Envato is a pretty well-known company among us webby types. Among their 8 million blogs and other sites, they also run a number of marketplaces where authors can sell their templates, graphics, videos, code snippets, etc etc to a huge pool of buyers for a certain amount of commission. After optimistically signing up to Theme Forest dreaming of becoming a top WordPress theme seller a few months ago, I finally got around to uploading my first item last week.

For a start, my first WP theme for the site is still in production. The marketplace upload rules are very strict and include such things as comprehensive help files with every upload. They also have high aesthetic standards that a lot of new authors struggle to meet. Since I’m obsessed with getting things just right, this has meant a lot of redoing certain parts of the code, adding new theme options, and generally struggling to finish everything off.

I’ll take the easier option, please

In the meantime, my attention turned to Graphic River, which is more focused on (obviously) graphics such as web design elements and stock illustrations. Now here was a market where the items didn’t take quite so long to create. I turned first to the category in which I felt most comfortable, web elements, and realised that although there are a lot of navigation menus available on the site not many of these are vertical.  Investigating the GR forums, I found many examples of graphics that had been declined for sale and was convinced I could do better than the majority, so away I went.

I work in Fireworks mostly, so after freaking out over whether my PSD version was “right” and writing up a far too in-depth user guide, I uploaded the menus and held my breath, leaving a pleading note for my reviewer to ask for feedback on my very first file (they usually just send a copy/paste reply depending on whether your file is accepted or declined). The following morning I awoke to a wonderful sight! I was officially a GR author, and my reviewer had sent me a very nice reply congratulating me on being one of the “very few” to get their first file accepted!

<insert mental image of me doing happy dance here>

A few days and no sales later, I was nevertheless hard at work on my second planned upload. This was an attempt at something a bit more different, and the 12 seasonal RSS icons are featured in my portfolio here because the end result was just so cute. If possible, I was even more nervous about this upload than the last. I only recently got to any sort of vaguely proficient level in Illustrator so it was a nice surprise when this was also accepted for sale with no questions asked.

Considering it isn’t rare for authors to be repeatedly declined, especially on their first uploads, 2 for 2 is a pretty good result so far.

Will they actually sell?

My first item went up less than a week ago. Unfortunately I fail at advertising (makes me feel guilty!) so I’ve yet to achieve any sales, but the warm glow from being accepted in the first place has yet to fade. The point is, even if these don’t start selling until this time next year they will always be there, 24/7, with no work involved from me. Passive (potential) income, FTW.

Some of the rejected uploads posted on the marketplace forums by disgruntled authors probably do deserve to be accepted. The majority that I’ve seen however seem to lack polish, or blatantly copy their concept from top selling files instead of providing something different. Rather than the marketplace standards being too high, I think a lot of wannabe author’s standards are too low. That said, there are a fair number of said authors who take rejection as a challenge to do better and improve their skills, which is the best way to look at it.

In case any of this sounds like bragging, I’ll point out again that I have zero sales so far. If I can reach 10 at some point, I hereby pledge to run around in the street yelling about it and post the proof on Youtube. Nothing like helping a girl make a fool of herself, is there?

Part 2 of this series will be published after some pushy marketing, and hopefully some sales. Please excuse the fact that I’ve used affiliate links in this post, you can’t blame a girl for trying.

Related posts:

1. Integrating the Various Presses

I’ve previously touched on the fact that I have the attention span of a mentally subnormal goldfish, and lately I’ve once again found myself overwhelmed with ideas for personal projects that I will probably only get done once someone in charge makes 10 extra hours in each day official. Last week, I heard the best and most obvious suggestion for sorting myself out that I have probably ever heard.

My game of choice is World of Warcraft, and I quite literally obsess over collecting achievements. Gaining achievements rewards points, and the satisfaction of seeing your progress bar move ever so slightly further toward absolute perfect completion. The pursuit of these essentially pointless rewards has seen me pulling all-nighters, spending hours and hours on in-game activities that I don’t enjoy in the slightest without complaint, and getting somewhat competitive with my fellow players. I want to be that determined in real life too!

