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Start developing smarter and stop yourself working late
Let me start off by saying if you’re proud of being a workaholic, have no goal for a life and/or are simply “building up your business” then this article probably isn’t for you. This is (in part) how I stopped myself from working 10am to 2am every day of the week and actually went outside for a change after being in exactly the same position.
I’m the first to admit I’m a self-confessed workaholic but I’m also the first to admit that being workaholic to the point of work being the only thing in your life is a boring when you look back at it. Work is great and it sometimes leads to fantastic rewards but it shouldn’t never become the basis of your life.
The things in this article are all things that led to me becoming a significantly better programmer and lead developer. They also made me become a significantly better freelance developer whilst I was freelancing.
Nine-to-Five
Start out by actually forcing yourself to work between 9am and 5pm. Get all early morning browsing in between 8:30am and 9am and make sure you’re ready to immediately start. When you’re forced to work within a time period that “isn’t enough time” you’ll find ingenious ways of cutting time out of your day and solving regular issues so you can do more in less time.
You will be able to reflect on parts of your work life during this time that you’ve never thought about. Are you charging enough? Do you need help to get the work done? Are people taking advantage of your time?
Know when to apply the breaks
Set out when and for how long for your breaks are going to be. Your lunch needs to be at a regular time and two other 15-20 minute breaks can be scheduled either side of your lunch. This breaks things up and allows you to remove yourself from problems that can be fixed with a few minutes of simply thinking about it.
The same applies here for time that isn’t spent working. Don’t go out on a three hour break because you’re not in an office and work from home “because you can”, it just doesn’t get you anywhere.
Inbox nirvana
Cut out all of your e-mails as soon as they’re coming in. Make sure you reply to the e-mails that are asking you questions and for help within a suitable amount of time. Either set a certain time period aside for this or break it down into 10-15 minute periods throughout the day so you can spend the rest of your time focusing on the job at hand.
I find Gmail’s built in labelling feature is great for this, I can simply scan an e-mail and mark is as “quote to do” or “reply needed” and make sure those labels are completely cleared out by the end of each time slot so that everyone receives their responses.
Trim the fat, throw out what isn’t working
Simply enough you need to trim out all those activities that take minutes here and there but add up to an hour, maybe more, over the period of your work day (outside of the standard breaks) that stop you getting what you need to get done. Rescue Time is perfect for this as it allows you to see exactly what is distracting you from working properly and shows you how you can be more efficient.
Determined enough to get work done, you may even consider installing parental controls to stop yourself accessing these applications during your scheduled work hours. It sounds funny now, but if you’re a World of Warcraft addict or love your RSS Feeds, you know how much that will cut from your day.
Make some plans, don’t expect them to just happen
Arrange weekly events you would have look like a complete idiot to pull out of, plan things a few days or week(s) in advance so that it’s definite that it will happen. Make sure to get out and experience something else other than the computer once and a while.
Thought of something else?
If there’s anything else you’d like to suggest to others facing this problem or you would like to share how you’ve got over the same issue then feel free to leave a comment or post it up on your own blog with a link to this post so that others can find your suggestion.
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Changing the default Mac screen shot image type
I recently had the need to change the default Mac OSX takes it’s screen shots in. There’s some occasions where you need more quality than PNG and some occasions where you need a file anyone can open and simply don’t want PNG as your default.
Well, in OSX 10.4 and onwards you can change the default screen shot format.
Start by opening Terminal, located in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal
Type in:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type image_format
killall SystemUIServerReplace image_format with your selected format that you wish to change the default setting to. The second line reloads the default so that you don’t need to log out and back in again for the change to take effect. The next time you take a screen shot after executing both of these commands, it will be saved in the new format you have chosen.
Below is a list of several popular image types and their commands in full should you wish to paste them.
BMP
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type bmp
killall SystemUIServerGIF
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type gif
killall SystemUIServerJPG
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg
killall SystemUIServerPDF
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type pdf
killall SystemUIServerPNG
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png
killall SystemUIServerTIFF
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type tiff
killall SystemUIServer4 Comments » -
Adding an unsubscribe link to a Magento newsletter template
A quick tip for Magento developer’s here, in how to add an unsubscribe link into a newsletter template so that the person can unsubscribe from the newsletter if they chose to do so.
