nortypig

How to Write with Style by Kurt Vonnegut.

Andy Rutledge’s list in his post The Employable Web Designer puts forward a strong list of traits, skills and generic attributes of someone who would be hurriedly hired as a web designer (of course if they were that good it would just piss everyone off anyway, but a great list to work by).

5 Rules of Thumb the every web professional needs emblazoned on their office wall - in blinking neon no less.

David Sherwin’s Designers Hate Estimating Part1, Part 2 and Part 3. The unquantified factors are important to understand if you want to make money - clients changing needs, client’s initial lack of articulation of real needs, client behaviour during the project, and learning curves.

The Pencil Project is a Firefox 3 add on that turns your browser into a sketching tool.

Ryan Irelan in A List Apart Issue 262 provides resources which can help you work SVN version control into your current business workflow for contractors. I’ve used SVN on several occasions and agree, although I did have it screw up an Eclipse Java Project over and over about two years ago (ouch). Its definately worth the effort.

Mike Gunderloy has been looking into who owns your online documents? Reading the fine print on Google Docs, Zoho and Acrobat.com shows the down side to these services. My main concern is that some of them have the right to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute the content. Sorry, but how would I stay in business Mr Google? Seriously, no confidential business letters getting printed on that service EVER, EVER, EVER. And only a total idiot would use the service to write a book or anything commercial under some of those terms.

In a bold move 37signals (Basecamp, Campfire, Highrise and Backpack developers) have announced that on August 15th, 2008 they will cease supporting Internet Explorer 6 across all of their products. Its especially bold because, regardless of my beliefs about IE6 adoption, I’m not having to assess whether my clients will be able to work with me via Basecamp later in the year. Interesting proactive move.