Ryan Boswell [dot] com
My GoDaddy Gripes
Disclaimer: This is more or less a small rant on some things about GoDaddy that have bothered me for a while, feel free to ignore it.
GoDaddy.com is one of the most popular domain registrars and probably web hosts. I used to use their domain registration service until I switched everything to my current provider, Dreamhost, about two years ago. Since then my GoDaddy account has been more or less dormant. I figured I wouldn’t worry about deleting it since I may use it at some point in the future. Today I decided to go ahead and cancel my account since I still hadn’t used it and I don’t see myself using it anymore. Long story short, I spent over an hour scouring their help section to try and find out how to cancel my account after spending nearly half an hour looking for it somewhere in my account settings. A quick Google search revealed that it is impossible to cancel a GoDaddy account completely, but there are steps you can take to more or less strip it of most of the important information.
It bothers me that I can’t just cancel my account completely and have my information removed from their systems permanently, but I could live with having an account floating around if I could completely strip out all of my personal information. You can remove all your payment and credit card information, which is the most important stuff, but you are still required to have a full name, street address, and various phone numbers associated with your account. This bugs me to no end.
On top of all of this, it took me 10x longer to get through the processes of effectively ‘deactivating’ my account than it should have. The GoDaddy website is a mess. And I mean a real mess. Everything looks shiny and there are gradients to the sky, but so many of the graphics and design elements clash with everything around them. To be honest, the site looks like the internet version of Frankenstein’s monster, with patchwork pages and mismatched design elements. It looks more like a 12-year-old took a professionally designed template and made his own changes to it without knowing anything about HTML or CSS than the website of one of the most prominent web companies in the world.
As I mentioned briefly, I spent an inordinate amount of time searching through the site to find things I was looking for, and I know what I’m doing when it comes to domains and web hosting. Everything on the site is buried beneath mountains of menus and sub-menus and sub-sub-menus. The navigation is split into more places than there are mistakes on Wikipedia. I also count at least 6 different fonts being used on any given page. Even elements and text that are on multiple pages differ in appearance from page to page.
It seems that if there is a general rule or accepted custom within the web design world, they not only broke it, but beat the poor thing within an inch of its life.
Of course, this is all very unfortunate because the service that GoDaddy offers is world class. I’ve worked with them for just over 6 years and I know many others who have worked with them for longer and their Support team is one of the best I have ever experienced (except maybe Apple support, but it is still a close call). Their pricing is very reasonable and in some cases a steal. But the design and flow of their website just gets in the way of all of that and ruins the experience for people like me.
Freelancing as a Student
One of my favorite websites to follow right now is FreelanceSwitch, because I get a lot of great tips on how to improve my freelance business. A few days ago they posted some questions about student freelancing they received for their advice-column series of posts. Being a student and freelancer myself, I thought I’d throw in a few extra tidbits that weren’t brought up by the questions. A few of these things may even be useful for freelancers already out of school.
The Hard Choice
Since I began my freelancing career 8 years ago, I’ve had a constant struggle internally with my commitments to my clients and my commitments to academics. Deadlines for class projects and client projects often coincide with each other and it can be hard to decide which takes precedence. On one hand, my client work actually provides me an income to pay the bills, which is important (especially in my current life as a college student). But on the other hand, if I neglect my class work, my grades will drop and I could risk endangering my academic future, which can mean not getting a degree (which is also important since it will ensure that I have an income in the future, and hopefully a *slightly* higher one than currently).
It’s important to have your mind made up on this one before you even walk into the business. Getting your priorities straight on this will save you hours of agonizing indecision, take it from me. As to which you choose to take priority is up to you, I can only say that in my experience the vast majority of my clients that was aware of my student standing were understanding of my academic commitments and were not as harsh when I occasionally missed a deadline by a day or two.
Use Your Academic Connections
You’d be surprised just how many people are looking for people to do work, whether it’s web design and development in my case, or anything other service you might offer as a freelancer. Especially in today’s times where a cheaper and more mobile workforce is becoming increasingly important and prevalent. More employers are hiring contract-based employees more, and so there are way more opportunities for freelancers to get work. With that said, one of the most diverse pockets of connections anyone can tap into is their local academic community. Get to know people in your classes, not only will you be able to use these friendships for study buddies, but if you talk about your business, you could get a referral out of them. I’ve gotten over a dozen referrals this way in the past two years alone.