So the plan…I’m currently engaged in writing a huge list of “real life achievements” to keep me on the straight and narrow. No longer shall I be tempted to spend 2 hours in the bath while waiting for a client’s email, now I’ll be working on the “Write 2 blog posts per week, for 4 weeks” achievement for 10 extra points!

Of course there’s a bit of fun in the actual creation of such a system too, firstly actually thinking up the achievements and then finding some way to record my progress. I think we can all agree even that is better than watching TV and eating biscuits, however. Update incoming when I figure out the best way to organise this project!

Related posts:

1. The Joys of Freelancing Sites

For me and My Man (I’ve been banned from calling him The Boy), 2009 was the year of lettings websites. We must have looked at hundreds of properties on sites ranging from irritating to completely unusable, and never managed to find a single site that did it all. Local or national companies, it made no difference. They all sucked!

The internet is the perfect medium for house-hunting. You can see more information than in a newspaper ad and view endless images (provided the agent has actually taken some). It should be an enjoyable experience, but it’s not.

Both being webby types, of course, there was much discussion over “this form is quite nice, shame about the results” as well as “this place is a bit more expensive, but look the walls are painted green!”. This inevitably led to the conclusion that if we ever got the opportunity, we would build the best property lettings/sales website in the entire world.

“They can’t be that bad” I hear you cry, “She’s exaggerating!”. You think so? Read on for some examples that may very well give you nightmares.

Our Search Form Criteria

• Must actually work
• Lets us specify ranges for price and bedrooms, rather than just  “1 bed or more”
• If there are a lot of options for example for choosing areas,  give us a “select all” checkbox
• Let us choose property type/at least filter out flatshares

Our Results Page Criteria

• A flatshare with 19 students is not a one bedroom flat
• Let us sort the results by price etc
• Prices shown should be accurate
• Show how many photos are available for the property (this gets important when you’ve just opened 20 flats in new tabs only to find they have 0 piccies that aren’t the external one you just saw)

Our Property Page Criteria

• Clicking on photos should enlarge them
• Let us view property location on a map (Google Maps is free you know)
• Give room measurements
• We’re on the internet, give us a link to email enquiries
• A scanned page from your brochure does not count as a web page
• Tell us when the property is available

You’d think these would be common sense and at least the majority of them would apply to every website. After all, there’s no point having a site that people can’t use. Well…you’d be surprised…

Pattinson

Arguably the most popular agent in the region, they also have one of the worst sites. The map-based area selection is actually quite nifty, unfortunately the search criteria form itself is not (see image at top of post).  We see the all too common “minimum bedrooms” option here, and no way to specify a maximum, resulting in the dreaded flatshares intermingling with our real results and me throwing my cup of tea at a wall.

When we get to the results page, they’re automatically ordered by price, high to low, with no way of changing this. I imagine we weren’t alone in skipping to the last page and working backwards through the list in case of lurking deals. The titles don’t link to the property page, as a lot of internet users would expect, and while we can view the location on a map from this page, once clicking through to read more details we cannot.

The final insult? While (some of the) images will enlarge when clicked upon, the image resizing script is completely useless and only shows a portion of the original image. *sigh*

Reeds Rains

This time it’s a popular national company, and they have an even worse site than Pattinson. For starters, typing in the url takes you to their sales site, and woe betide you if you enter anything into the search form before realising you want lettings. No, not content with giving you a buy/rent option on the form itself Reeds Rains require you visit a differently coloured part of the site and lose any info you’ve already typed in. Ok, let’s start again then.

On the bright side, the search allows you to specify a range of prices. On the downside…everything else. You must decide precisely how many bedrooms you’re looking for, and whether you’re looking for property exactly one mile from your chosen location or not. Never mind, the results page will make it all better, right?

Maybe not. Once again there is no option to sort the results. Once again the property title does not link to it’s page. There is some concession to modernity with the broadband test option, and there’s a perfectly serviceable lightbox effect to view images, but by this point I’m too annoyed to award any points for that. I should also note that while there is an option to send in an enquiry by email, the twice I’ve tried this resulted in no reply.

