Well, not quite - but almost. I'm just back from Vancouver and Alaska about two weeks and I'm still struggling to get back into the way of things. Vancouver is one awesome city, in fact it's joined New York and London as places I want to visit again and again and again. Alaska is a completely amazing landscape too, with snow-capped mountains for hours on end and vast amounts of sea all around (at least, where we were sailing!).
During the trip we got 1/2 mile away from Hubbard Glacier, were 100 yards away from 13 Humpback Whales that were bubble net feeding and saw a pair of Dall's Porpoises bow riding on a whale watching trip, saw 3 bald eagles - 1 of which I shot catching a fish out of the lake, as well as spotting a couple of whales while our cruiseship was sailing.
Alaska truely is a wonderful place to go and visit - and I would highly, highly recommend it. The cruise was immense - I'd never been on one before, so I was a tad apprehensive about spending a week at sea - and the free food 24/7 really helped :D
Vancouver itself is a huge city with so much to do - that we didn't even get everything done that we had planned to do, so we're definitely going to have to go back!!!
Fortunately a while before we went I bought a really great f/2.8 70-200mm Sigma lens for my Canon 350D, but I also took a compact Canon A720 with me for dinner, and places where bringing out a 200mm lens wasn't really appropriate...
I totalled 650 shots over two weeks and out of these I picked out 49 I really wanted people to see. So far I've done post processing on about 20 of these, so I thought I'd upload a couple here. Let me know what you think.
A couple of weeks ago Crunchgear published an article:
http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/06/23/ios-to-make-its-desktop-debut-with-next-imac-revision/ they mention iOS making its way to iMacs soon.
I can imagine that by starting up the Bluetooth Magic Trackpad, the iMac transforms from OSX to iOS "magically" and the user can control their iMac iOS using the Bluetooth Trackpad. I reckon it's going to have multitouch - remember the touchscreen technology that is in iPhones and iPads, Magic Mouse originated from controlling a desktop computer from a company called Fingerworks:
Youtube:
Now I might be adding 2 + 2 and getting 5, and I've never blogged a rumour about Apple products before, but for me - it seems like a likely combination.
...to posterous from tumblr. Once I get the tumblr posts imported ill
be laughing. There is api support too so nothing much should change.
*Update: That was painless. Posterous has built in import tools for Tumblr. I had to replace the client side jQuery code querying the tumblr api with server side PHP code to query the posterous api - due to xml security restrictions, but nothing major.
Since I blogged the How? Much? blog post two weeks there has been a good response to the form that I put online. Now on to the number crunching. I think it’s safe to say that I pretty much underestimated the data that would be produced, so here goes:
Who replied?
There were 17 Designers, 20 Developers and 5 Other (3 Both, 1 Project Manager, and 1 Front End Developer).
How did they charge?
12 charged per hour, 4 per feature, 15 per project and 11 other (a combination of all 3 options, per development iteration, or per day - averaging £325 per day)
What did they charge?
*Since Google Docs forms has a bit of trouble accepting that no answer does not equate to “Other” - I’ve had to manually work through the data. This happens are you can set paths through the forms, which as it turns out is a handy feature - if they would just tweak their summary algorithm we’d be laughing.*
Per Hour
Outside of Other, there was an even split of 2 charging between £10 and £15, 3 charging between £15 and £20 and 3 charging between £25 and £30. The other non-null values as it turned out where 2 at £45, 1 at £50 and 1 at £100. After looking through other responses 1 charged between £17 and £25.
Per Feature
1 charged between £25 and £50, 2 charged between £50 and £100. 1 other charged between £350 and £700.
Per Project
4 charged less than £500, 2 charged between £500 and £1000, 6 charged between £1000 and £2500, 1 charged between £2500 and £5000, 1 charged between £5000 and £7500 and 1 charged £7500 and over.
How were costs factored?
Factors considered were: the scope of the work involved, who the client is (e.g. non-profit), expenses (licenses required), the number of man hours required, is training required, time to complete the project, the size of the project (website), the project type (plain old HTML or Content Management System). Client relationship showed as a factor too - with some charging more for one off work while charging a regular client less. The most frequently raised point was the complexity of the project.
Summary
This is a pretty basic run down of the data held in the spreadsheet on Google Docs. You don’t need an invitation, and you won’t need to email me to request permission to view the document, you can just go right ahead and view it. I’ve shut the form for now, so it won’t be accepting any more responses - but the data will be kept live online and completely free to access for as long as Google Docs is.
Microformats. You use them a lot and you don’t really realise it a lot of the time, from sending a friends mobile number to another friends using VCards, or downloading that latest appointment to your Calendar using hCalendar.
Wikipedia lists about 16 specific microformats ranging from news to calendar events, from products to resumes (CVs) - as well as several other microformats under development.
The problem is they’re just so unsocial. You rarely find a directory of vcards - everybody has their own private contact list after all, or hCalendar events - although Google do have the ability to add public calendars into Google Calendar.
But it struck me - is Twitter about to socialise microformats? I’ve been reading tonight about how Twitter is about to start rolling out testing of their annotations that they announced a few months ago. They’ve listed 11 recommended annotations:
So if you’re going to tweet about a new book, you can add some information about that book, such as the ISBN, the author and the year it was published.
You can see the huge potential benefits for the sellers like Amazon or iTunes where, once you’ve bought a book or an MP3 - you can automatically tweet that information along with an annotation of the item.
For movies - a review system can now be built using annotations. For events - you can now have a social calendar. For offers - you can now tweet discounts with more information than you can fit in 140 characters.