Another area of campus community that you can tap into are clubs and other social groups. Universities often have hundreds upon hundreds of student clubs and groups covering almost any interest or discipline imaginable. Find clubs that relate to your business offerings and get to know people. Sometimes, the more professional clubs will refer members to community businesses that are looking for freelance workers. You can also use the connections and friendships you make here similarly to students in your classes.
Collaborate, Collaborate, Collaborate
Being a freelancer in college is a valuable opportunity. Get to know people that maybe have their own freelancing business, or even simply don’t mind doing a little extra work on the side of a more “regular” job. Especially if these people have complimentary skill-sets to your own. Consider partnering with them on projects where you both can do a part of the work that you are more specialized at.
For example, I have a good friend that does a lot of graphic design work, and is much better at it than I am. I’ve referred some of my clients that had graphic design jobs they needed done to him, and he has done likewise. I’ve also contracted out parts of a few of my own projects that needed a more refined graphic design skill-set than I have.
If you can build up a few of these relationships, you’ll have a strong base of colleagues you can rely on to help you out in a pinch, or to send you work when they spot it. These connections can be invaluable even beyond college into a more professional freelancing career by using the same relationship and dynamic that you built and fostered while in college.
Building Your Portfolio
College is a great time to flush out your portfolio. Don’t be afraid to highlight class projects on your portfolio if you have them (just make sure it’s your own work, or you at least credit others that may have helped you). Anything you do while in college can be used as an example of your skills; just write up a little blurb explaining what you did, maybe a little bit of how you did it, and possibly throw in some marketing language to make it sell.
Your Resume
One important thing I’ve noticed in my time is that some freelancers that have portfolios of their work neglect to write a resume. It is true that more and more people are less concerned with resumes and more concerned about portfolios, I have come across clients that want to see both. While your portfolio may show specific examples of what you’ve done and some of the people you’ve worked with, your resume should be like an “abstract” of your portfolio. Include a list of your specific skills relevant to your career path, what you have experience with, and list any non-freelance jobs you’ve held as well as mention that you are self-employed doing such and such work.
Don’t Be Afraid of Internships
A lot of people think that because I’m a freelancer, I don’t need to worry about getting internships in my field because I already have a job. That couldn’t be further from the truth. While a lot of the things I’ve learned and use in my work are self-taught, if you get a good internship where you do more than secretarial or grunt work, you’ll often learn a lot more in a shorter period of time on a job than you would otherwise. Also, having internships will look good on your resume, and it is worth asking your employer about projects you worked on that you may be able to include on your portfolio. But be careful of the last one, ensure that you have permission from your employer because anything you do while working for them can be considered their intellectual property and they may not like you claiming partial credit for it, but its always good to ask just in case.
But also be careful of what internships you take and what other obligations you may have with current clients on the freelancing side of things. Make sure that you’ll still have the time and energy to fulfill any ongoing or pre-existing commitments with your clients while on the internship. Also be aware that some companies may have you sign an agreement not to work on anything else while you are under their employment.
Experiment
Another great thing about college is that it’s a great place to experiment with new ideas. Try out new business management tactics and procedures. Take the time to look at your processes and think about how you can refine them. It is a lot easier to recover from messing something up while in college than when you’re out in the real world.
Relax
As a freelancing student, you’ll probably be spending a lot of your time working. Maybe even more than you would if you had a more “regular” job. Between academic commitments and your client work, you may have little time to spend on yourself, and that is one of the important benefits of freelancing as a whole. Plan at least an hour or two a day where you just relax and not do any school or client work. Maybe even plan an entire day or two a month (or more often depending on your schedule) where you just have “me” time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone for 3 weeks or more without taking time for myself and it’s almost always ended up in burn out, which can be dangerous, especially if it affects your academic work.