Simply add {{var subscriber.getUnsubscriptionLink()}} into your template in order to output the link for the user to unsubscribe. This even works for people who aren’t registered customers of the Magento installation but that you’ve imported into your system as subscribing to the newsletter.
Full example of a link in your template to unsubscribe:
<a href=”{{var subscriber.getUnsubscriptionLink()}}” title=”Click here to unsubscribe from this newsletter”>Unsubscribe</a>
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‘Share on Twitter’ link
Ever wanted to give your readers, or your client’s readers a chance to share the post quickly on Twitter?
The code is straight forward:
<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading http://www.test.com/post-url” title=”Click to share this post on Twitter”>Share on Twitter</a>
If you’re using Wordpress and want to automate this, simply use the following to insert the link to the current post in the loop into your link:
<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading <?php the_permalink(); ?>” title=”Click to share this post on Twitter”>Share on Twitter</a>
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Rescue Time is great for efficiency and productivity
After seeing Rescue Time I had to give it a go and see what came out of it. The web app allows you to track your time spent across various applications and sites etc. and gives you your productivity and efficiency scores based on that activity.
You set productivity on a scale of +2 to -2 in terms of points for each website and application you’re using. You can also group activity by tags and groups under groups that are pre-set or that you create yourself. Textmate for example is automatically under ‘Dev Tools’, as is Transmit. As I’m a developer I marked Dev Tools as +2, and Adium (instant messaging) as -2. Campfire would be -1, NewsFire -2 etc. until you have a good overview of everything.
It doesn’t require this kind of extensive set-up, but it only makes it a better tool spending this much time with it. The personal account is free, though your data isn’t kept forever like the paid packages and they have both Mac and PC applications to support its use.
I found overall that Rescue Time helped me enormously with monitoring, and subsequently increasing my efficiency and productivity. I’d recommend it to anyone who wanted to find out just how effective they are in their work without much of set-up.
If you have any results of your own you would like to share feel free to talk about them in the comments. I’d be delighted to see how others are doing with any trials they’re running with Rescue Time.
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Some things I’ve found some recent CVs
I’m probably a little over anal when it comes to checking CV’s that people have sent across. But I’ve gone through nearly a hundred from our latest job posting and I felt it would be of benefit to a few people to mention some things I’ve noticed on the vast majority of CV’s sent in applications or e-mails.
- Nobody pays attention to their fonts. A CV is potentially 100% text in its standard format, yet hardly anyone strays from the standard set of 5-6 fonts.
- It’s obvious when you use a template. Some may think it’s not, but it is.
- Ever thought of laying it out? Why not use a two or three column table for that list of skills you’re outlining? How about removing some of the babble and spacing it out a little?
- Personality is a dying art. Despite me declaring I wanted to see some personality from applications when they sent in their e-mail I saw very little.
- Nobody catered their CV to the role. Everyone sent in a standard CV. Nobody put in some text about why they’d want the role, or why they would be a good fit for it.
Learn from their mistakes and adapt to them next time you send in a CV for a job you want to apply to. Make it interesting for the person on the other end.
Have any opinions on the subject? Or advice for others? Bad mistakes you’ve made with your own CV? Feel free to leave a comment below, I’d love to hear them.
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Students: gain valuable experience for free
Most students have come into our offices talking about what’s covered in their modules at college/university. They’ve come in, sat down and spoke reasonably passionate about what they want to do within the roles they’re applying for. Though there’s no depth knowledge when questioned, no portfolio or diversity in what they say and no opinion about how that role should be done.
Here’s a few tips as to things you can do to get this experience to enhance the theory behind your degree in the real world:
- Do your own projects, set your own goals. This is a basic one but something that a lot of students don’t do. You need to set out what you want to learn by the end of the year and break it down into deadlines for when you’re going to learn it. Follow that plan as a base before any of the other things in the post and stick to it.
- Approach local companies involved in your area of desired service. It’s something that most students are afraid to do but it’s potentially a big opportunity to learn a lot about the role you want to work within later on. Observing the way people communicate, joining in on office banter and simply becoming comfortable in an office environment lends a big help towards how easy it will be to hire you. Most importantly here: work for free. Company’s don’t want to pay, but they will throw you the odd project if you work for free to gain you extremely valuable experience. If there’s an extra desk in the corner, why the heck not let you sit there and learn?