This is just new information or a new way to expand beyond 140 characters - this is a way to add useful metadata allowing the stream to become so much more than it already is. The content and context of a tweet can now be much more easily associated - and the potential for marketers, sellers and audiences to interact with each other just hit “the hockey stick”.
Prepare to watch Twitter expand its horizons much further than they go currently.
I saw this retweet from Lee Munroe on Twitter yesterday:
“You will lose potential clients because your pricing is too high…But also because it’s too low.”
So I decided to find out whether I was charging too much or not enough for any freelance work that I do. I’ve set up a Google Docs form with just those questions in mind. It ranges between 4 and 6 questions, just multiple choice and free text answers so it only takes 2 minutes to fill in.
There are a few paths that the form can take resulting in a variation on the questioning. The questions have been set to find out how much people charge, and how they charge - per hour, per feature, per project.
So far I’ve had 6 responses in 30 minutes, but I’ll keep retweeting the link and I’ll keep accepting responses for about 2 weeks so I can reach as many people as possible. The results will always be open for review and analysis.
Links:
So if you’re a web designer or developer in Northern Ireland please fill in this form - and as the form states - if you use more than one method of determing your prices fill in the form for each method!
How many times have we ever owed someone a favour? Ever seen Pay It Forward? Kevin Spacey as a teacher has a class assignment that Haley Joel Osment brings his own idea to.
Think of an idea to change our world and put it into Action!
Haley Joel Osment comes up with the idea of “Pay It Forward”. It turns the concept of owing someone a favour, into passing that favour onto someone else.
If someone helps you out, don’t help them back, but help somebody else.
It isn’t a new idea invented by the author of the novel, in fact if the article at Wikipedia is to be believed Benjamin Franklin is the first documented person to start the idea in 1784. There are numerous groups across the world running this initiative. I think we all have the potential to help each other out.
The amount of people and companies that have grown to know each other through the use of Social Media - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn is phenomenal and provides us all with such a massive platform of support that would have been unthinkable even 5 years ago.
This platform of support sees tidbits of knowledge go from one business and add value to another business - and they thank each other by returning the favour. But imagine if they passed on this favour. It has the potential to build up to something massive. It should become infectious, it shouldn’t just build up two companies - it should eventually go on to build up every company that wants to get involved.
Reach out and help other people. Expect nothing in return - except their willingness to go out and help someone else. Of course - it’s a utopian idea, but what’s the harm in trying something so beneficial?
So to summarise the concept of paying it forward:
I’ll not be so droll as to show all the maths but if I help 3 people, and they help 3 people…after 9 iterations 19,683 people will have benefited. After 13 iterations the pretty much most of the population of Northern Ireland would be affected (1,594,323 people) - how awesome is that!?
In summary:
Modesty is all part of the game but I think to get the ball rolling if you want to get involved and start your own chain maybe sending out a message on Facebook or Twitter along the lines of “If you need a hand, let me know, consider it a favour to pass on to someone else #pif”
Let’s get #pif trending. Go. Help. Now!
I started reading Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” book at the weekend, and so far I’m about halfway through. In the first chapter, on pages 15 and 16 Steve mentions about how Book Store e-commerce sites handled search for books.
The examples he gives are ones I have frequently come across, where the user has to tell the search engine whether the search term they’ve entered is a Title, an Author or a Keyword.
This forces the user to think too much, and as I’m doing a bit of work tidying up one of the sites I’ve developed - Pinkerton Murray, I realise there is one field in the registration form which can often cause confusion.
Phone numbers. In particular Mobile Phone numbers. This is particular to a site which uses Mobile Phone numbers to contact registered users about the latest properties which have been added.
In the UK mobile numbers can be reached by the following combinations:
(there may be more formats I’ve missed)
The API that the site uses for sending SMS messages is fairly particular in the format it needs the numbers to be sent in:
Currently I have the site suggesting to users that their number should be in the format similar to that above but I’m not convinced its working very well. So with the need to capture the mobile phone number in the right format from the user I’ve decided I’m going to implement the following plan in the next couple of days.
Now my only concern is whether to do this “once” - i.e. when the user registers their account or updates their mobile number, or whether to store their number warts and all (parsing it through an SQL injection checker when the number is entered or changed by the user) and to run this regex every time.
If I use the latter method the user won’t freak out so much at seeing their number change, but there’ll be a small performance hit and formatting all the numbers every time an SMS message is to be sent if I use the former method.
Thoughts via Twitter (@webtwozero) until Tumblr enables comments!
Why?
I attended Refresh Belfast last night with about 50 other people. Rory O’Conor and Anita Murphy of the Creativity Hub, and of Rory’s Story Cubes fame were hosting the evening entitled “The Little Red Hen Approach”.
The slides from the evening will be online shortly, and when they are up I’ll update the post to include links to the slidedeck.
Something Anita said really struck a chord with me - in terms of work, projects and generally everything I do.
Question Everything
Anita continued - “It’s something every child does, every 2 year old will always question ‘Why’”. It’s a thing I don’t think enough people do, perhaps as we grow up we become accepting of certain things and run with them, for fear of sticking out.
Some people have a fear that by questioning everything you will look like an upstart, that you will look like someone there to disrupt the normal, or worse - they may feel that by asking questions they will look stupid.
Someone once said:
There’s no such thing as a stupid question
So question everything - use the 5WH Acronym - question the Who, the What, the Where, the When, the Why, and the How. But do it wisely.
Use it in circumstances where people come up with blockers. Ask them Who (is causing the block), What (is causing the block), Where (is the block happening), When (is the block occuring), Why (is the block existing) or How (is the block blocking progress).