The Chromebook and Chrome OS
Just as expected, yesterday at Google I/O, the elusive Chromebook was announced. Samsung and Acer are launching the first two such devices, available this summer. The biggest drawback for me is the price. Both Chromebooks are priced just a little on the expensive side for what they deliver. Both will come in WiFi and 3G models (Acer’s 3G model will come later than the rest at an as yet unannounced price), and start at $349 (Acer WiFi) to $429 (Samsung WiFi) to $499 (Samsung 3G). The pricing on the Acer is closest to what I was hoping for, but with only 6.5 hours of battery life and the very clunky almost 90s-era laptop design, I’m hesitant to drop the money. The Samsung model does much better with it’s design (similar to the Cr-48 Google has been shipping to their pilot program participants) and boasts 8.5 hours of battery life, but it’s still a little on the pricey side for what it really is. I guess we’ll see how I feel when the devices actually ship, but I think I may wait for another Chromebook to launch before I get one.
Another huge announcement that came from yesterday’s event is full offline support for Gmail, Calendar, and Docs. Previously there was a sudo-offline support through Gears, but Google itself abandoned that a while back because it didn’t quite work as well as it should have. Google has apparently been using this offline support internally for months now, and this summer the rest of the world is going to get it. This is a huge win for Google in their quest to get more people to use their services. I’ve been hoping for something like this for a long time because I really do want to use their suite of applications more, but I require offline access to my stuff since I don’t have connectivity all the time.
With that said, I am interested to see if there will be distributions of Chrome OS (or Chromium OS) that will be available to install on non-Chromebook machines. It seems like Google is putting a lot of effort into working with their hardware partners to make a seamless hardware and software integration, similar to what Apple does with it’s own machines. It’ll be interesting to see how officially they will support installing Chrome OS on other devices, since that is something that I’d be curious to try out on my MacBook Pro, especially since Chrome OS is pretty lightweight, it won’t take a very large partition to run on, and it would be nice to have the option to boot into a very lightweight OS from time to time to do things that don’t require a full, desktop application oriented OS.
Google’s Cloud Music Service
Yesterday at Google I/O, Google announced their Music Beta service, which is a direct competitor to Amazon’s recently launched Cloud Player. There are a few important differences at launch between the two services that will definitely affect how widely the two are adopted and which one will catch faster.
Limits
Amazon’s Cloud Player has a free limit of 5GB of storage (although purchasing one album from Amazon MP3 gives you a year subscription of 20GB, which is cheaper than spending the normal $20 for the upgrade). Google has taken quite a different approach on this, and rather than giving a hard limit on space, they limit by the number of songs, capped at 20,000. That is quite ambitious, considering that the average MP3 file is between 5 and 8MB each, if someone were to upload 20,000 songs, it would easily reach or surpass 100GB. But then, relatively few people have more than 5-6,000 songs and would be far under that limit. So in that respect, it’s like wireless carriers and their “unlimited” data plans. Yeah, technically you’re unlimited, but so few people actually go above a certain amount that they’re able to offer it without worry that everyone is actually going to reach a usage level that threatens the network stability (of course AT&T might disagree with that philosophy now). It’ll be interesting to see how and if Google’s limit changes over time as more and more people start using the service.
In this category, I’d call it a win for Google.
Availability
To start, Google’s service is currently an invitation-only beta, which severely limits the reach for the next few months as people as slowly let into the beta program. But other than that, Amazon’s service is available through their website (using HTML5 for the vast majority of the website, Flash is only required for uploading), as well an Android application. Google’s service is available online (Flash required; interesting considering Google’s obsession with HTML5 and desire for things to work on any browser available) and through an Android application.
The commonality between the two so far is the absence of an iOS application. Amazon does get around this with their web player, which can be used just fine using a browser on any iOS device. But Google gives no options for iOS devices to access the service, without a native app and with the web player running entirely on Flash, these potential users are left out in the cold, having to either choose Amazon’s Cloud Player or wait for Apple’s rumored cloud music service.
I’d call it a narrow victory for Amazon here since it is 1) widely available to the public and 2) in a backwards way, it supports more devices.
