In the past year an a half I have really been updating this site more and more. Sometimes I go a few weeks without updating and sometimes I update too often, but I always think of what can I be posting on the site and how can the site be a reflection of who I am.

I also like a place to show some of my work. I keep trying to get some public projects released, much like the Google Voice Notification script (which is sadly probably way broken now).

I show you part of the header now of what I’m working on, hopefully it will be to everyone’s liking once it’s done.

I’m going to be self sufficient this year.

In this economy you can never have too much work and to be honest to a freelancer this is a goldmine. This might sound difficult to believe but its I’ll share with you a few tips about freelancing today.

What can I expect?

Expect competition. Furious competition. Maybe you still have your job, maybe you don’t but I can assure you many of your comrades are out on the streets and just like you would have fierce competition for a full-time job right now, expect a lot of competition for contract jobs. You’re going to need to be faster, cheaper (I’ll explain in a minute), and better than all of them. You achieve this by picking your battles and by befriending as many people as you can. Most of my gigs come from friends I’ve made along the way that can’t take a project for some reason or that need assistance with a project they have already taken on.

Where are the Jobs?

Everywhere. While going into past workplaces and recommending they update their Point of Service systems with one that I can custom build for them, has not gone well. (I swear I will change that video store’s cataloguing system if its the last thing I do! ) I don’t think it was a waste of time, if I see a system that I can make better I immediately talk to whoever is in charge and leave my card. These are mainly just practice for when you really need to pitch your work to somebody since they will mostly be happy with their current system, but if they do decide to change it they’ll think of you.

Talk to your friends, let them know that you have some extra time now that your WoW character is in hiatus and you would like some extra work. Maybe they’ll hear something and they’ll pass it along, its better if you have a whole bunch of people with their eyes open than just you. One point I’d like to stress however, talk to your friends, do not whine to your friends. We want good leads, not somebody who has no idea what he/she is talking about that mentioned something about a website. We are trying to make more with our time, not waste it.

Finally, scouring Craigslist and other job boards will be where the bulk comes from, with all the people looking at job boards these days a well constructed, resume will go a long way. Lots of companies cut in-house staff and are looking for contractors to pickup the slack. This is where most of the opportunity lies if you are not friends with many people or would rather not discuss your job search.

How do I choose a Project for Myself?

This is going to be the most important part of your new solo career. Picking your projects is important because if you pick too big of a project you might end up losing money in other, smaller, opportunities. What has worked for me personally is making sure all the projects I take are about 10-20 hours of work.

This is because I have a day-job and I have weeklong projects there. I really prefer to just have projects that take a weekend or two of part-time work rather than slave over it for weeks and weeks. If you are looking for work and you have the time, the longer projects pay more. Try and find projects that require a specific rare skill that you possess process automation, bug-testing and flash games come to mind as things I always see demand but not enough supply.

I try to take projects that do not require me to build a whole CMS from scratch and, in the interest of full disclosure, I preach WordPress and Joomla. These open-source CMS are very coder-friendly. I can do band websites and small community sites in no time I just have to get the theme together and build custom plugins for the user the whole permalinks system and back-end editing, publishing, comments and user system is provided for me. This is something I tell the client beforehand of course. I explain that if he wanted me to build a completely custom solution that were nearly as polished the price would go up (a lot). Most of the time, they really have no problems with this.

A few points about this:

• Do not be afraid to tell the client how much a project will cost if you build him a whole CMS.

• Do not promise a completely custom solution and come back to him with a WordPress implementation.

• Do not just install WordPress/Joomla. You need to harden these installations so that they are technically bullet-proof. This means changing the permissions of some key files and installing a caching system so that if they get dugg the website can survive the hit amongst other things.

Everything else

Once you are doing freelance projects you have to watch your own back. This means you need to stay on top of projects, and clients. It is your responsibility to have a concise list of deliverables that you can check-off as you go along so that you understand when the project has officially ended. Don’t get dragged into endless projects that don’t pay you what you are worth.

Also, please, enjoy your work!

A few years ago I was working with ModWorks Group, we worked with project such as Deskmod, PixelAttic and ModBlog and we also had a webdesign company called Ramped. I was happy there even if i was the last one to find out about anything. I was living in Iowa and I was a hermit, I never really go out anyways but in Iowa State I’d randomly take walks with friends around campus and what not, i had some freedoms i never had before.

One night i thought up of an idea of having a campuswide event system, where you would find out of what is going on in campus and maybe start our own parties and stuff. There was a popular blog on campus called Strangetalk and people did these gatherings already but it was more amongst the geeks than anything. So the idea wasn’t new, it was just organize it and have it readily available and have people talk about parties and what not. Have people discuss events. I was going to use all my deskmod / modblog knowledge for this. Then i thought bigger, what if, you have a page that divides campuses by their acronym, wed be iastate.whatever.com and University of Northern Iowa would be uni.whatever.com, we could share web designs and just change the university’s colors and stuff. Have one main page and from there go to many member sites where you could see locally whats going on, and also see what your friends are doing in other campuses.

This was around mid 2001 when i started with this idea. I called it Akronym and registered Akronym.com/.net/.org on September 26, 2001. I still own those domains. School got crazy, work got crazy, but i still talked about some day doing that site. I left Iowa State and returned home, without having done that site. There was one coincidence tho, somebody in Iowa State came up with a similar idea and did a site which was basically what i was envisioning.

