In just over a month, I’m teaching an introduction to blogging class, in Boulder, through Life Long Learning. More, including links to register and a great picture of the instructor, here.
FreshBooks Review: An Invoicing System for Freelancers
Last November, I started using FreshBooks (full disclosure: if you click on that link, sign up and end up paying them money, I get some money), which is online invoicing software… Wait, let’s back up a minute.
When I started contracting and consulting (oh yes, they’re different), I originally was doing all my invoices in Word docs (actually, OpenOffice Writer), and it seemed natural to track my time there as well. Don’t repeat yourself, right?
After a while, it was tedious to have to open up each invoice every time I switched the client I was working for, so I started using an OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet. On the left hand column were dates, and on the top row were projects/tasks (“work order 13”, “troubleshooting database performance issues”). I ended up having a second row, which was client identifier.
This worked well for a while. When invoicing time came around, I would take the hours and task data from the spreadsheet and put it in the custom invoice. I’d export the custom invoice as a PDF, and put it in a directory. When the client paid, I’d move the invoice to a ‘paid’ directory. This differentiation let me send gentle reminders to clients who hadn’t paid yet.
I realized early on that this wasn’t the most efficient system. Several times, I did research on invoicing systems. I looked around SourceForge and FreshMeat, but the invoicing systems I found there were aimed at invoicing for products, not hours. I had a friend who’d used GnuCash but it seemed to be so much more than I needed.
So, each time, I went back to my old friends, the spreadsheet and the word document.
Mid last year, I was slammed with work. This made me realize, again, how inefficient my invoicing system was. I thought, ‘hey, I’ll outsource it’. A friend had a good person doing some administrative work for him. I hired her to do my invoicing, once a month. I talked her through my system, and she got it. I double checked her first invoice, and it was great. The price was reasonable, I could still use my familiar system, I was happy.
Then this lady decided to raise her prices fifty percent, in a rather high handed and arbitrary manner. Now, I was not a big client. Frankly, I can understand how 1-3 hours of work a month was not very attractive (though I did throw her some research work at least once). However, I was slightly offended at the price increase, and decided to take my work elsewhere. This shows the power of the initial price, because if she’d quoted the hourly fee at the higher rate originally, I would not have blinked.
I tried to find someone else to do the job. I found a relative, who could do the job, but required a fair amount of hand holding. The relative kept talking about the automated accounting systems she had used in the past, so I undertook my search again.
This led me to last October. I looked around for web based invoicing system that would work with me the way I wanted to work:
- mostly time and materials billing
- some fixed bid, including for clients that I do t&m for
- varying hourly rates
- ~10 clients
- pdf invoices I could email
- web based
- time tracking including
- professional looking invoices generated
I narrowed it down to three contenders (this was as of October, 2008; there may be more now):
I took one look at QuickBooks Online, saw that it was IE only, and discarded that option (I may run Windows, but I want to support the open web).
I spent significant time investigating both Cashboard and FreshBooks. I liked the Cashboard interface better, but there was a huge stumbling block. Some of my clients have both fixed bid and t&m work, during the same month. I don’t ever want an invoice to show how much time it took to do a fixed bid project–that’s my business and not the client’s concern (that’s why it is fixed bid). Cashboard had no way of putting both a fixed bid project and t&m work (which must show hours spent) on the same invoice. I even asked Cashboard support about this, and got this answer back: “At the preset(sic) time there is no way you can show time for some projects on an invoice, and hide it for others.” Updated, 4/30/2009, 20:25: Apparently I was wrong, Cashboard can do both types of line items on the invoice; see discussion below. Now I’m not sure exactly the source of my choice of FreshBooks over Cashboard.
FreshBooks lets you do exactly that, so I signed up for their free account (full disclosure: if you click on that link, sign up and end up paying them money, I get some money). And I’ve been using it since last November. After I decided to use it, I upgraded to get more client accounts.
In general, I’ve been happy with FreshBooks. It is always an adjustment to change your business processes and/or software but I’ve been happy with a lot of what FreshBooks has to offer.