- Search out online teams There are plenty of online teams for areas like 3D, illustration, Flash and others that are dedicated to learning as a group and growing as a talent. I find myself lucky to have found myself within a team like Pixel2life early on and it gave me an extremely good base of talents to move on forwards from after I left.
- Approach local charities/business. Focus on people that wouldn’t be able to afford the services you provide if they wanted to. (But of course would find it of benefit to have those services in the first place). You offering to give them your services for free in aid of some experience and a reference may just get you another project in your portfolio/CV come interview day.
- Read a lot of blogs. It sounds basic, but you need to get yourself an RSS feed reader and add an RSS feed from every site you can find of reasonable quality into it. Read the articles that come through and study the latest trends and issues in your field. It makes you a more valuable candidate and cements your role within the team should you get a job.
What’s most important here is for you not to sit and take your college or university course as gospel. Yes there are people who get jobs straight out of their course with little help and there are courses that obviously don’t need this post. But you only increase your chance by getting up and doing something outside of your usual routine. It doesn’t have to be a full-time 40 hour workweek for free, do it a couple nights a week. Even a few hours a week is going to improve upon what you’re doing already.
If you’re a student yourself and have any comments about how you’ve prepared yourself for the outside world upon leaving your course or if you have any more advice for the students out there, feel free to leave a comment. I’d love to hear it.
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Why Virgin Media is better than Sky (from a Sky customer)
I used to be on Virgin Media, angry at Sky wishing I had Sky One and all the other quality features Sky has instead of being stuck over at Virgin. When I moved into my new house one of the first things I did was purchase myself a nice new Sky Plus box. Boy, was that a big mistake.
Virgin, please read the following and adapt your advertising appropriately:
- You don’t own the box: Virgin don’t sell you a box, they let you rent it. Which means free repairs, free replacements and no extra £10-15 a month for a support plan just to get someone out to your house when your Sky box is dead. Virgin also offer remote support on the box where by they can fix some problems over the phone. Sky doesn’t offer this, unless you’re paying extra. Another benefit to this for Virgin’s customers is that your box also gets upgraded for free too.
- Record two, watch one: With Virgin this literally means watch one program whilst recording two others. With Sky, this means record two programs and one watch of them. This is annoying as you more often than not end up watching parts of one of the programs you’ve got set to record. Another annoyance attached to this is that Sky disables all other features when two programs are recording, no information, no guide, nothing unless you cancel a recording.
- Information button? Well… not really. With Virgin, you browse to a program or channel and press the information button and it gives you information on the program you currently have selected. With Sky, it simply returns information on the program you’re currently watching. That is, unless you’re looking through the guide.
- Elevator music: Sky’s guide is boring. You press it and it removes all trace of the program you’re watching. You browse through the channels and everything else whilst listening to elevator music and are stuck staring at text. Virgin on the other hand: you have a small picture of what you were watching and can continue to hear the channel as well as watching it whilst browsing the guide.
- Television, that isn’t on: anywhere. Sky has ‘catch up TV’ where by you have a selection of 15-20 great programs over the past week to watch through. The problem is, you require a subscription to the channels to watch them. With Virgin there’s this and a massive back catalogue including the BBC iPlayer, Channel 4’s 4-on-Demand and hundreds of other series for you to watch through. A massive, massive plus on Virgin’s side.
Feel free to share your annoyances with Sky or Virgin in the comments below. I’d love to hear your opinions.
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301 and 302 redirects with .htaccess
I’ve been asked this question time and time again, so here we are. How to redirect directories and old URL’s to new ones when moving your site from one domain to another, or launching a new version with re-structured URLs.
Here’s a sample structure of a re-direct line:
Redirect 301 /about.php http://www.newdomain.com/about
/about.php here is the local URL relative to the core domain you’re redirecting from. If you’re redirecting from http://www.sample.com/directory/about.php then this will be /directory/about.php and if you are redirecting from http://www.sample.com/about.php then it is simply /about.php.
The second part of this statement is the complete URL you are forwarding to.
