theAdmin.orgGrowing a simple software business

In order to become a great business, you need to push yourself to become great first. This requires that you get out of your comfort zone:

• Why I Don’t Work Hourly And Neither Should You - time is our only resource we will never get back. Why do we put such a low value on it by charging hourly fees?
• Evaluating New Product Ideas (focus on Tractability) - new products are the fastest way to make your business soar. They are also great ways to kill your business if you follow the wrong idea.
• 3 Uncomfortable Ways To Make More Money As A Freelancer - want to get out your comfort zone without taking drastic changes to your business. Try some of Dave Navarro’s ideas first.

Alan Weiss says if by improving only 1% every day, in 70 days you are twice as good. Who can’t do 1% each day? With the idea of small improvements, these links are all ways you can improve your business that little bit every day:

• 25 Freelance Tips for Maximizing Your Income
• 7 Things You Can Do TODAY to Kickstart Your Freelancing Career
• 25 Stress Relief Tips for the Overworked Freelancer - Running a business can get stressful, especially when it is only us. Leo Babauta has another great post, this time on ways to reduce your stress.
• 101 Reasons Freelancers Do it Better - Great list of how freelancers have it better than the typical office employee. Good for the Friday afternoon after a long week.

Have your own tip to share? Leave a comment and let me know, I’m always looking for my 1% improvements.

• How Much is Your Time Worth? - Great post that really hits what I’ve been saying about pricing services.

• PSA - backups - Jamie Zawinski has a great solution for backups. If you are running a business without backups you are just asking to have your business closed any day now.

• Javascript Design Patterns - 1. The Singleton - I love using the singleton pattern. I’ve implemented it many different ways but post outlines one of the best I’ve seen.

If you ever want to see what I’m reading or what I have pending, check out my del.icio.us page for @check. This massive list is the links I sort through.

I’ve been scrambling this past week trying to close out a few projects before I start on some new ones. Here are a few links that came across my wanderings:

• Generating the code for an older version of Rails - A customer asked me how to generate a stock Rails application from an older release. Turns out RubyGems allow you to specify the version using underscores as an argument.
• Jeff Mackey’s notes on the SEED 2008 conference - Jeff took some notes from the 2008 SEED conference put on by 37signals, Segura Inc, and Coudal Partners.
• Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails - New book by Apress. Sounds pretty interesting, especially with all the reporting plugins I’ve been building for Redmine.
• Real Programmers - Now if I can only get Emacs to buy my wife a Valentines Day gift, C-x M-c M-gift only works in emacs CVS.

I upgraded a few Rails applications to 2.0 and found the following links helpful. In under an hour I was able to upgrade 2 applications from Rails 1.2 to 2.0.

• Rails 2.0: taking the plunge
• Pastie script to test for 2.0 Compatibility
• Upgrade to Rails 2.0
• Upgrading to Rails 2.0. A Recipe

Was able to start to catch up on some developer links I had bookmarked this week:

• No True “mod_ruby” Is Damaging Ruby’s Viability On The Web - Peter Cooper wants to know why there isn’t there a good mod_ruby for Apache.
• Merb 0.5.0 is out - Hot on the tails of my last set of links, Merb has just released their latest version. It sounds like their next point release will be separated into the core and extras.
• loupe.js - Cool JavaScript library to “zoom” over parts of an image. It can also display part of another image under the magnifying glass (X-ray).
• Reinventing the Clipboard - Coding Horror talks about the limitation of the Windows clipboard to only hold one thing at a time. Linux and Emacs have had multiple clipboards for some time now, it’s amazing Microsoft hasn’t added this feature.
• 2007: The Ruby on Rails Year in Review - Very nice review of the progress Ruby on Rails made in 2007. Let’s make 2008 even better.

I’ve been reading up a lot on different ways to manage code using SCM systems because my current ones take way to long to do anything advanced.

• How to use Piston to ease your upgrades - Piston looks like an easy way to work with upstream svn repositories. Currently, I do a huge hack of checking out the trunk from Mephisto and merging in my custom code. On the other hand, moving to git and git-svn might be better in the long run.
• Learning git-svn in 5min - quick writeup on how to use git along with an existing Subversion repository.
• Shoes Meets Merb: Driving a GUI App through Web Services in Ruby - Nice write up of creating a Merb web service. I’m going to have to take a look at Merb soon, it looks like it has a lot of benefits over Rails but is still the Ruby I know and love.

In order to organize my articles, I split my blog into four sections now:

1. Home - all articles from Business and Tech
2. Business - articles about running my business and freelancing
3. Tech - articles about technology and software development
4. Link Blog - posts with links to content I come across that I found interesting and want to share

Another benefit of this split, I now have four RSS feeds to cater to your specific content need. So if your only interested on my freelancing articles, you can subscribe to the Business feed. If you want to follow my progress with Ruby on Rails, my Tech Feed is where you want to be.

All the feeds are listed on the sidebar and below.

Eric

Feeds

• Home Feed (all articles)
• Business Feed
• Tech Feed
• Links Feed