First, though, the gripes and caveats:
FreshBooks is not a full accounting package (and they don’t pretend to be one). I still don’t have one–other than the accountant who does my taxes. This means that I don’t have a precise view of my business’s health all the time. I do find out my profit and loss numbers once a year (tax time), and I find that is enough for me. The business’s expenses and income just aren’t that complicated. I had about 30 deposits into the business checking account, and about 50 checks written against it (and a number of EFTs and fees as well).
The web interface is cumbersome and non-intuitive at times. It can be learned, but the crazy urls and heavy use of javascript are occasionally issues for me. For example, editing time that you already have entered, especially changing the day the time was entered for, took me a while to figure out. I also have to re-login to my account every day, even if the browser window has been open for the entire time.
There is no free widget/desktop app for Windows XP users to use for FreshBooks time tracking (you can always use notepad). There is one you can pay a modest fee for. I think it’d be cool to write an AIR FreshBooks time tracking app–maybe sometime…
What I like about FreshBooks:
This last quarter I qualified for the report card, which is free quarterly data comparing your invoicing statistics with others in your industry. Statistics include number of invoices, amount invoiced, % revenue from new clients, and average time to collect payment. This data is great, and I don’t know how I’d find it otherwise. (As an aside, one of my other project ideas is to have a local Boulder/Denver survey of rates for web software development. I’d pay for that–would you?)
I like the reporting available, including which hours have been invoiced and which haven’t (though I have issue with a fixed bid project that I’ve invoiced, but can’t seem to mark invoiced). If you had more than one employee, this reporting would rapidly increase in value.
The cost is reasonable–I have a Shuttle Bus plan, which is 14 dollars a month. (My bank does charge me a bit extra, because FreshBooks is a Canadian company).
They have a great blog.
FreshBooks has an API, which lets you develop any number of widgets (including the time tracker mentioned above) and/or access your data from other programs.
I want to emphasize that the FreshBooks invoicing software is no one-size-fits-all solution. I am running a one person software/consulting business with a fairly stable set of clients and minimal expenses. FreshBooks has many features I don’t use (postal mail invoices, basecamp integration, expense tracking, estimates).
The biggest component that I don’t use is client login. Freshbooks makes it easy to create client accounts. Clients can then login and view documents, see outstanding invoices, contest them, and even pay them with online payment systems. This seems nice, but doesn’t fit with my client expectations. I may try this with new clients, but I hate to ask someone who is paying me money to login to yet another system, just to make things easier for me. Besides, I like to thank my clients in a personal email around the first of the month (along with sending them my invoice)–it never hurts to thank your clients.
So far, FreshBooks has been a great choice for me. If you’re in the Excel/Word invoicing world, or have an invoicing system you’re looking to dump, check it out.
[tags]invoicing,business process, freshbooks[/tags]
Boulder New Media Breakfast Notes: A Presentation by John Jantsch
I went to the second Boulder New Media Breakfast last week (this will be a monthly event, but this particular talk was delayed by a week due to weather). It was interesting–a 15 minute networking session over bagels and coffee, then an hour presentation. The catch is that it started at 7:45 in the morning–so you still had a full day left when you were done.
It was an interesting presentation and crowd and I think I’ll attend in the future. It was a much smaller crowd (30-40 people) and far more focused on marketing than the typical group I attend (New Tech, BJUG, CU Colloquia [which incidentally is having an interesting talk on “leveraging social networks in information systems” on Apr 7]). I talked to a couple of people who were PR folks interested in technology, which isn’t my typical networking group. I also talked to a fellow named Joe, who often asks hard questions, but always wears the great hat, at the Boulder Denver New Tech meetup. I also got a chance to talk to Dave Taylor (of elm and Ask Dave Taylor fame [who answered a tough question well enough it got emailed around to me])–it was interesting to talk to him about his move from software developer to strategic business consultant.
After the networking, we all sat down for a presentation on reputation management by John Jantsch. The following are my scrawled notes from that presentation (any sentences that start with I are my thoughts).
Notes:
Lots of people use the internet to do research for products and services. 36% of people think more positively of companies with a blog. I don’t know how many people think less positively of such companies.
