1. Qualities of a great freelancer

    The following are qualities that I consider core things I look for in freelancers I use when outsourcing work and getting things done. They are also the things that each and every freelancer working on jobs for Rolled At possess.

    Personality

    You may remember the guy who bored you to death on the phone, but you’ll remember the one you related to and laughed with a whole lot more. They’ll also become a pleasure to work with and you’ll use them more often. I can’t tell you how put off I am by the lack of a personality in some freelancers I talk to.

    A love for the job

    Clients don’t want their leg humping, but they do want someone who wants to do the job they have available. Someone who wants to see the product of their work come alive at the end of everything.

    Chances are if you don’t love making websites, the ones you’ll be creating won’t be very good once your finished. The first question I ask anyone when I talk to them the first time when I’m adding a freelancer to my list is ‘do you love what you do?’ and if the answer isn’t yes with a convincing follow up statement then they don’t last passed that first question.

    Patience

    Can you wait for a job or are you going to be asking me every day about it? Are you going to blow off a huge list of insults at a client when they merely suggest a small change? Patience in my mind, is something that every freelancer needs in order to be a freelancer. You need to be patient in order to wait for a client getting back to you, to hear back from a job follow up and patient with your work too. If your forever complaining that something is going wrong instead of simply looking for a solution then your going to be closing doors instead of opening them.

    Flexibility

    Don’t work with frameworks? Someone else’s code? Pre-built scripts? Other people’s CSS/XHTML? These are all basic examples of lack of flexibility in some areas. Whilst they aren’t vital ingredients of a web development freelancer they do effect your ability to get work if you aren’t a specialist or established.

    A speciality

    The freelancer who specialises in one area and becomes a guru is someone that can – providing the speciality is of importance – become a cornerstone of a business. A talent in one area can be what gets you hired over someone else for a particular job, and it can be something that allows you to make more money that someone who generalises over multiple areas of knowledge. They do a better job, they have more experience and in most cases they take less time to get things done.

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  2. R.I.P. Tutorialized

    rip tutorialized R.I.P. Tutorialized

    Tutorialized was an inspiration of mine when I started out on the internet with Pixel2life and I’ve been lucky enough to get to know Kurt directly since leaving (after years of seeing him as an unapproachable figure, it’s strange). Whilst I’m not still directly involved with the tutorial community I do hear a lot of things about it. I still get a lot of the complaints and the news bulletins I got from people two years ago, so I’m almost up-to-date with everything that goes on. I heard this from Kurt himself, and on the 19th of May Kurt announced that Tutorialized (the number one tutorial listing on the internet) had been sold, the new owner being Developer Shed.

    Unfortunately Developer Shed have taken over the site and it is dead upon their arrival. With seven advertising spots (three to four advertising the same thing at any one time), two implementations of the ‘White Papers’ service and with a couple of search boxes added by Developer Shed, it’s no wonder I’m hearing so many complaints about the site after they have taken it over.

    It’s sad to see another of the great tutorial sites fall from the grace of the audience that held it so highly in regard. But I’d like to congratulate Kurt on the money he made from the sale as I don’t think anyone can doubt that he deserves every single penny of the money he received for building what was the best tutorial listing web site on the internet and something I held very high respect for until Developer Shed left their mark.

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  3. A lesson brought to you by a six year old

    The beauty of this video is that your expecting a typical cute performance from a six year old on a reality television talent show. What you get is the best damn singing performance by a young kid, and your jaw on the floor. She has never had a lesson, and learnt from singing with a £40 karaoke kit. And has apparently preliminarily agreed to sign a seven figure deal from Simon Cowell already, what can I say? She deserves it.

    The lesson for freelancers and wannabe developers/designers here is that natural talent goes a long, long way and being self taught can be a good thing.

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  4. Too many screens?

    548507548 50708e64d5 Too many screens?

    Samsung 32″ HDTV (arrived last week), 15″ MacBook Pro (arrived today), 20″ Samsung monitor along side a 20″ iMac. Very messy everywhere at the moment as I’m organising everything in preparation for moving out.

    The MacBook Pro arrived today with a nice cold metal feel to it out the box, taking an entire minute and a half to get fully running and on the internet – very cool.

    It’s my opinion you can never have too many screens. But I’ll let you guys decide.

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  5. I Love Laughter, the new Funholio

    Launched I Love Laughter (Note: site is now down) a week or so ago silently in the background. It features a new layout, a few more pictures (I say a few, but not too many more), a new statistics page (mostly for my own enjoyment) and some new embed code boxes underneath each picture as it is generated.

    There’s a few bugs no doubt and the colour scheme isn’t perfect – but it’s a quick update to the successful Funholio side project in a few hours during an active night off.

