Archive for the ‘virtual assistants’ tag
Wow, what a difference a day makes.
Yesterday I decided to skip the Daily Review. It was a bit past midnight, hadn’t seen much on the tubes that I wanted to pass along and had just finished pumping a bunch of tasks into Redmine for my VA, that I just hired. I had spent a bit of time getting Redmine to send email through google mail for apps, receive mail with a bit of fetchmail/imap magic and mostly parse them into issues.
Today, during our daily standup we find out that VC for our client wasn’t looking good, they were going to stop, regroup and figure out what it was that they needed to do to have a kick ass product. I won’t say I convinced my buddy to leave his full time gig for this contract work with a start up, but I’m sure I had a pretty heavy hand in it. I also filled basically the rest of the team with colleagues and contacts and myself.
So, come Friday I know a trio of developers that are ready to help you kick some serious ass on your next rails project. Or, we could give your rails project a serious kick in the ass if it’s that kind of project. Get in touch, or pass my contact information to someone that might need some help.
Interesting tidbits from around the web
No more kicking or asses.
- Logo Design – I’ve used LogoSamurai, eLance, 99designs and a few other places that probably have a few of you turning up your nose, or giving me the finger. I’ve had pretty good experiences with the ones I’ve used, most of the issues are failings on my part communicating my ideas (or not having a clear idea).
- Budget – An envelope budgeting system for Mac.
- Command line tricks for smart geeks – I still need to figure out grep or search in place through history, my shell-fu is weak there.
- MetaProgramming Ruby – Patrick McKenzie gives a real life example of using Metaprogramming.
- Cheap DIY Boxee MC – Interesting, but after my recent hardware experience I’d rather buy something that works and pay someone to fix it (or have the person I bought it from fix it for free).
- 25 Tips for Intermediate Git Users – Because you can never get enough git tips (I know, it was almost as painful to write as read).
- Promoting your Facebook Fan Page – Do people use these for good? I get a request almost weekly to join a fan page for a local company (from the company itself). Seems like most people try for a pretty strict divide between personal (Facebook) and professional (LinkedIn). I don’t know if they’re that useful for me, I certainly wouldn’t spend $25/day on targeted Facebook ads…
- Essential Project Management and Collaboration Tools for Freelancers – Surprisingly Wave isn’t on there. A pretty good list of the usual players. I’m only kidding about Wave.
- Magntize – I guess the world needs another profile.
- Consistency – Alton Brown said something on the Chili (with an I) episode to the effect of “A feller expects what he’s expecting”. Same idea here; buttons, or things that resemble buttons, should do button like things.
- Jammit – Because Dammit is too obvious? Another asset packager for rails.
- 25 Awesome Tools for Choosing a Website Color Scheme – 25 should just counteract my design deficiencies.
Remember: You can hire me and my team, just get in touch.
Busy day this morning, 2 new projects, still only 24 hours in a day. Talked to another potential VA, I think I might need to chat with 1 or 2 one more time and narrow down my decision, hopefully early next week. Its the weekend, hopefully it will stop raining soon.
Interesting tidbits from around the web
- Online vCard Converter – I needed this to go from AddressBook Smart Groups vCard to CSV to use in Mad Mimi. Bottom line, vCard to lots of formats, including CSV.
- jQuery UI Multiselect – Pretty cool jQuery widget to deal with adding things one at a time to another thing from a giant list. A client pointed this out, I’m guessing because he wants something like this. Just a guess.
- 21 Awesome T-Shrits for Photographers – I like #13 and #14.
- 11 Ways to Influence People Online and Make Them Take Action – Interesting tip to talk directly to your audience using “you”.
- My Humble Android Sales Figures – Now that we’re a two droid family, I’m wondering what it would take to get into Android development on the mac. I have a few ideas for apps, of course.
- Why Ruby is a Wonderful Language – May not be scientific but it’s an interesting pic.
- How Freelance Businesses can measure Social Media Results – I was actually pretty down on LinkedIn and Twitter for their lack of producing viable clients. I’ve won my single largest work from twitter (employs me, a sub to me, my friend, and had one other on the team but that fell through).
- The Bikini Concept – Some analogies just stick, for me I think this one will. It’s been over 20 years since my 7th grade science teacher told me how long my paper should be, but I remember it like it was yesterday. She said, it should be like a short skirt; short enough to be interesting but long enough to cover the subject.