As a company, says John, you need to have a policy on digital conversations. Such conversations with customers will happen, so you need a policy, and HR is the right department to produce one. He discussed three types of conversation: person to person (like Dell customer service reps answering questions on forums), thought leaders (like a blog from a industry heavy weight who happens to be employed by IBM) and company communication (like an official blog from the USPS).
John also mentioned that it may make sense to, in the same way that sales folks sign non compete agreements, to have customer service reps that interact through social media sign such agreements. After all, if someone is the face of the company, and then they switch jobs, do they (and their new company) have a right to all the followers on twitter that were acquired through the original company’s hours? Who owns the facebook profile? I never have liked non competes, but the idea follows logically from the personalization of customer service on company time.
Another concept that is important is transparency. Given the proliferation of digital communication, transparency into a company is here–now the question is, how can you influence it. The best way to influence it is to host your conversations as much as possible. In addition, be proactive in responding to issues (ie, customer complaints).
As a company, you need to have coherence in your branding across your internet presence. Just as the website used to be ignored 10 years ago, facebook profiles are now often ignored and grow up from the ranks. This leads to lack of message and branding consistency.
Now John moved on to cover some tools that are useful. Most of the tools are free, but he did mention a few paid services. The following are free alert services that help you search for keywords in various areas of the internet:
- Google alerts searches emailed to you
- tweetbeep.com twitter
- boardtracker.com forums (will find stuff that might not make it into the Google index)
- backtype.com blog comments
- search.twitter.com twitter
He referred to twitter as a “stream of sewage” and stated that tools to filter that stream were needed. (As an aside, this video commentary on the twittersphere is hilarious.) Twitter has a location specific search options (in advanced search) that you should definitely leverage for competitive analysis.
John also talked about making sure that your online presence is high quality. This is not only done by making sure your website/blog/facebook profile/twitterstream/etc/etc are updated regularly and with good content, but also by taking advantage of tools that aggregators like search engines provide. For example, if you have a local business that appears in Google’s local search, you can add update the entry using the local business center. This lets you claim the listing, add pictures and verify other information. Other search engines have analogous processes, and it is well worth your time to try to stand out. I don’t quite know what will happen when everyone does this updating–the value of accurate content will remain, but having a picture won’t be enough to stand out.
Then we went into a question and answer period. One person asked for examples of good corporate users of twitter. John gave these examples: Dell, radian6.
Another person asked about the personal/business divide: if you’re running a small business, do you want to provide info in your twitter stream (or other digital media) that identifies you as a person (“I like to tele ski”) or just have it focus on business issues. John answered that the line is still blurry and being defined. I personally try to keep my blog focused on business, but I think it depends on what you’re selling. If I were selling socks, tales of adventures in my socks would be appropriate. Since I’m selling software services, you probably don’t want to hear about the killer desert hike I went on last year.
End notes
I really enjoyed the breakfast and encourage anyone with an interest in digital media to try it out. The next presentation (at the end of April) will be a presentation by Terry Morreale on personal digital security (I believe).
[tags]boulder new media breakfast,twitter,duct tape marketing,it’s at 7:45??[/tags]
How to turn off red/green/blue lines in Sketchup drawings
This frustrated me to no end, so I’m posting it here.
If you’re using Google Sketchup to sketch a model, and you want to export it to a two dimensional file (e.g, a PNG), without the green, red and blue axis lines, you can do so by following these steps.
- open your model
- choose the window menu option
- choose the styles menu
- choose edit
- change the ‘color’ drop down (at the bottom of the popup) from ‘by axis’ to ‘all same’.
This works for Google Sketchup 6.4.112.
[tags]google sketchup, basics[/tags]
Popups in GWT and IE8
Just starting to test some GWT applications against IE8. (Using IE Collection, which is very useful. It includes standalone versions of IE from IE1 to IE8. Very useful, even if the version of IE8 doesn’t include the developer tools.)
The only issue I’ve seen so far is that popups don’t work correctly. Some appear, but not where they are supposed to. Others, particularly with the lightbox we’re using (from the GWT-Widget project), just don’t appear at all.