Integration
Since both services have an Android app, it is fair to compare how well integrated they are to Android. As a small disclaimer, I do not have an android device and since Google’s Music Beta service is invite-only, I wouldn’t be able to test that out myself at this point even if I wanted to; I’m only going off of what I’ve read from other tech blogs about their thoughts and what they’ve gathered from Google about the service. On this front, Google seems to have the upper hand with their Music Beta application being better integrated into Android as a replacement for the stock music player than Amazon’s which seems to be just a secondary music player. I’m sure that with time this will even out though.
Overall
I’m still on the fence about what I will eventually use. Partly because I like that I would actually be able to use Amazon’s service while moving about on my iPhone, I would prefer to have Google’s massive song limit. And partly because I’m still holding out to see what Apple announces in a few weeks at WWDC and just hope that their service meets my needs better than the other two. If I had to choose one over the other, I would go with Amazon’s service, mainly because it’s the only one that I’d be able to use away from my computer (where I have iTunes anyway).
Chrome OS Launch Soon?
It seems that Google may be gearing up for a public launch of Chrome OS tomorrow at Google I/O. If so, this would mean the end of a six-month delay for the OS, which would be much welcomed. I, for one, am pretty excited about this launch, since I’ve been wanting to get my hands on Chrome OS for quite a while, but I’ve never felt comfortable running anything from the Chromium repository. Whether I try to install Chrome OS on my MacBook Pro or get a dedicated device will mainly depend on whether the Samsung event also slated for tomorrow evening is to announce a Chrome OS netbook.
I do hope that both of these rumors are true and that by Wednesday night we’ll know all the details about Chrome OS and the first publicly available Chrome OS netbook. The biggest factor then in determining how well it’ll sell is price. If Samsung builds a true netbook, I don’t see it being very expensive, or at least I would hope it isn’t. If it’s not in the $2-300 price range I imagine that a lot of the general public would feel a little uneasy about dropping that much money for such a lightweight device. Considering that netbooks are basically portable web-browsers and the idea is not to have much actually happening on the device itself (as far as processing and local storage), there isn’t a whole lot to raise the price for and it’ll be hard to justify spending more than $300 on one, even for me and I’m a pretty big geek.
I guess we’ll just have to wait for the truth in a few days.
Improved Google Docs Upload Process
A few days ago, Google Docs revamped their upload process. The biggest addition was the ability to select a folder to upload. When you upload a folder, a new collection is created with all of the files the original folder contained. It’s not going to change the world, but it does make uploading large groups of files much easier to do.
But the other big change was that they removed the need to go to a dedicated upload page. Now, you just click upload, choose whether you’re uploading files or a folder and your browser prompts you to select the items. Once you do that, a small display dialog appears in the bottom right corner of the window (see picture at right) with the status of the uploads. The files will be uploaded into whatever collection you are currently viewing, a feature that I’ve been wanting for quite a while. I love that the new process is incredibly streamlined now and it makes uploading much more simple and intuitive than before.
But wait, this process is still too complicated, because you are still forced to go through the process of selecting the files through a browser upload dialog. So how about just dragging and dropping files from your desktop onto your file list? Oh, you can do that too now. This is probably the coolest part, since it makes uploading documents as easy as moving it from one folder to another on your computer. The one drawback is that so far in my testing is that it doesn’t work with iWork files, which is what I use when I do things outside of Google Docs, but it seems to work for any other file type Google Docs supports.
For those of you that actually liked the old method of going to the dedicated upload page, you are still able to do so by selecting ”Basic” under the normal upload menu.
The Unification of Our Online Lives
An interesting post over at GigaOm’s WebWorkerDaily today lists the 4 needs we have for the “perfect web working tool”. I couldn’t agree more. In recent months, I’ve been making efforts to consolidate the various applications and services that I use on a regular basis, focusing on tools that allow me to be more mobile.
