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.

All small business owners are strapped for time. Each of us have only has 24 hours in the day but we somehow have to get 28 hours of work done every day. One problem I have, is just keeping up on all the information available. Even my simple RSS feeds are overwhelming me.

I have a solution to start to take back some of our time. With the hard work of some of the freelance greats, a new service has been launched, Sproutwire. Sproutwire is a collaboration of small business owners finding content to help small businesses grow to the next level. Instead of scouring the Internet for new ideas, the Sprout Finders will do it for you.

If you haven’t signed up yet, hurry over to our signup page. Use the invite code of ER-WB to get in. Welcome to the community.

Eric

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 just released version 0.0.2 of my Timesheet plugin for Redmine.

Changes

This release was made possible from the feedback of the community. Some of the changes include:

• Timelogs can now be filtered by user account (#477)
• Multiple projects can be selected (#484)
• Subtotals are shown for each project (#485)
• Language translations to Russian and Czech (#486)
• Parent project names are shown on subprojects (#552)
• BUG: Project and Activities are being reset after submitting (#476)
• BUG: When no activities are selected, all activities should be shown (#570)
• BUG: Language label bugs (#566)

You can see more details on the Activity and Roadmap pages.

Upgrade

I’ve discovered a problem with the name of the plugin folder. If your plugin folder is not named timesheet_plugin, please rename before upgrading or you will get an error in the Administration panel.

Zip

1. Download the latest zip file from https://projects.littlestreamsoftware.com
2. Unzip the file to your Redmine into vendor/plugins
3. Restart your Redmine

SVN

1. Open a shell to your Redmine’s vendor/plugins folder
2. Update your SVN copy with svn update timesheet_plugin
3. Restart your Redmine

Install

If you are installing a fresh copy, follow these steps:

1. Download the archive file and extract it to your vendor/plugins folder. You can also download directly from my Subversion server with:

    svn checkout svn://dev.littlestreamsoftware.com/redmine_timesheet_plugin/trunk vendor/plugins/timesheet_plugin
   

2. Follow the Redmine plugin installation steps.

3. Login to your Redmine install as an Administrator.
4. Enable the “Run Timesheet” permissions for your Roles.
5. Add the “Timesheet module” to the enabled modules for your project.
6. The link to the plugin should appear on that project’s navigation.

What’s next

The next release will be 0.3.0 and will focus on building up the tests for the plugin. So far, I’ve gotten by with manual testing but that’s caused a few bugs to creep in. As part of this process, I’m going to be refactoring a lot of the internals in 0.3.0.

After 0.3.0, we will get to start to add some really cool features. I’m hoping to get some feedback from the community on these so we can build something really great for Redmine.

Help

If you need help you can leave a comment here or enter an issue directly into my bug tracker.

Eric