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Blogs » Archive for January, 2008
How to get contract work in three easy steps (Part 2 of 3)
Following on from my previous post, I am going to talk about that vital first email contact. I am going look at what should and shouldn’t be in the email and how to structure it to best effect.
The Initial Written Contact
This first email is the “teaser” email. The “get your foot in the door” introduction. Nothing more. It is not your resume or an essay on your approach to the web. Its a “would you like to know more?” introduction.
Remember, this email is a sales pitch – it is a textual representation of you. It gives the recipient their first impression of who you are and what you are capable of. So, it needs to look and read professionally, but it also should show a bit of your personality. I know it is a tall order, but with a little work it can be done.
Keep the Reader in Mind
When creating your email you need to think about the person reading the email. What they looking for and what they will be asking themselves:
Who is emailing me and why?
Basically, this is the spam-scan we all tend to do automatically – Who is it from, do I know them? and what …
Introducing The SitePoint CSS Reference!
We’re very excited to reveal that the SitePoint CSS Reference is now open to the public!
Written by two of the world’s most renowned CSS experts, Tommy Olsson and Paul O’Brien, the reference contains a bunch of features that make it stand out from the pack — things like cross-browser compatibility charts and user feedback (ala the PHP manual) — to ensure that it is accurate, up to date, and best-practice. If you’re building sites with CSS, this is a reference you’ll keep coming back to again and again.
We’d like to extend a big thank you to everyone who got involved during the private beta test stage! We received some excellent, constructive feedback from many members of the SitePoint community, some of which has already been implemented; we’ve also penciled in many other suggestions for future releases.
We believe that the unique combination of expert commentary, thoroughness of content, useful examples, up-to-date browser charts and dynamic user feedback make this the best CSS reference online. Period.
Check it out: http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/
The Week in ColdFusion: 23-29 Jan: Putting CF developers on the map
Want to know where all the ColdFusion developers are? CFMaps is a Yahoo! Maps mashup that allows ColdFusion developers to place themselves on the map, color-coded according to their level of experience. Right now, most registrations are in North America - so if you’re a CF guy or gal, why not add yourself to the map? There’s definitely a lot more of us than are currently registered - and I know for a fact there’s more than one ColdFusion developer in New Zealand!
Registration has opened for the WebManiacs conference, to be held in Washington DC in May. Speakers include ColdFusion Jedi Master Raymond Camden, Dave Watts, Doug Hughes, Jochem van Dieten and Joe Rinehart amongst many, many others. The CFUnited conference - also held in Washington DC, but in June - continues their podcast series with an interview with Kevin Roche on the Fusebox framework. So how about a conference that’s not in the US and not in DC? Scotch on the Rocks will be held in June in Edinburgh, and tickets are now available.
Also on podcasts, The Digital Media Dude interviewed CF guru Ben Forta as part of the “Meet the Experts” podcast series. Ben covers his background, why …
99designs Logo Contest Winner Announced!
The most popular design contest ever held on SitePoint — to design the logo for the next evolution of SitePoint’s Design Contests, 99designs — has come to a close, and a winner has been announced!
In what was by far the largest contest to date in terms of both entrants and designs submitted, Bonic’s simple design incorporating a sketched folder (indicating thumbnail sketches that are part of the design process) has been declared the winning logo that will be used to shape the identity of 99designs.
Here are some statistics about the contest:
- First prize: $1,000
- Second prize: $200
- Number of designers: 311
- Number of submissions: 1472
- Contest length (days): 4
- Number of star ratings left: 280
- Number of contest comments: 191
- Number of feedback comments: 1304
I’ve written before about what makes a good design contest, and there are a couple of lessons that contest holders can take away from this contest to ensure that future contests are successful. For example, in addition to offering a reasonable prize and being prompt and diligent when leaving feedback, a winner for this contest was selected even though the design still needs some tweaking.
Another decision that made this contest successful was to award a second prize winner (congratulations designabot!). …
How to get contract work in three easy steps (Part 1 of 3)
Over the next three posts I am going to outline one method of getting contract work that has been very successful for me. It is both cheap and easy to implement, requiring little more than some time, email and a phone.
So, how do you get contract work?
Simple — You ask!
Of course, there is a little more to it than that, but basically: You just ask.
How Does it Work?
- First, find and research the web and advertising firms in your area.
- Next, send the firms an introductory email.
- Then, follow up a few days later with a phone call.
I have found this approach is far better than cold calling, as the firms are forewarned, (that you are going to call) and they know why you are calling. Also, by emailing first — If the firm isn’t interested: they will generally email you back to that effect.
The Ground Work
Preparation is really important, potentially any of these firms could be worth thousands of dollars to you. So, it is worth putting a bit of time and effort into researching each firm — basically the same as if you were preparing for a job interview (which effectively you are).