For the latter, you get the very helpful message:
Line: 2618 Char : 324 Error: Not implemented Code: 0 File: url to your GWT cache.js file.
(This is with GWT 1.5.3.) After compiling the GWT with “-style DETAILED”, I looked at the precise line causing the error message.
It was in this method:
function com_google_gwt_user_client_ui_impl_PopupImplIE6_$onShow__Lcom_google_gwt_user_client_ui_impl_PopupImplIE6_2Lcom_google_gwt_user_client_Element_2(popup){
var frame = $doc.createElement($intern_1350);
frame.src = $intern_1351;
frame.scrolling = $intern_1352;
frame.frameBorder = 0;
popup.__frame = frame;
frame.__popup = popup;
var style = frame.style;
style.position = $intern_1314;
style.filter = $intern_1353;
style.visibility = popup.style.visibility;
style.border = 0;
style.padding = 0;
style.margin = 0;
style.left = popup.offsetLeft;
style.top = popup.offsetTop;
style.width = popup.offsetWidth;
style.height = popup.offsetHeight;
style.zIndex = popup.style.zIndex;
/*
style.setExpression($intern_110, $intern_1354);
style.setExpression($intern_111, $intern_1355);
style.setExpression($intern_91, $intern_1356);
style.setExpression($intern_93, $intern_1357);
style.setExpression($intern_1358, $intern_1359);
*/
popup.parentElement.insertBefore(frame, popup);
}
You can see where I commented out the style.setExpression calls, which seemed to fix the issue (the $intern strings are css property names like 'left'). Obviously not very sustainable. The other fix available right now is to add this meta tag to the HEAD section of your HTML documents:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />
For more information on this, follow the GWT issue tracker bug 3329.
Speeding up Thunderbird Search with IMAP
I like the Thunderbird email client a lot (Thunderbird2). I used to use and love pine, though, so perhaps you should take any accolades with a grain of salt.
I use Thunderbird with IMAP so that I don’t have to worry about backing up my email locally, and so that I can always ssh in and view new mail if I’m on a different computer (‘less’ is my mail client then!).
It has a lot of plugins, but the only one I really used was lightning, the calender/task management plugin. And then I got a Palm, and haven’t been able to find any way to hook the calendar on the palm up to lightning (there is support for syncing contacts).
Anyway, one thing that got me really riled me up was the slow search. This post illuminated the facts for me; it wasn’t Thunderbird that was slow, it was my IMAP server. I upgraded my IMAP server to dovecot 1.1.7, that being what my hosting provider supported. Dovecot has a nice full text search installed by default. Or at least I thought it was nice. It couldn’t be worse than no full text indexing at all, I figured.
However, my hosting provider didn’t provide that plugin–whoops! I downloaded the same version of dovecot, ran ‘configure; make; make dist’ and copied over all the fts *.a *.so and *.la files for both fts and fts_squat to the plugin directory. Then I enabled the fts plugin in the dovecot.conf file, including changes recommended for fts_squat, and restarted dovecot. My full text searches (in Thunderbird quick search) for folders with 6000 messages, went from 4.5 seconds to 1 second. Quite the success.
I then wanted to figure out some way to search for multiple areas in the quick search box. I already found that you can use the pipe symbol as an or operator but that only applies to a given type of search (for subject, or body, etc). What I was looking for was a way to search for ‘from sue’ ‘to anton’ and ‘body contains spaghetti’, all in one search.
I searched and searched, looking at the IMAP rfc and trying many different variations. I looked at plugins. I looked through the config editor. I tried the Thunderbird tips page. No luck.
Then I read a post that talked about the two ways to search. Quick search (the box in the upper right hand corner of the email client) and normal old search, the one you get to by typing ‘control-shift-f.
This does exactly what I want! But it’s cumbersome. It’d be great to take a page from Yahoo Mail and implement their search shortcuts in the quick search bar: ‘from: ‘ for from, etc. It’s a killer feature for me.
Anyone know of a plugin that does this? This page has some keyboard shortcuts, but that’s not really what I’m looking for. And I didn’t see anything in the Thunderbird bug list, though this bug seems like it might be heading down that path.
