Digital Tinker

Lifestyle of the Digital Tinker

digitaltinker — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:20:55 +0000

Photo by jeremybarwick What is a Location Independent Freelance Lifestyle? I would say that, for some, location refers to where the money is; others will understand it to be where they hang their mouse at night. Either way, freedom is the fuel that fires the freelancer’s soul and location [...]

Middle Class Bailout - Fixed-Priced Services

digitaltinker — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:57:46 +0000

There is a time to cut costs and a time to ensure quality at any price. Right now is not the right time for either service extreme. Like many small business owners, my company is experiencing a crunch. While looking for ways to remain relevant and competitive, I joined oDesk.com,which is a marketplace for freelance programmers and [...]

Testimonial Interview with Rachel Tolbert

digitaltinker — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:53:07 +0000

The following testimonial was solicited from Rachel Tolbert, a Fingerprint Identification Supervisor at the Philadelphia Police Department. 1. What one thing has the database(s) helped you accomplish that was more difficult before? The databases that were created by Mitchell Allen have helped me accomplish a lot in a shorter amount of time. The one I use [...]

Forum Analysis

digitaltinker — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:30:00 +0000

Some software ideas are best left in the ad hoc bin. This is another way of saying that, just because I can create something, I don’t necessarily want to. My friend Erin was looking for a quick way to determine which forums on her At Home Resources website were performing well and which topics should [...]

How I Created the Ambient Orb Blog Index

digitaltinker — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:37:35 +0000

Here’s a change of pace. In this article, I’ll show you how I used Microsoft ® Word, Microsoft ® Excel and Notepad to clean up an old blog post for republishing. Project Purpose For my personal blog, I decided to do a links posts, which is used to highlight older posts that new visitors may enjoy and [...]

Parsing Strings in Excel

digitaltinker — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:09:12 +0000

Jumbalaya Jam Before I learned about HTML in 2003, I learned how to get rid of the tags that define it. One of my passions is designing games and I wanted to recreate Boggle® on the computer. My wife loved to play an online game called Jumbalaya, which is similar to Boggle®. I decided to borrow her word lists [...]

Proper Nouns

digitaltinker — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 14:00:30 +0000

One of the best things you can do with your contact list is to create a standard for capitalization. Whether your data is spread across multiple fields or jammed into one (shame on you!), a parsing function can make your reports look more professional. proper(”John D. ROCKWELL, S. Kinnickinnic Av and Lake Pkwy, milwaukee, Wi”) becomes John D. Rockwell, [...]

Misguided Advertising Copy

digitaltinker — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:50:28 +0000

No, this isn’t a copywriting article. It’s a plea to all office managers who send insertion text to webmasters. This is also a horror story, so if you have a weak stomach, click away now! Julie is the owner and publisher of the Fredericksburg Guidebook and its companion website, fredericksburgguidebook.com. It is a quarterly publication. Advertisers pay [...]

Data Cleanser Humble Origins

digitaltinker — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:03:17 +0000

Believe it or not, I started out in the sub-cellar of my old personal computer, cleaning up MP3 files that I had either downloaded or ripped from my CD collection. In the olden days, there was a clever website called CDDB.com (now gracenote.com) that had a database of CDs based on the number of tracks [...]