    A sample of the laughter:
    (This has been removed, since the site no longer exists)

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  6. Rolled looking to expand once again

    I’m gearing up the start of a recruitment drive for Rolled.at where there are a mass amount of opportunities for both starting and established developers. We work primarily in PHP/mySQL but are starting to see requests for ASP.NET, C++/C#, Python and Ruby on Rails. We are also in need of web designers.

    The prices we charge depend on the people quoting for the particular job and we require everyone to have a instant messaging contact address for initial enquiries. Whether you charge very little or a lot – we are interested in speaking to you about opportunities Rolled.at can offer.

    I can’t stress enough at this point that agencies should not bother applying and that we are only looking for English speaking people in the US/Canada, Great Britain, Europe or Australia.

    Rolled.at isn’t a tied down contract and you are free to work for yourself on any other projects that may come along. We require non-disclosure agreements for all projects during the development/design process and expect freelancers to be able to self-manage the projects given to them to an extent.

    We are looking for people with any of the following
    - Experienced PHP developers for large jobs, and young developers looking to become established by doing smaller jobs and working their way up
    - Deep CSS/XHTML knowledge, with the ability to code PSD’s or PNG’s into XHTML Strict and CSS valid layouts
    - Experience with vBulletin or Invision Power Board, modding or skinning
    - WordPress, Expression Engine or Movable Type experience
    - Established web designers
    - People with experience in ASP.NET, C++, C# or Ruby
    - People with experience with frameworks such as CakePHP, Code Igniter or Rails

    If you have any of these qualities and are interested in being handed work on a freelance basis – feel free to send an e-mail over to me@jhuskisson.com with some details about yourself and what it is you can do – and your availability for any work.

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  7. Announcing Rolled At

    Today I’m pleased to announce Rolled At, an organisation of quality and passionate freelancers gathered by myself. The aim of the organisation is to expand offering only my own PHP development services at JHuskisson.com and is made up entirely of freelancers who love what they do, what they produce and have a history of delivering a quality product to their client.

    I maintain a very high quality bar for freelancers at Rolled At in order to make sure the client receives exactly what they’ve paid for. If a client isn’t happy or a freelancer misses a deadline they simply aren’t used for any further projects. This is done to ensure quality level for future projects and to maintain client happiness in the long term.

    A temporary page has been put up for the moment whilst plans for branding, the web site and client servicing apps are thoroughly thought out.

    There are some exciting things in the pipeline and some excited freelancers waiting to start work for clients. So get in touch for a quote and get something rolled at you today.

    5 Comments »
  8. Mosso out, Wired Tree in

    Today I’ve completed my move away from Mosso Web Hosting to Wired Tree. It comes for several reasons which I’ll break down for you:

    • Email:
      Recently a client told me that he had lost complete faith because I couldn’t communicate with him via email, I couldn’t send anything to him and I couldn’t receive anything – it’s currently making the fix of a very random problem very difficult. Mosso moved me to their new email platform this morning and fixed the issue a few days ago.
    • Simple things:
      Cron jobs, multi-user FTP access to domains, clients being able to setup their own sub-domains/addon domains, having to login to an external site to access a database instead of just clicking from inside the control panel to bring up phpMyAdmin. At the end of the day, it’s the little things stop me being able to host a client site I’ve just built permanently, or that take up my time having to re-train people.
    • Rails/Subversion:
      It’s been in private staff BETA for a while now and when I joined Mosso I was told it would be coming very soon, therefore a hostee clinged on and I felt that it had been too long without this happening and didn’t want to mess around this hostee any longer. Plus – I want to play with Ruby on Rails and Sub version too.

      To be fair to Mosso they repeatedly told me I would be put into the BETA program for Ruby/Rails. But I was told two weeks ago, and the guy responsible for putting me into the program didn’t get in touch.

    Mosso have been a great host, I took part in nominating them for an award and I submitted a testimonial for their upcoming testimonial page (I think this will happen around about the time of the blog). I was contacted by several core staff thanking me for writing about them, to find out more about me and just generally to see what they could do to better improve the service. And I believe I’m ranked highly if you search on Google for Mosso or Mosso Web Hosting.

    I feel personally that there isn’t enough development coming out of Mosso for all the things customers are told and it could be improved upon by delivering small improvements (company blog, multiple user ftp, the testimonial page) whilst the larger ones (new email system, new billing system, Ruby support, JSP support, ASP .net 2.0) are being worked on over the long term. Again I’m not taking anything away from Mosso, this is just my opinion.

    My new VPS on Wired Tree will allow me to provide Ruby/Rails/SubVersion, allow me to go back to cPanel with all it’s features and allow me to host clients who require it in the future. I also get the small things back whilst giving myself JSP support via the tomcat cPanel addon. So lots of room to learn and develop into new things which I always love to do – and hopefully some of these Ruby/Rails video tutorials I’ve been stacking up will get put to use and make some interesting posts over the next year.

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