Anyway, those are my recent adventures in email.
Notes from Tom Malaher’s cloud computing presentation
A former colleague, Tom Malaher, did an online presentation about cloud computing on Mar 11 at the Calgary JUG. You can view the recording of it now. It was titled: Cloud Computing and Amazon Web services (AWS), and was a great survey of cloud computing and then a nice dive into AWS. I used to work with Tom and always enjoy the depth and breadth of his presentations.
Below are some of my notes.
- This was their first online meeting, due to cash flow issues (lack of sponsorship), and to make it easier for speakers out of the Calgary area. It was put on using Elluminate.com. (This client was installed using JNLP; very easy to install and setup). You can use Elluminate for up to three participants for free (but you cannot record your session).
- Definition of cloud computing is in tug of war in vendor land. According to Infrastructure Executive Council, cloud computing is elastic, multi-tenant, on-demand, usage based metering (no long term contracts), self service
Tom outlined a number of variations on cloud computing
- Infrastructure as a service (s3, ec2)
- Platform as a service (Google app engine, Microsoft Azure)
- Software as a service (Google docs, salesforce.com)
- Grid computing–more homogenous, but lots of overlap
Diving into Amazon Web Services, he outlined all the webservices that Amazon provides. I had already heard of a number of these, but two caught my eye:
- DevPay–pass through payment for Amazon Web Services.
- Public Data Sets–public domain data sets easily available for computation on the AWS platform
Composing AWS services makes sense, since there are no bandwidth charges between Amazon service calls within Amazon’s data centers (e.g. EC2->S3).
He had some interesting figures from the IEC: 70% surveyed are not using cloud computer (40% aren’t even considering it). Only 10% are hosting an ‘app’ on the cloud (with no definition of an app). I asked a question of Tom about what is considered an app. I have a client who is hosting backups and images on s3, and friends who regularly back up servers to s3. Is that an ‘app’? I don’t think so, but Tom didn’t have a definition of ‘app’ for this survey.
Tom also did an interesting cost analysis when he was looking at pros and cons for AWS.
The 1and1.com high end hosting agreement: 1gb ram 50gb hd, 2000gb transfer: $59/month.
For a comparable AWS instance, with an ec2 image, 1.7 MB ram, 160gb hard drive (ephemeral), 2000 gb transfer, persistent 50gb hard drive: worst case $479.50/month, but for one day: ~$16.
In my opinion, this is the key con of AWS right now, at least for full fledged applications. It’s simply not cost competitive with some of the hosting you can find out there.
And with regular hosts, you don’t have to deal with as much infrastructure overhead. Tools like ElasticFox and S3Fox can help. I’ve used S3Fox and love it.
The development model is suprisingly similar (Tom mentioned building his demo on his home machine and using some of the more exotic services, like SQS; then, when he was ready for the full cloud deployment, he just moved his war file to the appropriate image after some setup).
Then Tom demoed an app built by composing a number of Amazon web services. Starting an an ec2 machine image (AMI) takes a long time (but still less than building a machine from scratch :). During entire presentation and demo (1 hour, 3 instances, some messaging, he was only charged 50 cents.
Other interesting uses: The NY Times used it to build a bunch of web friendly pngs from tiffs of papers past.
You can use a regular RDBMS, with Elastic Block Storage.
Someone asked: where does AWS fit in larger organizations? Tom thought it was a good fit for small organizations… But he was not really sure about large organizations.
In my opinion, many of the technical decision makers I know are willing to use S3 as a storage mechanism, but they still want a backup solution, in case Amazon is unavailable (as it sometimes is). This unavailability would be even more damning if you had an entire webapp running off ec2 and the other services.
Buying your own dedicated server has its own risks, but many people are still used to that paradigm. But, for quickly scaling, or for a special one time project that needs a lot of firepower (like the NYTimes project above), it makes sense.
Stepping back from AWS, the idea of cloud computing seems to be continuing to make progress and attack the issues of network connectivity, security and cost that make it a hard sell at the present. I love the delineation of the variations (infrastructure as a service, etc), and not all cloud computing will look like AWS.