How to Find the firms
I would start by …
Upgrading to Rails 2.0. A Recipe
In previous posts, I’m covered some of the updates to Rails 2.0 and how to prepare for Rails 2.0 but haven’t really covered the mechanics of HOW to upgrade to Rails 2.0. So as part of the 6 things to try in Rails this year series, I have compiled a quick recipe that works for me. It probably isn’t the only method, but it works.
1. Fix all of the deprecated warnings
The easiest way to do this is to download Geoffrey Grosenbach’s rake task that I previously mentioned. Copy it to the lib/tasks directory of the app you want to upgrade and run
rake deprecated
This will point you in the direction of any deprecated methods. Find them and fix them.
2. Cleanup your environment
I used to put a lot of code in the enviroment.rb file, which is really a bit of a no-no. To facilitate this, the Rails team introduced the initializers directory where you can add custom code that is automatically loaded at run time. You will need to create the directory now, so run
mkdir config/initializers
Create a new ruby file under that directory and move any custom code, mime types and inflectors from the enviroment.rb files.
3. Update the engine
Even though a lot …
Expand your resume by contracting
When most people think of going into freelance work, they think of getting clients through their own sales and marketing. That is all well and good, but is there another way?
Yes, there is.
There is a much overlooked potential source of work: other peoples’ clients. What do I mean by that? Client theft? No, no, no. That’s just not cricket!
I mean: contract work.
These days there are lots of web design companies, web development firms, and advertising agencies with their own specialized web departments. They all have the need for skilled web professionals. Some might have employed all the workers they need but, in my experience, most are happy to hear from freelance web specialists.
Why would they want to hear from you? What’s in it for them?
Having a number of reliable external contractors who can be called upon as and when they are need is a huge advantage to firms, as it gives them extra capacity and the possibility of taking on work that normally, might be beyond their skill set. There are other benefits too — they don’t have to pay worker benefits to contractors, nor are they obliged to keep them on once the work is complete. …
HTML 5 Spec Released, Warts and All
The W3C released the first draft of the HTML5 spec yesterday — warts and all. As far as technical specifications go, it’s pretty interesting reading.
A large part of what is interesting is what is new in everybody’s favourite markup language:
- header, nav, article, dialog, section, aside, and footer elements
- The canvas element (shameless plug: there’s an awesome chapter about it in our latest book)
- Inclusion of the video and audio elements
- Support for persistent client-side data storage
- Support for users to edit documents and parts of documents interactively
- RSS feeds as part of the page’s markup
It’s just as interesting noting what’s missing:
- frame and frameset (hooray!)
- font (cheer!)
- applet, among others
Rumour has it that one faction of the HTML working group were lobbying hard to have the meta tag removed in order to prevent Microsoft from hijacking it, but they were clearly unsuccessful.
Check out the list of differences between HTML4 and HTML5 if you find the thought of tackling the entire spec a little daunting.
For me, what really makes the spec an entertaining read, however, is the fact that so many of the review comments for areas that are still problematic, are still in place. There is obviously still a fair amount of work ahead, though, if the …
The week in ColdFusion: 16-22 Jan 08: exam time!
So what does the blogosphere have for hard-working ColdFusion developers this week?
Firstly, open source projects have been busy. More information about the upcoming version 5 of the FarCry CMS – “FarCry Fortress” – has been released, and it will now have a variety of deployment options which will mean that it can run more easily on shared hosting accounts, which has long been a bone of contention for many developers. Full details on the Daemonite blog: FarCry: Shared Hosting Made Easy.
On the frameworks front, Steve Nelson – one of the original developers of Fusebox – has written a “one year on” look at his simple CFC-based MVC framework. Apparently it hasn’t changed much, which makes perfect sense when you consider that it was meant to be super simple! Steve even goes so far as to explain how it works in one paragraph (and the final version is pretty short): Steve’s MVC Framework a year later.
Lots of developers are interested in the Ext JS Ajax framework, especially since Ext 1.0 is what does the heavy lifting behind the built in Ajax tags in CF8. Justin Carter has started on an Ext JS tag library for forms, and made some screenshots …
IE8 Standards Mode Is Opt-in
Microsoft have reversed this decision; IE8 will now choose standards-compliant mode by default.
Chris Wilson confirmed today on the IEBlog that for a site to render in standards-compliant mode in IE8 it will need to include a specific meta tag:
- “Quirks mode” remains the same, and [will stay] compatible with current content.
- “Standards mode” remains the same as IE7, and [will stay] compatible with current content.
- If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple meta element.
The meta tag, also documented by Aaron Gustafson in the latest issue of A List Apart (with careful justification and support) looks like this:
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8″ />
While I concede that, in order to retain backwards compatibility with the sites of yesterday (and of five years ago), opting in to render a page in standards-mode in IE8 seems the only sensible option, one thing really irka me about this approach:
Hardcoding a reference to a specific browser as a necessary part of the page’s markup feels plain dirty.
It’s one thing to specify a character encoding or the language used by the page, but the agent with which it is compatible? Fundamentally and philosophically it just makes …
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