need to write, and so on -- fine little details that suck time. And then I mentioned it to my UK client (who's like a partner to me) and he said not to worry about those sites for now -- that he can feed me enough $2K projects to keep me going. (I only usually need $6K per month to survive comfortably.)

* I started my first public phpBB forum. It's on an obscure topic, though, and I don't have any visitors yet except one, so it's going kind of slow. However, I'm learning as I go here and my next forum will be better. I'm collecting income from AdBrite and Google AdSense -- so far $0.

* I've got a $3K contract I'm on right now and another for $1500. They kind of bleed into each other in requirements -- I can share code a little. Anyway, I've been dragging my feet to get this moving, and I'm now suddenly forced to doing this so that I don't have a lot of debt. The other trouble is the time consumption here -- I have very little time to earn that total $4500 and move on to the next stuff.

Nice Regexps

I've been doing some Javascript client-side form data entry validation lately. I wasn't interested in using a jQuery plugin because I frankly didn't trust that the plugin author would get it right. Besides, I can write my own plugin once I figure this out. Anyway, here's some need RegExps I found along the way:

Test for Alphanumeric

if (/\W/.test(s)) {
alert('That field is not alphanumeric.');
}


Test for Normal Full Name Structure

if ((!/^([a-z\x80-\xFF\'\.\-]+(. )?[ ]?)+$/i.test(sFull)) || (/\d/.test(sFull))) {
alert("The Full Name must be alphabetical and properly formatted (i.e., O'Malley Haven-Wilcox Jr.)";
}


Anyway, more can be found here, but they aren't all perfect and require testing:

http://regexlib.com/