One of the reasons was my desire to be part of the Chrome OS Pilot Program, I applied back when it first started and unfortunately haven’t been selected (yet, at least), although one of my close friends was (I’ve since gotten to play around with it a little, but no regular use). The biggest trial of switching to Chrome OS is that there are no desktop applications, everything has to be “in the cloud” per-say. So far I’ve gotten quite a lot of my daily routine moved to the cloud, or at the very least, mirrored there so that it’s accessible if necessary. The biggest holdouts are my music and photo libraries and my development environment/workflow for client work. So far my media libraries are too large for any online service (without paying through the teeth), and I can’t really find any decent web-based development environments (I’m taking suggestions for any of these).
Of course, one of the challenges of moving to a cloud-based workflow is the numerous tools and services that I would have to use and switch between. This is one of the four needs that GigaOm’s post mentions, the need for a centralized dashboard. I’m hesitant to rely on one service to host and fulfill all of my needs for my workflow, since if that one service goes down I am left unable to do anything. Therefore, I do believe in using multiple different services for different needs, but having some kind of “web desktop” that allows me to access all of these disparate services from one place is invaluable. Even a self-hosted option would be good, although for it to reach the masses, it would need to be hosted for people.
The second big need that I can connect with is that of aggregated contacts and information. Currently, my desktop address book and Google Contacts are synced, which takes care of one part of that need (at least for me). But there is no easy way to maintain a constant syncing link between those contacts and my Facebook friends or Twitter followers (this could also be expanded for others that use services having similar connection features). There only exist one-time, one-way syncing available for this, and it is manual. As for communications, I can’t reiterate enough the need for a truly universal inbox that can combine email, Facebook messages, Twitter @replies and DMs, instant message conversations (AIM, Google Talk, MSN, Yahoo, etc.), Google Voice texts and voicemails, and any other direct communication methods commonly in use (no need to include regular Facebook news feed or Twitter feed posts in this). The internal conversation that is given on the GigaOm post is something that goes on all-too-often in my own head, and sometimes I will spend over an hour looking in over a dozen different places to find something that either I or someone else said. It should be easy to see my entire digital conversation history with any one person, no matter what service we used to communicate.
Hopefully, someone will step up to fill this void before too long, or I may have to start getting my hands dirty with writing my own.
Beautifying Sign-Ups and Logins
After the very insightful post about proper techniques to consider when creating e-commerce websites, here is a great tidbit about what to think about to make sign-up and login forms better. Great read, and definitely going to keep that in mind in the future.
Sparrow, Finally a Viable Mail.app Replacement
Two months ago I purchased an application called Sparrow, at the time it was relatively new and was a Gmail-only mail app. I’ve been looking for a solid replacement to Apple’s Mail.app for a while now, so I was intrigued. With the promise of full IMAP account support in the works, and with so much praise already, I decided I woud fork over the $10 and buy it and see how I liked it. If I wasn’t impressed, I would only be out $10, so I wasn’t too worried.
The Inbox
For a month or so I used it with my two Google Apps accounts, since they were the only ones that were supported at the time. The interface is very simple, and very reminiscent of the Tweetie for Mac interface. Each account has it’s own inbox, there is no universal inbox, so if that is really important, this probably isn’t the app for you.
First, Sparrow automatically groups messages by thread, and it will show all messages in the thread, even if some of them are not in the Inbox, just like in the web version of Gmail. As you can see to the right, you can easily tell at a glance a lot of the important information about a message thread: attachments, who the senders of the thread are (a comma separated list of everyone that has sent a message in the thread), how many messages are in the thread, and if you have replied to the most recent message in the thread. Also, if you have any labels applied to messages, it will denote that by coloring the top right corner of the message with the color you have set for the label in the preferences.
In one of the updates since I purchased the app, multi-touch gestures were added. My two favorites are pinching open/closed a message into a new window, and three finger swiping a message open into a drawer.
Message Views
There are two ways of viewing messages, either in the drawer or a new window.
Drawers
One of the biggest complaints visually about Apple’s Mail.app is that there is no option for a three-pane message view. Several 3rd party plugins aim to fix this, but as yet there is no official way to accomplish this. That’s one thing that makes Sparrow nice, you can now choose to view your messages like this. Of course, on the other hand there is no option to view your messages in the split-pane view that Mail.app and most other email applications provide. So take that how you will.