• CampusAuthority

The idea of having one central site which fed from all the local sites was also not new, and i saw a site doing it aswell.

• IndyMedia

CampusAuthority later also had diffrent designs for diffrent campuses but they didnt feed off each other in one central page like IndyMedia does. But that wasnt a concern for me anymore because i was in Puerto Rico again and that whole campus frame of mind was gone.

I no longer worked with ModBlog but i still talked to a few people, one night i was checking the local sites here and i noticed there was a big gap in the local entertainment scene and i thouhgt, you know what, i could easily modify that CampusAuthority idea and make it a site about events in a city. Have people come in and submit the events, people subscribe to events, have an alarm system that lets you choose which of your friends can see what event you want to go to so you can plan your weekend out an then leave the computer and have fun. This was obviously targetted for this city and therefore had to be in spanish, but what could be a good, short, catchy name for that. MiWiken.com/.net/.org was registered November 11, 2003.

I immediately thought of the possibilities and did some mock ups and started coding parts of it (will edit this with pictures when i get home). I even added the (then alpha) Google Maps into the script through a little applet tool that used the api to make a little iframe with it, this was before google let you actually do this through the api itself.

Through all of this I got involved with work and with other stuff, but i always tried to talk to Gorman about the project, or asked him copyright advice and stuff, but Gorman is literally GorBot. He works and works and works. My instant messenges went un-answered, so did my emails. I never got to tell him about the idea, but sites started popping up around the web that reflected what i was thinking but didnt quite make it. They didn’t quite make the jump to that unexploited night-scene / geek-blogger arena.

Here we are now, MiWiken had a splash page for years, and never any content. I was looking for a good webdesigner that would help me with the project, looking for help, any help. A site this big needs lots of helping hands. So i kind of let it be and never worried.

So what is this MiWiken idea?

well now i can tell you and use examples which is an easy way through, I was very involved with ModBlog at the start so i knew how to make a good friend-of-a-friend network site that let you have good back-end code so you could change profiles and templates for everything. That is, essencially, ModBlog. Sadly modblog was a bit late to the party and therefore couldnt compete with the LiveJournals and MySpaces of the web, but it has way better code behind it. Gorman Powered, what can i say? check out these reference links :

• ModBlog
• Digg
• Craig’s List
• MySpace
• Last.fm

You have a interface where you submit events in your area like you submit stories to Digg, you get them listed by area and type like on Craig’s List. In that site you have a profile, the profile gives you a blog where you can change the template and display it the way you want like in ModBlog (its glory days), and you have a friend of a friend network through those profiles like on MySpace, but so much better than MySpace because it actually has hanging out with your friends included in the package, not just random pointless shouts. Finally, the icing on the cake. Gorman always talked about having a “Brain” for the next version of Deskmod, i never understood what he meant, until way later when i was playing with Last.fm. Last.fm traks what you listen to (i listen to a lot of The Cure) and gives you statistics but more importantly it gives you suggestions.

Suggestions by your peers and suggestions by an automated system that has no bias but just information of what people listen. Brilliant! Add that to the page.

You have the end-all page for social networking, really connecting on a person-to-person level, and making new friends. That is what i wanted to do with MiWiken. I called it Social Calendaring, and it answers to solve the “I wanted to go but couldnt find anybody to go with” issue that keeps appearing after every major event.

Three years ago i got that idea, and ive been dragging my feet with it. Just recently I was wondering what had happened to Gorman after he went to FileFront since he once asked me to send him a resume but that never went through, and i stumbled upon Ramped being the main page and ImThere.com being the flagship site. ImThere. That would be such an awesome name for MiWiken if it were to be released in the US.

What is ImThere? It wouldnt say, and the GorBlog didnt answer many questions either. I asked Chad (Chad Ingram, who i worked with at ModWorks and is now a head developer at Ramped), and when i asked him what it was about because i think i had a similar idea he said “hmm, tell me your idea, and ill let you know if thats it”. I went on a panic and I didnt know what to do, so i rushed to get to work on MiWiken again. Thinking for sure theyd kill me.

And here to why I am writting this. Ive had a great relationship with Gorman, Chad and the guys over at ModWorks/Ramped for many years. The whole reason I got into programming was because of Gorman and at ModWorks i learned what nobody has ever been able to teach me in years. Knowing the way Gorman and the rest of the guys code, I can never out match their coding and their site will be a tremendous success, but i am hoping that in writting this, and publishing it a little before the site publicly opens, therefore before i really know whats on the site, which i think is everything i posted above but better, I still have a fighting chance. That I will have ground to stand on if they decide to accuse me of tresspassing on their intellectual property. Which I doubt they will, and therefore, why i wrote this so far into the develpment cycle, after having known about the existance of ImThere for over 2 months.

Everything that is detailed in this post is pure speculation on what the contents of ImThere.com will be, I dont have any knowledge, proof or “inside information” on this.

I wish them the best of luck and i will certainly be THERE (not at the launch party cause thats expensive >.>) but ill be refreshing my page a lot just like the old Deskmod.com days.

The following links lead you to Gorman’s projects which i was discussing here:

GorBlog (http://blog.g0rman.com)
ImThere (http://www.imthere.com)
ramped (http://www.ramped.com)