Globrix

Globrix is evil. Actually no, Globrix is quite good really but needs a bit of refining. I should point out that this is not a letting agency, but an aggregation site pulling listings from other sites.

At first the casual browser is stunned by the fact that it looks decent and uses such voodoo as Ajax and sliders. As the novelty fades, however, we have all the usual problems. While the search itself is wonderful, even including such options as “pets allowed”, they’re often inaccurate. Properties tagged with the aforementioned option will often include “no pets” in the description, so  it leaves me wondering where Globrix got their information. The majority of listings will only feature one external shot forcing you to click through to the agency site for more, and of course this opens in a new tab by default. I have enough tabs open at one time already, thanks very much.

There are a lot of good things to be said for this site, the search results can be manipulated every which way and there’s even an option to email every agent in your results. However all of this is overshadowed by one very important point. Despite the fact that you can search for only flatshares, it appears to be impossible to search for everything but flatshares. There’s no indication given that the 2 bed flat that seems a resonable price is actually twice the price and inhabited until you click through to read the full description. Damn you, Globrix.

Ok those are bad

There were many more sites involved in last year’s househunt, but most had the same problems. A notable exception is Andrew Craig which until recently did not actually have property pages. Instead the viewer was presented with a scanned copy of those pages they stick in the shop window, thus neatly avoiding giving the site any purpose at all. Fortunately they have added a picture gallery for each property, however this is seperate to the aforementioned “details sheet” which is still totally unclickable. Well done, guys.

In conclusion, if you’re building one of these sites you should probably just ignore the competition and start from scratch, your users will thank you. After some bad experiences with Pattinson viewings, including being shown around by a representative unable to answer such questions as “will this bathroom actually be finished?”, we went and advertised on Gumtree where we found our current happy home. Hooray!

Related posts:

1. Integrating the Various Presses
2. The Joys of Freelancing Sites
3. Random Project – Excuses to Drink

A lot of your design ability will come through practise and research, knowing what is “in” and knowing what will always look good. However, if you’re just starting out and don’t quite have a hold on the nuances, here are a few things to consider.

1. Practise creating suitable graphics

Before you ever try to design something yourself, you need to know how to make what’s in your head appear on your screen. If you’re not familiar with the current trends you can get a feel for the prevailing wind in web design by simply visiting a few CSS galleries. Choose a site you particularly like, or certain elements from a few, and try to recreate them. You’re not learning design here, you’re learning techniques to create the graphics you need. Once you have a few tricks up your sleeve…

2.  Actually Design

“I know how it should look in my head, that’s enough”

It may sound ridiculous, but I’m sure I’m not the only one to have done it backwards and just jumped into a site build feet first. This approach is unlikely to yield favourable results. If you can’t afford Photoshop consider GIMP, it’s free Open Source and doesn’t have all the features you’d ideally have at your disposal, but it’s a good starting point.

3. Don’t be afraid to copy

Obviously I’m not suggesting you steal someone’s entire site design, but if you see a navigation style or a texture that you like, use it as a starting point for a design of your own. There are always certain “looks” that are more prevalent than others, and there is absolutely no shame in using something tried and tested.

4. Design for appropriate resolutions

There’s no hard and fast rule where website width is concerned. Depending on the site in question your users could be a completely different demographic. Generally speaking however 1024 resolutions are still considered appropriate to design for. 960 is a common width for modern sites, take a look at the 960 grid system. Using a grid will help you achieve a nicely proportioned design, making it much more pleasing to the eye.

5. Get your layout sorted first

Leave any colour decisions for now, and just mock up the main elements of the design in shades of grey. Make sure content is given an appropriate position and size relative to it’s importance. If it works well without colour, you’re onto a winner. Once the layout is finalized you can start to make the more “exciting” decisions.

6. Choose your colours carefully

It shouldn’t need to be said, but don’t choose colours that look hideous together. If in doubt, there are many colour scheme sites and applications out there, when stuck for inspiration my tool of choice is usually Kuler.

7. Pay attention to fonts

Typography is a complex subject in itself, but for a beginner it is enough to know that it exists, and that font choices are important. While the majority of your website’s content will need to be an easily-readable websafe font, a lot of the time you can go a bit wild with headings to give your design some extra oomph. Investigate Font Squirrel or dafont for something appropriate. For the love of God, do not use Comic Sans.