The appealing part of using the drawer is that all of your main interactions occur within one unified window, save for replies and forwards which will always open into a new window. Also, you can make use of the three-finger-swipe to open and close the drawer.
The one drawback as I see it of using the drawer is that it takes up a lot more screen real estate, since even if you have no message selected, it’s still there; just a big empty blank window. Also, when you reply or forward a message, the original still appears in the drawer. This may not be a big issue for some, but personally when I’ve taken action on an email, I want it out of my sight.
New Window
Messages that you open in a new window are similar to those opened in the drawer, except they have their own window (obviously). The one advantage to new windows is that once you take an action (reply, archive, forward) on the message, Sparrow automatically closes it out, since logically you won’t need to view that message anymore.
The drawbacks here are that your screen can quickly become cluttered with multiple windows if you forget to close one out after reading it. On the upside, you have the option to pinch open and closed messages in a new window, which can be fun.
Proper Gmail IMAP Support
This isn’t really one of the major things about Sparrow, but I’m so excited and happy about it I had to make it it’s own section. I’ve been using Mail.app and my Gmail accounts through IMAP for years now. Because of the way that Gmail organizes it’s IMAP folders, Mail.app has a hard time mapping certain folders to their function (mainly Trash, Drafts, and Spam), and so I’ve had to fore-go the traditional keyboard shortcuts for deleting and junking emails in favor of Mail Act-On shortcuts that do these actions properly. But because Sparrow was Gmail-only, it handles these things natively, which is awesome. Also because of this native Gmail-specific support, it works nicely with any labels you may have. Unfortunately because of how poorly Mail.app works with Gmail via IMAP, I have long since abandoned my use of labels because it was just too difficult to manage. But maybe with the ability to work with them properly now I may start using them once again.
The Little Things
One of the aspects of an applications design and functionality that matters the most are the little things that make life easy.
- If you use Gmail in your browser at all and know the keyboard shortcuts already, you can easily make Sparrow use those shortcuts rather than the default ones (which parallel Apple’s Mail.app).
- When you reply to or forward a message, and the original is in a new window, the original message is automatically closed out so you don’t have to worry about it.
Quick replies are very useful for firing off short replies or confirmations to emails you get. A small text box drops down below the subject line and above the message body and lets you type in a few short lines and hit send.- Minimalism to the Max. One of the biggest take-aways I’ve gotten from Sparrow is functional minimalism. Everything is tailored to unobtrusive emailing. One example of this is that you don’t need to have the app in the dock, you can relegate it to just the menu bar (which will kindly turn blue and display an unread message count when there are any). You can also choose to have it show up in both places if that’s your fancy.
- Growl notifications are my lifeline to what’s going on in the background. Sparrow uses them natively, which makes me happy. Also, you can turn off notifications by account, which can be useful if you get a large amount of daily email in one account.
Why I Switched
Apart from the fact that I’ve already paid for the app, I really love Sparrow. I mean really, really love it. I’ve been using Mail.app ever since I switched to Mac 8 years ago, and I’ve tried over a dozen other email applications and nothing has gotten me to switch, not even the Gmail web interface (although that is 90% because I have multiple accounts and not all of them are Gmail, and I don’t like having to go multiple places to do email). Everything is intuitive and simple, and it has a very Mac feel to it, even more-so than Mail.app. So, if you have an extra $10 to spare (and have a Mac of course), you should at least try out Sparrow, I promise you won’t be disappointed.
Apple Surpasses Microsoft In Almost Everything
It’s now official, Apple has surpassed Microsoft in profit. Over the past year Apple has slowly been making it’s way to shooting past Microsoft in pretty much every aspect, financially. First came the market cap a year ago, then revenue 6 months ago, and now profit. At this point, Apple is far ahead of Microsoft in each of these three areas. It’s about time, although it does mean that Apple isn’t really the underdog anymore, they are now bigger than Microsoft financially. In fact the only Microsoft has on Apple is OS market share, and that’s still going down, albeit slowly, but dropping all the same, and it’s only a matter of time before this changes as well.