Had our first sprint review today. We’re coming together but we need to work more with the product owner to make sure we have enough stories, broken down into enough detail to fill our backlog (with a bit of buffer) for the next sprint. Spent a bit of time exploring themes with adva-cms between responding to Virtual Assistant responses to my RFP.
Interesting tidbits from around the web
Got through the weekend of client work and Monday didn’t do too much damage. I’m still working on that whole work/life balance. I picked up a copy of Get More Done, Make More Money today, read it and submitted an RFP or two for some Virtual Assistance. Hopefully over the next week or two I can get to a short list of potential VA, or have found one. WWD had an interesting post on How to use a virtual assistant in your business.
Interesting tidbits from around the web
- Web Developers Can’t Sell. Sorry. – No reason to apologize, for the most part, we can’t. A good set of tips if you still want to try to do this on your own.
- Cleaning user’s input – This has been coming up a lot today, maybe it’s taking long enough for Rails 3 and this is such a no-brainer idea that people are looking for workarounds. Who knows?
- Beautiful-HTML – I half hoped, half thought this was going to be something with HAML.
- 7 Ways to Get More Out of LinkedIn – Alright list, I’m still trying to figure out how to use LinkedIn more. I have found more work through Twitter than LinkedIn. I’d update my status more if I didn’t have to go out to LinkedIn (can’t get ping.fm to work, and they’re support folks aren’t getting back to me).
- Meet jQuery – from PeepCode, bought and on my todo list for tomorrow.
- Python Language Moratorium – interesting.
- Smart Email Marketing – Some good tips. For the haters that think this is spammy, email marketing also gets people to attend conferences, usergroups, and a host of other things.
- Basic postgresql server setup – One day I’ll look at postgresql.
- A first look at the Droid – On my tobuy list.
- The difference between motion and action – or, as one of the comments note, “Never confuse motion with action” – Ben Franklin. Leo has a better post, IMO, The Little Rules of Action.
- Rails on Karmic Koala – For when I’m brave enough to take my production boxes from Hardy to something else.
- I’m an idiot for not using Heroku – maybe you are too. I’ve got a couple things in my idea pipeline that would be good candidates to test out Heroku.
Code, watching Keira play soccer, hanging out with the family. Today was a pretty good day. Tried to scratch together a list of items that I’d like to hand off to a virtual assistant. That quick exercise yielded 25 things, I might need a fleet of assistants or a reality check. Probably the reality check.
Interesting tidbits from around the web
- RSS Feed + GeekTool – teh awesome. I needed a way to focus on a couple RSS feeds without all the noise in NetNewsWire, specifically my Github and Pivotal Tracker dashboards. I had a problem with https in the beginning but simply dropping the SSL made things work like a charm.
- Wave back channel in conferences – sounds like a pretty good use.
- 10 Droid Apps – PC World’s list of a starter set of apps. A few of them looked really cool; Twidroid, Compare Everywhere and Key Ring.
- Missing Drawer – We got some feedback on BDDCasts to use something like ProjectPlus to deal with TextMate’s drawer. I’ve never had much problem with the drawer, sure it opens on a side depending on space, but meh. I tried out Missing Drawer and so far I’m liking the feel of it.
- Nice Find – Continuing with the TextMate theme I wanted to see what other useful plugins were out there and came across this, asynchronous find in project that can use git-grep. The other one in this category would be “ack in project”.
As I laid down in my bed last night a few minutes after midnight, up since 5 that morning having spent likely 16 of those 19 hours in front of my computer trying to do something, I decided there might actually be something to this work/life balance thing. I say “do something” because it’s not quite work, at least not all of it is, I pretend it’s mostly related. Maybe imposing a scarcity of time will focus my efforts.
I’m researching Virtual Assistants, trying to figure out what kind of tasks people like me (solopreneurs, freelancers, independent consultants, entrepreneurs, small biz owners, whatever) would see the most benefit in by delegating to a Virtual Assistant. I’d link to my Wave, but I’m not sure how. This search will help you find it:
with:public Using Virtual Assistants
Interesting tidbits from around the web
Picked up another client today. He’s been burned by a few freelancers / contract developers and that’s left a bad taste in his mouth. Who can blame him? Unfortunately his story is pretty common based on the leads I’ve talked to.
Interesting tidbits from around the net
