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/

Latest Thoughts

• A new hosting site, Mosso, seems to want to brag about having affordable rates for a scalable website. They're really for mid-sized sites that have grown out of shared hosting plans and need something more robust. Yeah, but the trouble is they don't even use Apache. They use IIS7. Ha, yeah, like that's scalable and secure. No wonder they're still too pricey for me to even think of them.
  
• I thought I was the first to come out with the news about W2K8S having a free 240 day trial license from Microsoft. But now I'm seeing that others are repeating what I'm saying.
• Saw a neat logo on this site. It's interesting what a little light effect, some font uniqueness (using all uppercase or all lowercase), and good color choices can do for your site with relative ease.
• The newer browsers -- FF3, Opera, and Safari -- now have a new feature where if you use non-styled HTML form controls, they will automatically style them with fairly visually appealing 3D glass-like effects with curved borders on some of the controls as well as a highlight color during a mouseover. Microsoft, however, has not gotten the memo on this. Let's hope they do because it would be great to not have to worry about styling these components ever again.

Contract Bit The Dust

Every site has two parts to it. One is the EUE (End User Experience), sometimes referred to as the UI. The other is the Admin part of the site where administrators go into adjust things.

On one client I had, which paid pretty good for awhile, I at least completed the EUE, but not the Admin part. I only had one week left in the project timeline to complete the admin piece, and one week for testing. But I had some things going against me even with the tight timeframe.

1. The client didn't even know how a critical piece of the site was going to be worked out. They assigned a senior dev to figure that out and get back to me.
2. The client was frustrated already on time but by their own fault. Early on in the project, they had no XHTML templates for me to hang things on, no serious functional spec exept a two-pager requirements list, no time for me to rework their existing functional spec, no clear direction on how some key aspects of the work were going to be ironed out, and they had me first start with Zend Framework and then abandon that in favor of my own design.
3. They had a senior dev who was pesky. He kept out of the design for the most part, but he'd have some biting questions for me here or there as I went forward through the thing. And when I tried to get more information from him, it was like pulling teeth -- he would delay frequently unless I called him on his phone.
4. The top guys didn't know a thing about programming or building projects of this size. The existing site they had was built over time by several developers over a series of months. Their knowledge was immature of this industry.

My lessons learned here are:

• to really get a grasp of my client early on.
• to see if they have a pesky senior dev who's going to get in my way.
• to never again join a project where they do work in MVC format.
• if locked into a corner, know when to get out.
• if told to stop work, don't fight it -- just get out and move on.

Well, anyway, this might seem like a dose of bad news, but actually it is not. I don't have to do that pesky project anymore. I can work with two other really good clients right now. One is flexible and sort of pays semi-okay. The other is flexible/inflexible (fair is what I'm trying to say) but pays better and understands my worth.

One thing I did on the end of the project, however, was a trick. I had already been paid several paychecks on this project already. But in the end here, I asked for $1500 which is half of two weeks worth of work. By doing that, I knew they would not pay that sum. What this does is get me off the hook for a lawsuit. Imagine if I had not done that and had just said I want out -- they might come back to me and ask me for some of their cash back, or hit me with a lawsuit. The next thing I did was act professionally through the whole closure. I explained my predicament and then left the facts as the facts without pointing fingers. I fudged things a little and said that I'd like to work with them in the future. Of course I know that the client wanted to return with a nastygram, and they did. But I did not return one back to them. This makes the client seem victorious and me as the failure, which is exactly where I wanted to leave things. This keeps them out of the mood of suing me.

So anyway, here's a toast to the future on my next contracts!

Get A Free Copy of Windows Server 2008 for Browser Testing

I hate Microsoft with a passion. That's why the logo on this post is upside down. They don't deserve the advertisement. I mean, I'm a developer, and I don't like being forced with dirty market tactics to pay for products I don't need or want, and I don't like a company that lied under oath and got away with it while you or I would be facing several years in federal prison doing hard labor for grand perjury.

Microsoft Vista is complete garbage. I have to use it because I have to do browser testing, and that's the only reason why I use it. Everything else I run comes through Ubuntu, even if I have spend an entire weekend fighting with my xorg.conf file on Linux just to get my attached monitor to be the most optimal resolution next to my laptop. I don't like any version of Windows, but of all of them, I could tolerate W2K the most because it didn't periodically call home like XP has been proven to do, and it didn't have an NSA backdoor like XP and Vista have.

So now I have a new laptop, and the very latest Ubuntu on it, and I installed Virtualbox on it. I then needed a Windows OS on it to run IE7 because IES4Linux doesn't quite run IE7 perfectly yet. I looked around in my office and the last Windows license I had was for W2K Server and W2K Pro workstation, and no XP licenses, and the Vista license I had was on my other laptop. So I then had to make a decision, and that was to purchase a copy of Windows Vista or Server 2008. I didn't like either of those decisions, so I went looking for a free route.

And that's when I discovered that M$ has a 240 day version of Windows Server 2008 for you to try. Just visit their site, search on Windows Server 2008, click Trial, and download your ISO file.

I downloaded mine and it works great inside Ubuntu with VirtualBox. This comes with IE7. Then, to test IE6 I use IES4Linux because that works well and the engine, after some testing I did, runs just fine. I then installed Opera in my VirtualBox instance and Safari as well. They say if you test your stuff on Safari for Windows, it will work 100% in Safari for Mac. So that eliminates me having to get a Mac.

MyGlowKeys.com

One problem with non-Mac and non-Lenovo/IBM laptops is that they don't have keyboard lights. At night when trying to work in complete darkness on your great little laptop, it's aggravating to not be able to see the keys. Some say, "Yeah, well, I'm a touch-typist," but the reality is that if you use different keyboards in a day (I do), then you're left guessing where the special keys are like page up, down, volume, etc. So, by using glow-in-the-dark key labels, you can get around this.

I just ordered a pack for $14.95 USD. I recommend if you use a non-Mac or non-Lenovo/IBM laptop in the dark -- that you get one of these.

http://myglowkeys.com/

[EDIT: Unfortunately, I don't recommend these anymore. I thought these keys would glow in the dark, but evidently they do not. They're really only suited if you already have some dim lighting near you -- at that, they are fantastic. But if you're sitting in a completely dark room with only your laptop screen, you won't really see these keys very well. Instead, consider LatKey.com. I contacted them and asked about getting a set of glow-in-the-dark stickers that are geared more for laptops -- giving me a Fn key as well as a Euro symbol. I told them I was in the USA, and they oddly told me to get the Spanish version because it also included all the F1-F12 keys as well. Oh, well, whatever works is good with me.]