Archive for category: Random Stories

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/content-code-career-transition/?utm_source=rss

As Aaron Osteraas can tell you, the path between discovering what you want to do for a living and actually doing it is rarely linear.

Now a Software Engineer at Tigerspike, a digital services company headquartered in Sydney, Aaron’s journey toward becoming a developer began when he was in high school, yet it wasn’t until his early 30s that he obtained his first full-time development job. The years in between were filled with starts and stops, challenges and successes, and a whole lot of tinkering.

“I was always tinkering with the family computer, which was mostly, ‘oh god I’ve broken it how do I fix it before I get in trouble,’” Aaron said of his technical beginnings. He had an appetite for building and modifying hardware, which he attributes to the joy that comes from doing something with your hands. He’d collect spare hardware, buy and sell parts, and at times resort to scrounging and trading. “There were computer parts strewn everywhere,” he said.

But by the time he graduated high school, Aaron had checked out academically. He wasn’t confident his grades were good enough for university, so he enrolled in TAFE, Australia’s largest vocational training provider, and spent six months learning XML before realizing that “making mobile websites for 2004’s best mobile phones in XML was pretty damn far from my idea of a good time.”

So he dropped out of TAFE and eventually found himself working in the world of content, where he stayed for seven years. Though he worked his way up to a managerial and editorial role for a handful of companies within the technical realm, Aaron found himself consistently unsatisfied.

I had this itch to solve technical problems, and working in content, I wasn’t able to scratch it. That’s what a lot of programming is, problem-solving. And it’s not that this is unique to programming, it’s just the type of problems – and solutions to them – are more enjoyable to me.

Back to School

During his long stretch in content, Aaron maintained enough of an interest in tinkering and programming to eventually enroll in a Software Engineering degree program.

I took one subject to start off, as I felt I needed to validate two things: one, that I could learn to study again, and two, that I would enjoy it.

Aaron found the validation he was after, but it wasn’t until a few years later, when he learned his company had been acquired and his job was on the line, that he decided to leave content behind and commit fully to becoming a developer. Knowing he could be let go in as little as a week, Aaron enrolled at RMIT University full-time to pursue a degree in Software Engineering.

Aaron was finally where he belonged, but it wasn’t easy.

There was a lot of frustration. I found certain languages, concepts, and themes difficult to grasp, and others came with remarkable ease. So when you’re going from, ‘How easy and fun is this!’ to swearing at the computer asking why something isn’t working, it can be emotionally turbulent.

In conjunction with the difficult subject matter was the overwhelming amount of career paths to choose from.

The world of programming is outrageously broad, there are innumerable paths you can take, and there’s temptation to try and take them all because everyone loves the new shiny thing.

The more career paths he discovered, the less sure of himself he grew.

The post How Aaron Osteraas Made the Content to Code Career Transition appeared first on SitePoint.

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2020/03/how-to-manage-your-freelance-finances-during-a-crisis/

Have you ever heard of disaster recovery and business continuity? Basically, they’re processes that enable businesses to survive a crisis — no matter what it’s caused by: a natural disaster, economic downturn, personal emergency, or something else.

There’s a lot involved, but one of the most important parts of recovery is how the company manages their finances before and during a crisis. This isn’t just for large corporations, mind you. These practices are really useful for businesses of all sizes, from solo freelancers to enterprises.

If you’re reading this, then you’re probably wondering what you can do to manage your freelance finances when you’re in the midst of a crisis. That’s what I’m going to lay out for you today.

Step 1: Contact Your Clients

Before you start crunching the numbers, you need to figure out how your business has actually been impacted. Plus, by getting in contact with your clients before you look at your finances, you can go into the conversation with a clear head and without the pressure of, “I really need this money right now.”

If the current crisis only impacts you, do the following:

Take care of yourself first;
When you’re recovered or in a safe place, email each of your clients;
Inform them of your status and if anything has changed with your availability to work for them.

If the current crisis impacts your clients or the globe as a whole, do the following:

Take care of yourself first, if you’re impacted;
Email each of your clients;
Wish them well, briefly and professionally address the crisis, and let them know that you’re still here to help if they need it (and if you’re available for it).

Here’s a sample of a “Checking in” message you might send:

Hi [client name],
I hope you and your family are doing well and are staying safe.
I realize that this is an uncertain time for everyone, so I just wanted to let you know that my schedule is flexible and I can accommodate whatever changes you might need. If you need to hit the pause button on our project or adjust the timeline or scope until things have gone back to normal, please let me know what I can do to help.
[Your Name]

Not only will this touchpoint help you maintain relationships with clients during a crisis, it’ll give you immediate insight into how your incoming revenue is going to change. The same goes for your clients — by reaching out in this manner, you can help them plan their own budget for the coming months or locate another source of help if you become unavailable.