Typography is more than just choosing a suitable font, of course. You can read about some of the basic philosophies at I Love Typography.

8. Whitespace. It is good.

Whitespace is, as the name suggests, the space between elements in your design. A cramped page can look overcrowded and messy, while the same page with slighly more space between elements will look completely different.

You can also use whitespace to indicate the importance of an element. A common use for this concept is call to action buttons (a button encouraging users to take an action such as sign up or buy something), surrounding a button with plenty of space ensures nothing detracts from it.

9. Be subtle

I know you want to go crazy with gradients and drop shadows. They’re just so cool.

For the most part a subtler, more natural approach will look infinitely better than a bright blue to pink gradient or a solid black drop shadow. Colours aren’t the only way to misuse these effects either, make sure your gradients are long enough to change steadily, rather than jumping suddenly from one colour to the other, and make sure your shadows blend into the background rather than ending abruptly.

10. Prepare yourself

Your first designs aren’t likely to be dazzling. As with any skill, over time you will improve. Keep practising new techniques and looking through the CSS galleries for inspiration. With a few carefully chosen design elements from various other sites you can create something beautiful, and the confidence to design something bold and original will simply come with time.

Related posts:

1. So You Want to be a Web Designer?
2. The Portfolio Chronicles – Part 1

Soon I stumbled upon bbPress, the forum by Automattic (the Wordpress guys) and the same one used for the WP support forums. This was definitely going to be easy.

Hurdle 1

I wasn’t just integrating with any old Wordpress theme, I was working with a premium theme from Woothemes that made everything just that little bit more complicated.

Hurdle 2

The documentation for Wordpress is so amazing I didn’t for one second stop to consider the fact that it may be lacking for bbPress. I did find all the information I needed, but it took a fair bit of Googling.

The Basics

There are different levels of integration between these two platforms, and I wanted the whole thing. First off, though, I had to get to grips with the installation.

While it is very easy and well explained, it does take a bit longer than the usual Wordpress install due to the fact that you need to give bbpress some cookie and database settings if you want to share logins between the two. This is very simple, as helpful links next to each form field during install give you clear directions. No worries so far.

Once installed, I needed to map the user roles. For example, I am now a proud admin in Wordpress and Key Master in bbPress.

All of the above is explained beautifully in the docs.

Now, at first I thought I was going to need to build a theme that looked exactly like my main site theme. Thankfully this wasn’t the case.

In bbPress template files, the <?php get_header; ?> we all know and love is replaced by <?php bb_get_header; ?>. That’s no good, we want to be able to link to the main site in our page and so on without hardcoding it in! Thankfully there is a very straightforward way.

In bb_config.php, add this line at the start:

require_once('path/to/wp-blog-header.php');

wp_blog_header.php is located in your Wordpress root folder, and you must use the actual filepath (not a relative path or URL).  Including this file makes all those lovely Wordpress functions available for use by bbPress. Excellent.

If you, like me, are copying a default forum theme you’ll need to find each instance of <?php bb_get_header; ?> and <?php bb_get_footer; ?> and replace them with <?php get_header; ?> and <?php get_footer; ?> respectively. Now your forum should be using at least some semblance of your main theme.

Chances are you don’t already have the forum-specific CSS in your Wordpress theme, so here you have two choices. Adding everything you need to your WP theme’s style.css will include it in the forum, but unfortunately will also include it in every page of your main site. I chose to check whether or not the current page was bbPress, and if so load a seperate stylesheet with <?php bb_stylesheet_uri(); ?>. I used a simple isset to check for the $bb variable, indicating this was a forum page.

The Advanceds

Using a non-standard theme threw up it’s share of complications. The theme in question had a style.css, but also various other css files depending which colour scheme was chosen and a further custom.css file to keep things seperate and make upgrading easier. The problem was that style.css was included in the theme’s header.php, but the others were sent to wp_head by a theme function and were not making it onto the forum pages. If you find you have a similar situation, the solution was to find the relevant function file and remove those two links, adding them manually into header.php. It feels wrong to fiddle with clever code, but alas.