Overall, a great presentation. If you have the time (I stayed for some of the Q&A, and left at the 90 minute mark), it’s worth a listen. Go ahead, check it out.
[tags]cloud computing,cjug[/tags]
Nice overview of cloud computing options
Here’s an overview of cloud computing options. Nice to have all these options in one place.
Supporting cutting and pasting in web applications
Dion has a long, interesting, painful article about supporting cut, paste, and copy operations for Bespin, a web based code editor.
In our world with the editor [in webkit], we use the before events to set things up, and we have to do something pretty hacky to make it happen. The copy event itself only actually goes through if you are on an element that supports it. There are hacks around this too. For example, if you want to be able to get a copy event on a div, you need to turn on
contentEdibleand set the tab index to -1. Strange huh?
All I can say is ‘Ow!’
Review of etendi BRIDGE: a family distance communication product
I have some friends who recently launched etendi BRIDGE, a product aimed at making family communication easier, especially when the family is divided by distance. You can view a slightly heavy handed video that gives a good overview of the feature set (though not the best sound). Features include calendaring, email (which they call ‘Thinking of You’ messages), a shared whiteboard, video messages, and notes. All the action happens in a pretty slick Flash interface. It also sends all traffic over SSL, which is the same standard that banks use, etc.
In addition to clicking around this myself, I set etendi up with my girlfriend and mother (yes, yes, perhaps they shouldn’t be in communication, but what can you do?). I ended up kicking the tires on the video chat with my girlfriend; video chat seems to be the killer feature. I was able to fairly easily set up the sound. I did have an issue with the microphone–at its default setting, the software couldn’t hear me, and kept giving me an error message. This happened even though I’d had no trouble using the mic at that level with skype. Video chat didn’t work for me, as I had no video camera. But my girlfriend also had issues with it; we didn’t have time to dive in, but it may be her system, as she has had webcam issues before.
One final note about usability–in general it is great, but when you are adding a user to your etendi house, no cues are given if the password isn’t long enough; the save button is just disabled.
From a web application developer’s point of view, it’s a very cool app that feels much like a desktop app. I’m not sure what it means for our society that there’s a niche for this type of remote communication application with children, but it’s a very cool app.
I’m not going to pretend to have done a wide survey of solutions in this space, but here are some other options that solve some of the same problems:
- roll your own solution with youtube/email/im/netmeeting/phpbb/phpgallery/etc: You can do this, but security is an issue–never put anything in an email that you wouldn’t put on the back of a postcard! However, make sure you read and understand the etendi terms of service. The amount of work to bring this together would be substantial to be feature complete with etendi. On the other hand, you can customize it as you like, and it is free except for your time.
- Facebook/other social networks: Facebook, and myspace and friendster, etc, solve some of the same issues. As far as I know, there’s no video messaging service that integrates with FB, but it does have most everything else (email, whiteboard, photo gallery ). However, with facebook, your child has to have an email address and there are as far as I know, no parental controls. Also, every bit of content you upload to Facebook grants them a right to use that content for any purpose as long at is up there (see the user content section of their TOS for more). But, it is prevalent, easy to use, and free.
- Ning: Ning lets you create your own private social network, solving some of the control issues. You can share videos, photos, blog posts and events. You can invite your friends, but again they have to have an email address to be invited. You have some pretty granular control over what members can do (you can choose to approve photos before they appear, etc). They don’t have quite as nice an interface as etendi does, but they do have 141 widgets you can add (and a nice API). You also have to deal with advertisements, or you can pay $25/month to remove them. Ning seems like a nice alternative to etendi, but is definitely aimed at more sophisticated (read, adult) users (users under 13 are explicitly asked to avoid Ning networks) and doesn’t have the tight focus on families.
- Obscurity.
etendi has been live for a few months, so I’m glad they are starting to get some press, and I hope they continue to update the blog. If you need to keep in touch with family over long distance and both ends have high speed internet and webcams, you should give etendi BRIDGE a try.
Disclaimer: I have worked with these FOLKS in the past, way back when I was concerned about testing Korean content, and have had a beer or two at their office.
[tags]zia,etendi,telepresence,children of divorce[/tags]
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