Step 2: Take Stock of Your Cash

One of the things web designers should do to manage their freelance finances is to make regular deposits into a rainy day fund. You might hear some people say that you need three months’ of rent saved while others suggest having at least $1000 to cover basic expenses.

If you’re curious to see how much you actually need to cover expenses and how long it’ll take to get back up and running, run your numbers through Money Under 30’s Emergency Fund Calculator:

If you don’t have a rainy day fund, then you’re going to have to look at the rest of your cash and assets to see how it can help you recover during this crisis. Here are some things to look for:

Money in a checking or savings account meant strictly for expenses (business or personal);
Food in your house that can hold you over for awhile and keep you from grocery shopping as frequently as normal;
Gift cards, frequent flyer miles, free hotel nights, credit card points, and anything else that can cover some of your expenses until things return to normal.

This is not the time to dip into your retirement savings or to pull your money out of investments. When you get through this crisis — and you will — you’re not going to want to start all over again replenishing these accounts. Nor will you want to pay the fees for early withdrawal when the next tax season rolls around.

It’s probably not a good idea to take out loans either. You don’t want to be stuck with an additional expense when this is all over.

If you’re light on cash, keep reading.

Step 3: Cut Down on All Your Expenses Immediately

Once you have an idea of how your incoming revenue is going to change, it’s time to cut back on both professional and personal spending.

If business has stopped, shut off as many business expenses as possible. Or look for ways to downgrade your plans (e.g. web hosting, app subscriptions, wifi, etc.) until you need them running on high again.

If business is operating but at a slower pace, you probably won’t be able to dig much into your professional expenses since you’ll need most things to keep going. If you absolutely need to make cuts, make a list of priorities. What can’t you operate without? Then, reduce or remove the rest.

As far as personal expenses are concerned, this is where you’re going to cut deep. Identify areas where you could start spending less ASAP. For example:

Dining out or ordering in vs. cooking the food you have;
Emotional spending splurges on Amazon vs. using what you already have;
Date nights out vs. staying in together;
Buying brand name products vs. buying generics;
Watching TV on cable vs. using cheaper streaming services;
Paying for a gym membership vs. using workout streaming programs or apps;
Going to a cowork space vs. working from home.

The one thing you might be tempted to ditch or cut back on that you shouldn’t is health insurance. Even if this crisis isn’t one that affects you physically or emotionally, you don’t want to be left without that safety net in case something happens while you get your business back on its feet.

For everything else, make your cuts and go deep. Then, use that to create your budget until the crisis resolves and things stabilize.

Step 4: Negotiate with Your Lenders

There are so many reasons why experiencing a personal, professional, or global crisis sucks. But watching your bills pile up while you already feel so helpless amidst the chaos has got to be one of the worst.

Thankfully, many lenders (e.g. credit card companies, loan providers, mortgage companies) will cut you some slack during this time. You just have to be willing to ask for it.

In some cases, you may be able to negotiate a lower monthly payment until you get back on your feet. This’ll give you some breathing room in case your revenue takes a dive.

In other cases, you may be able to ask for a lower interest rate or to freeze it altogether. While you’ll still owe normal monthly payments, the interest fees that stack up won’t be as devastating to deal with later on.

Another thing you can do is only pay the minimum owed each month. It’s not ideal, but it’ll at least provide you with a buffer in case you need that extra cash. And if you don’t, then you can put it towards your debt at the end of the month.

Step 5: Look for Other Ways to Make Money

If your business or your clients’ businesses are impacted by the crisis, you need a way to make money until things go back to normal.

As a web designer, there are other things you can do in the meantime to support yourself:

Enter a New Niche

Contact business owners in niches that are thriving during the crisis and need a website built or maintained. For example, health crises tend to keep medical equipment suppliers and pharma companies busy. If you’re comfortable building sites for companies outside your niche, it’s worth reaching out.

Become a Tutor

While you could create design or coding courses and sell them through a site like Udemy or Skillshare, it takes time to build up an audience and make good money on those platforms. Instead, use something like Tutors.com or Wyzant to share your skills with others right away.

Work as a VA

There are tons of people who need help with the technical aspects of getting online and using cloud-based services. While virtual assistant work is usually associated with doing random business support tasks, you could adapt this to your particular set of skills and become an IT assistant.