I had a similar problem with wp-cufon, which was installed on my main site making the navigation links beautiful. Because the script was called with wp_head it didn’t make it to the forum, and more manual coding was needed. My kingdom for a bb-cufon plugin!

In the end, everything seems to work. This was my first time playing with bbPress and no doubt I’ve done several idiotic things (like making half a new theme before reading that I could include that wp_blog_header.php *ahem*) but the result is a good one. Now I feel the itch to learn something new, but it’s 3:34 am and I shall be a good girl. Night all!

Related posts:

1. The Portfolio Chronicles – Part 1

You know you’re unlikely to find anything that pays more than $4 an hour, but work is thin on the ground and you’re feeling optimistic. Thirteen hours later you’ve watched 8 seemingly sensible buyers fall for the cut and paste bids, had 2 people tell you you’ll never make it in freelancing unless you halve your rates, and made exactly 0 pennies.

I’m sure there are some people who make a good living out of these sites but if you, like the me of a year ago, feel that freelancing sites are your best bet to get some portfolio work, read on.

First I’ll go over a list of things to always bear in mind while dealing with freelancer sites, then I’ll regale you with my experiences of each.

You will not make a real income

Pocket money, yes. If you’re in this for the experience and don’t need the cash then fair enough and I’m sure we’re all jealous.

You are unlikely to score a portfolio-worthy project

At least at first. You’ll find your best chances of being hired with no feedback are for the all too common $20 PSD to HTML projects.

Buyers are often inexperienced

There are exceptions, but most of the buyers using these sites don’t really understand what they’re asking for. They’ll often reel off a list of requirements totalling around a month’s quality work, and their budget will be under $300. Don’t be afraid to point out the discrepancy, but don’t be surprised if another provider comes in under budget and steals the job.

A lot of bids are cut and paste

You’ll recognise them immediately. Some buyers go so far as to request you type a codeword into your bid to ensure you’ve actually read the job description! If you’re awake and facing the right way, you’re immediately at an advantage with this type of buyer.

Most buyers want a real person

You’re likely to see a lot of bids from companies, but in my experience the personal touch can go a long way with securing a job. Whenever you bid, send the buyer a message detailing exactly what your bid includes and how you plan to complete the project. The more information you can give them, the more confident they will feel about hiring you, especially if you have no feedback.

“So which are the sites to avoid and which are veritable goldmines?”, I hear you cry.

Get a Freelancer

Probably the most well-known freelancing site, and therefore by a wide margin the most spammed. Getting your voice heard here isn’t easy, and there are so many providers without feedback that you can even find yourself facing more competiton when bidding on the newbie-only trial projects. On the other hand their escrow payment system seems secure and I have met some very nice buyers through this site, you just have to pick your battles.

EU Freelance

This is a sister site to GaF, and is by contrast rarely used. Still worth keeping an eye on however, since you can sign up to it with basically no effort by clicking a link in your GaF admin.

Scriptlance

Scriptlance suffers from the same major overcrowding as GaF, but makes it even worse by being horrendously designed.  The front page is essentially a wall of text (or links, whatever) that will make you squint, and half of them are repeated under each heading! I’ve bid halfheartedly on a couple of things here, but never actually been chosen. I think I’m grateful.

Wordpress Freelance

A nice change of pace, wpfreelance usually has one or two new projects per day and there are regulars who bid on just about everything (*shifty eyes*). In case the really obvious name didn’t inform you, this site is for Wordpress-related jobs only. As usual you have the mix of unpleasant and perfectly nice buyers, though I’m glad to say the balance is more in favour of the latter. Unfortunately the escrow system on the site leaves something to be desired. On one occasion my buyer released the funds only for them to disappear! Thankfully the buyer was lovely about it and sent them a sternly worded email, resulting in me getting my money within a day or so, but it did nothing for my confidence in the site maintainers (they didn’t actually reply to his email, just sent me the money).