The beauty of a 301 redirect with .htaccess is that if you have one big set of URL’s that have changed from one place to another with the filename/end URL staying the same it is still the same statement. For example:
Redirect 301 /test/ http://www.newdomain.com/testing/
This redirects /test/about.php to http://www.newdomain.com/testing/about.php – anything after /test/ will be redirected to http://www.newdomain.com/testing/ and placed at the end of the URL. The same applies for all query URLs (i.e. about.php?variable=1&this=that).
Tip: Always priority order your redirects. The redirects you want done first should go up top. But you should also be careful not to place inherent statements above specific ones.
This won’t work:
Redirect 301 /test/ http://www.newdomain.com/testing/
Redirect 301 /test/about.php http://www.newdomain.com/about.phpThis will result in the first statement being processed and the second statement meaning nothing. The correct order is:
Redirect 301 /test/about.php http://www.newdomain.com/about.php
Redirect 301 /test/ http://www.newdomain.com/testing/This means the specific statement is applied first, and then the inherent statement is ran afterwards.
Here’s a sample of our extensive re-directs for Sausage Roll to Rolled:
Redirect 301 /general-posts/ http://www.rolled.at/general-news/
Redirect 301 /wp-content/uploads/11/ http://www.rolled.at/wp-content/uploads/Here is what they do:
- Moves all posts in the /general-posts/ slugged category to show at /general-news/ on the new site. For example /general-posts/testing-post is now /general-news/testing-post on the new site as we changed the category.
- All uploads from /wp-content/uploads/11/ are now linked to in /wp-content/uploads/. For examples /wp-content/uploads/11/test.jpg is now /wp-content/uploads/test.jpg on the new server.
All of these lines can be applied to 302 (temporary) redirects too. Just switch the number 301 with 302 to achieve the result you need. 302 redirects should be used where the file is only moving there for a short while but will be put back eventually and 301 redirects are used to transfer the URL to the new URL permanently and work great for a site move or a URL restructuring.
I used these to transfer Twod.co.uk to JHuskisson.com and several other transfers and they have all retained by page rank and search engine strength from domain to domain with ease.
Have any other htaccess redirect tips or things to discuss? Feel free to leave a comment using the form below.
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Common mistakes of outsourcing
Through my vast amount of experiments in outsourcing I’ve made quite a few mistakes here and there that would have been better avoided if I had simply thought about it before I did it. Here are the common mistakes I’ve either been a part of or have witnessed myself through others, in a hope that you may read them and learn from them.
- Posting the wrong job application text up in the first place/wanting something you can’t get
Most people just post up a big long list of what they want and accept nothing else. To get the right result post up the bare minimum that you’re looking for and add ‘traits that would be ideal, but not required are:’ to the bottom. - Grabbing the first person that comes along.
Sometimes it’s genius but the majority of time it’s just lack of patience. The first person in your inbox isn’t always the best. If you can’t find anyone and are desperate, then you need to start thinking about how you’re posting and where you’re posting. - Posting in the wrong places
Do your research first and take a look around at the other job listings being posted up in the same place you’re putting yours. If you find jobs that aren’t similar in the majority, then it’s the wrong place. If the others look completely different to yours (less detailed, much more detailed, including images, not including images) then adapt your posting. - Trying to fit the wrong person into the wrong position
Don’t hire an Expression Engine developer to be a Wordpress developer if they don’t already have experience. Don’t hire someone who specialises in non-framework based development to work on a Code Igniter powered site. Get someone who already has the experience otherwise you either get: a) more expense for nothing, or b) a completely poor result. Sometimes it’s both. - Make sure you know their hours
When, in their timezone, are they online? It should be one of the first questions you ask and you should know when each of your outsourced team will be online or offline. - Know how to get in touch
Do they want to Skype? Do they want to be contacted by phone? By AIM? MSN? GTalk/Jabber? ICQ? Know that they fit what you want and don’t have their own standards. I once worked with a developer who decided to let me know that he only wanted to be contacted when he decided to come online, on MSN. No phone calls, no Skype, nothing. When he was called, he pulled out of the project. Clearly a bad choice.
I will follow this in a series of other articles about outsourcing. If you have any other mistakes or experiences to share, feel free to leave a comment on this article as it would be fascinating to read.
No Comments » - Posting the wrong job application text up in the first place/wanting something you can’t get