For instance, if a crisis forces people to work from home or take classes remotely, you could help get organizations set up with shared cloud workspaces, virtual conferencing software, collaboration apps, and so on.

Even if you have rainy day funds to cover you during a crisis, it might be a good idea to get another gig anyway. That way, you’ll stay busy and won’t obsess about the crisis or the impact it’s having on you and everyone else.

Wrap-Up

There are a lot of big decisions and compromises you’ll have to make during a crisis, but it is possible for you and your freelance business to get through it in one piece.

If you want to make it easier on yourself next time, manage your freelance finances on a regular basis — not just during a crisis. Keep costs low, income high, and your cash reserves growing at all times.

Featured image via Unsplash.

Source

p img {display:inline-block; margin-right:10px;}
.alignleft {float:left;}
p.showcase {clear:both;}
body#browserfriendly p, body#podcast p, div#emailbody p{margin:0;}

Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/stream-video-faster-combining-internet-connection/

With 5G — the fifth-generation wireless technology — slowly gaining worldwide adoption, the world will enter into a new era of mobile connectivity. However, it’s not uncommon to…

Visit hongkiat.com for full content.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Designrfix/~3/LjwAGWjKBNE/top-applications-of-litho-printing

The history of printing dates back to 1800 years ago. Ever since the printing started, people witnessed lots of evolution in the industry. In 1991, digital printing emerged. It became one of the cost-effective and exclusive printing techniques. But when it comes to the finest quality prints with a fast turnaround, nothing beats the quality […]

The post Top Applications of Litho Printing appeared first on designrfix.com.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/e4_-5iyo8s0/best-social-media-schedulers

If you promote your creative work via social media, the best social media schedulers could relieve you of a significant chunk of your weekly workload.  Users who share upwards of seven posts a week gain the most engagement across their social media pages, and you could be spending that time working on creative projects instead of staring at social media platforms. This is where a social media management tool, or scheduler, steps in. You can plan your content in advance and then schedule posts to be sent out automatically.

There are a host of other features built into these programs, all designed to help you understand what audiences respond to across different platforms, increase engagement and build a bigger following. Some contain a variation of analytical tools to help you understand optimum times to post, or what content is working best for you. This post mostly focuses on schedulers, so keep in mind that there are loads of other options if you need a tool that does it all.

Remember, scheduling content is helpful but it isn't the best way to increase engagement with your social media accounts. Instead of simply putting out content, you need to deploy a well-rounded set of strategies. For more on this, see our post on how to boost Instagram engagement. You may also want to try simple tricks such as how to change the font in your Instagram bio.

Smarter Queue is just coming out of Beta, and it's shaping up to be a fierce contender in the social media tools space. The platform is category-led, which means you set up multiple categories each with different posting plans, such as which profiles are to be posted to, and add content to each category as you create or find it (including directly from your Twitter feed). You do this by inputting urls or dragging and dropping into the visual calendar so your plan is laid out clearly in front of you. 

Smarter Queue's analytics are pretty powerful and will give you information on optimum posting times, enable you to compare engagement between content types and analyse your social history plus your competitors. The evergreen content recycler keeps your repeated content going on a cycle, with no ending (unless you ask it to stop). There are engagement tools such as sharing or retweeting from within the platform, and content curation and editing tools, too. 

One downside is that the mobile app is very limited. Its only purpose at the moment is to remind you when to publish content on Instagram (which doesn't have an auto-post function), and to bookmark content. However, the product roadmap details some great future features for the platform, which could outweigh this negative point.

This scheduler boasts that it saves you over eight hours a week, and indeed it is a great choice if you want to be totally hands-off (remember, this won't necessarily create the most engagement). Establishing your content settings is the only time-consuming part, but once that is done, you can let it tick over. 

Later is unapologetic about being mostly for Instagram, in fact it tags itself as the number one Instagram scheduler. And it does that job really well. Due to Instagram's regulations, you can't auto post content on the site unless you're a business page (and even then, only on single image posts), so bear in mind that if you're not, you'll only be able to schedule posts then publish them manually. But, you'll get notifications from Later at the specified times, and all you need to do at that point is press publish on the content you've already created. 

The fact that the platform is so image-led means Later works incredibly well with Instagram, but not so well with Twitter or Facebook, which aren't so focused on the visuals. The grid layout within Later displays your content just as you would see it on Instagram, so you can curate brand consistency at a glance, as well as check you're posting a mix of content. There's also a handy hashtag search which allows you to repost content based on specific keywords.