Joomlancers

Sounds like another specialist site doesn’t it? Well actually you get a bit of everything listed here, which scientifically proves my theory that everyone who works with Joomla is mental. Don’t be offended, I count myself in that group too. My one experience with this site was not a good one, and that obnoxious buyer only has herself to blame when she reads this (which will definitely happen) and sees that her rudeness got the entire site a bad review. Sweet revenge.

Ok. So maybe that’s a bit mean. Joomlancers has actually changed a lot since I last used it, including the addition of tests providers can take and display proudly on their profile to attract more buyers. Good idea.

oDesk

I only recently discovered this site, and am very impressed so far. There are of course your usual selection of idiots, but the site has a few measures in place to make it much easier to find the decent projects. First of all, as with the new improved Joomlancers, as a provider you can take tests in pretty much whatever your expertise might be. Secondly, buyers can list certain required qualifications with their jobs, such as specific skills or tests passed. Of course plenty of people will bid who do not meet or have not even read these qualifications, but oDesk sends them straight to the bottom of the list. Scanning the job postings for those that list qualifications is how I found my first job there, since I knew I wanted to work with a buyer who actually had standards.

If a buyer is interested they don’t just award you the job arbitrarily, they actually invite you for interview. This can be in the form of private messages, or use Skype or another messaging equivalent. It might seem like a lot of effort, but it’s steered toward finding quality providers for quality jobs, and you’re quality…right?

Compared to other sites of my aquaintance, oDesk works in a strange way. There are two types of job, hourly and fixed. Fixed is where you find the usual “no bids over $20 please” jobs, and hourly is guaranteed payment. The catch is that you must download and run a time-tracking application that then reports your work hours to the buyer. All very professional.

Since I’ve only just scored my first job here, I can’t comment on the payment process. However, I am quietly confident.

That is all!

I realise some of the big-name freelancing sites are missing from my list, but I wanted to give a personal view of each. Some sites are so famous for their lack of quality, I wounldn’t touch them with somebody else’s.

If you really want to give these sites a try, just be prepared for the rejections and the frustrations. Once you get your foot in the door they can become more lucrative but it takes a special sort of dedication to get that far in the first place. Godspeed.

Related posts:

1. The Problem with Passion
2. Selling through Envato – Pt 1

You know how it is. Some days you just wake up and want to try something new.

I’ve used Photoshop and the more unfashionable (yet tons better for designing websites) Fireworks but the only experience I’d really had of Illustrator was once upon a time when I downloaded some free vector art and opened it up to change part of it from pink to green. The time was right to learn.

After a few false starts and some frustration with the gradient tool it was time to get on with things and make something ambitious and pretty. In stepped this tutorial over at Vectortuts+. In it we learn how to create a gearbox, settings-type icon (please forgive the Mac look, and bear with me) with surprising ease. The author explains each step clearly and while it’s true that I stumbled a few times through my own inexperience, I was always able to get back on track and my version of the icon looked really rather nifty.

Over the last few days I’ve done a few of these Illustrator tutorials and this is probably the best so far for both clear instructions and a truly impressive end product. The one downside is that exact dimensions aren’t given so it’s difficult to get your version looking exactly how it does in the picture, but as you can see I managed close enough.

Related posts:

1. jQuery for Beginners
2. Selling through Envato – Pt 1

“You taught yourself all this web stuff, I want to do it too. Teach me?”

My usual reaction is a sort of resigned sigh, since their newfound desire to learn soon fizzles out rendering my efforts useless. Instead, from now on, I will with a lazy wave of my hand and a heavy heart send them on their way to this blog, where I shall eventually compile the ultimate web stuff learners guide.

Getting Started

First of all, when I started I started at the beginning. It makes sense if you think about it. Working steadily through the tutorials at W3Schools I had soon mastered basic HTML, including tables and the infamous frames. A lot of what I learned there was already out of date, but trust me when I say it came in useful.

Next up was CSS, and again I scurried off to W3Schools for help. That site really was a lifesaver in my early forays, you can’t go wrong with a brief simple tutorial and a do-it-yourself example.

HTML and CSS are, in fact, all you need to build your very first website. Basically, HTML is the structure of your site and CSS is the pretty colours and styles. Flash and Javascript may be fancy, but they’re far from essential. PHP and other “scary” code can definitely wait. Practise with what you’ve just learned and make sure you’re confident in the basics before trying anything else.

Staying Started

Ok, so you have the ability to physically build a site, but you don’t really know where to go from here.

Read! Read until your eyes bleed. Read every design/development blog you can get your hands on even if you have only the vaguest notion of what the article is talking about. Hear about jQuery enough (which you will) and it starts to sound less like gibberish and more like a popular Javascript library. See enough references to Wordpress and you’ll know it’s an open-source blogging platform (and CMS, oh yes I went there). In fact, before long you’ll even know what CMS stands for.

Some recommendations to get you started are Smashing Magazine, Webdesigner Depot and Noupe. These are all big name web stuff blogs, add them to your feed reader and you’ll be drowning in education. Also, thanks to Smashing Magazine, endless (somewhat repetitive) showcases of awesome sites.

Most of all I would advise patience. The quickest of learners can be overcome with too much new knowledge and you don’t want to immediately forget everything you’re learning so be sure to practise everything you can on a test page. Spend some time creating various layouts with just HTML and CSS, the more you do it the more it sinks in.

In this series of posts you’ll be visiting many many links and learning many many things, the last thing you need is to forget the things we already covered. Especially when you get that job to update a hideously old site and can’t remember how an HTML table works.

Related posts:

1. 10 Tips for the Beginning Designer

I still remember the pride I felt at completing that first site, though looking back on it it was fairly ugly it was still my baby and will always have a special place in my heart. Surprisingly, after the stress of getting that first site live and having actual people actually use it without it breaking (oh my that was scary!), I realised how much fun I was having and set about learning everything I could get my grubby little hands on.

My main problem nowadays is that the initial enthusiasm never left. For every paid job I have there are 3 fully formed (and in my opinion fantastic) ideas that I never get time to build on. Coupled with my naturally short attention span this means there are projects I’ve had in the pipeline for over 2 years that I add to every now and then and are still only about halfway done.

As with Leonard da Quirm, most of these ideas are for my own amusement with little or no thought given to any practical value they may have for the world. I just want to play with code!

Recently I came up with a very simple plan to help the situation before it spirals forever out of my control. Knowing that I need some sort of motivation to get things done (or I’d just sit reading, sketching plans for new sites  and eating egg sandwiches all day every day) I’ve now added a list of all the tasks currently awaiting my attention right on my desktop wallpaper.

It’s pretty effective. Whenever I turn on the computer, minimize firefox to try and find the elusive file I just downloaded, or even have my browser in less than full-screen mode, a basic todo list showing how many tasks I’ve completed and which are still to do greets me.

In conclusion then I will now complete projects instead of going off on tangents so often, just for the satisfaction of seeing another line crossed out in the top right of my desktop. Genius.

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Related posts:

1. How Exactly Do You Motivate a Gamer Geek to Work?

One of my past jobs was as an administrator for around 30 people. Every day without fail I would find an appropriately silly holiday and send out a department-wide email informing people of any specific celebrations they should partake in. For the most part my little obsession was tolerated with a weary smile, but a handful of my colleagues really got into the idea, culminating in an otherwise respectable rail engineer and tram enthusiast coming to work with an inflatable parrot.

One particular colleague was so enthusiastic about the whole thing, she encouraged me to start a mySpace group for the purpose of collecting all the holidays in one place. The group lasted for about half a day and hasn’t been updated since, but the principle was sound.

The Plan

Over 2 years later, I’ve decided to revisit the idea in the form of Excuses to Drink, my upcoming Drupal-based events calendar. The plan is to collect silly holidays (both official and unofficial-but-fun-enough-to-be) and display them in an upcoming list on the homepage with a quick description, link to a website and an image. Users will be able to view holidays without registering, but if they do sign up they have the added benefits of private messaging between members, posting photos and organising local get-togethers right there on the site, as well as the “Drink to this” option which lets you become a “fan” of an event.

So far I have the basic structure in place, next up is finishing off the theme and then I can start on the more advanced features. And don’t worry, my one reader, I’ll let you know how it goes.

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