Later provides stats on your account that become more detailed as you move up the price plans, but these are pretty limited at the lower price points, and even the most in-depth analysis doesn't match that of other schedulers. 

If you're a visual content creator, focused on Instagram, this is an easy-to-use scheduler that doesn't overcomplicate things. But it's not the best choice for writers, or anyone wanting to delve deep into stats across social channels.

A powerhouse of a social media management tool, Sendible really does do it all. Aimed at increasing productivity for agencies managing multiple clients, the platform has a slick dashboard interface that allows you to switch between clients easily, and the facility to collaborate with teams/clients on content and campaigns. 

Functions for scheduling and auto-posting are included in the toolkit, alongside powerful analytics via reports, automation tools (like automatic replies), grouping posts by teams, and content libraries that house all your evergreen content for reuse. 

This is a serious choice for larger outfits, but the app can be somewhat unstable. This isn't something we'd expect from such a professional program so it's a niggle, but the other tools definitely have the goods to back up the price.

If you're looking for a scheduler that does just what it says on the tin, this is your best bet. Postcron is ridiculously simple in its focus: it schedules and auto posts, and that's it. (As with most other apps, it won't auto post to Instagram, you'll need to respond to the notification.) You can bulk upload, which saves time, and the ability to add a watermark is a nice touch. 

There are no extras here – there are zero analytics, and no editing or curation tools. But if you just want to be able to schedule, for a reasonable price and with a clean, useable UI, this is a safe choice.

Hootsuite is one of the leading social media management tools, and it truly does do it all. It offers a free forever plan that will do the job well if you just want to schedule content. It can be hard to find a decent free scheduler that works this well across all channels, and Hootsuite's free plan even has basic analytics. 

The Streams tool is a clear winner, allowing you to schedule, manage and sort your posts (and your followers' posts/mentions) across social media channels without having to log in to your separate accounts. Bear in mind that you are limited to scheduling only 30 posts at one time, and to three user profiles, but this should be enough to get you started if you're a single user.

If you choose to upgrade your plan, Hootsuite's wealth of features won't leave you wanting in any area – it offers functions we didn't know we needed. We were particularly impressed with the Hootlet – the browser extension. It helps with topic searches, retweets and replies and more. However, it's worth mentioning that the UI does feel a bit dated, especially compared to other platforms.

TweetDeck is a pretty basic scheduler that was bought by Twitter, and, unsurprisingly, it only encompasses Twitter itself. However, though there are not many other features, it does do Twitter scheduling well, in an uncomplicated way. It may only be a browser platform but it has a clean, bright UI, plus there are a few nifty tricks that will improve your experience immensely. 

Content is organised through custom columns, which you can create yourself to track pretty much anything you like through targeted streams. Think keyword mentions, lists and saved searches. You can filter searches (to track whenever someone mentions your business, or your competitors), and all this can be done with up to 200 Twitter accounts at once. You can also manage multiple accounts from one dashboard. TweetDeck will not provide enough functionality for power users, but it is a solid option for a single user, or a small team. 

Recurpost has found a niche in its approach to recycling evergreen content, so if you have content that you want to resurface and recycle, it could be particularly useful as part of a wider social media strategy. The content variation tool automatically suggests alternative wording to your existing content, potentially saving you a lot of time when trying to mix things up for Twitter's reposting rules. 

Other than that, it is a simple scheduler. The free plan means you could use this platform for recycling content alongside something more heavy hitting. It would also be useful for testing the strategy of automated recycled content, or for people who don't have a huge amount of content to push and purely want to post recycled content regularly. The free plan allows you three profiles and 100 pieces of content.

Loomly is a calendar-based tool with a useful angle. The software will help keep your ideas and content fresh with its content creation toolkit, and make it easy to collaborate. Loomly uses AI to generate dynamic suggestions based on time of day, location and what is currently trending on Twitter. Its calendar view contains key dates and events to help you out, and you can also connect your RSS feeds to generate further content. 

The collaboration aspects are also a massive plus. Posts can be set up and shared with team members or clients for approval and edits, and the post view function saves all previous versions of a post. This includes who has made edits and what they were, which is great for feedback and accountability. Slack integration is also great for workflow. The fine-tune each channel tool allows you to tweak posts for each social media channel individually, enabling you to perfect format, picture, links and so on.

Loomly's main function is to be a calendar-based scheduling tool with a focus on content creation assistance and collaboration, and it does these things very well.

Read more:

The best Instagram font generatorsThe ultimate guide to social media for creativesBrands that rule at social media