Hotchkiss Consulting

It’s closing in on 6 months that I’ve been doing only freelance development– while I moonlighted and worked in an office for years, I love being my own boss, and part of that has been setting my own schedule. It seems like there are never enough hours in the day, but here is the pattern that I’ve found that seems to work, at least for the time being:

10am – Wake up, check and respond to email, deal with any urgent issues

10:30am – Breakfast time– grab a bite and dive in.  Morning time is multi-tasking time– I can do bug fixes, put together bids for projects, etc.  Anything that can be done in under an hour, this is the time for it.  Also, this is when I handle most of my phone and instant-message client communications with clients here in the states.

1pm – 7pm - This is my ‘me and my wife’ time– generally, Becky and I will voyage into town, go to the gym (we play racquetball every day, and we love it!), maybe watch a movie, have a nice lunch, and enjoy life.  It’s nice to be able to run errands and go to the gym while most people are at work– a real time-saver!

7pm – 3am – This is my focus and get things done time.  I’ll make a couple pots of coffee and get to work– This allows me to have fewer interruptions (I turn off my email alerts and chat and get down to business) and also allows me to communicate with my clients in Australia and, towards the end of the night, the UK.

So if you get an email from me in the middle of the night– don’t be alarmed, that’s just how I work!

This weekend, we launched Becky’s new photo blog, http://sureshotphoto.net/.  This was a quick launch, and Becky hasn’t started posting yet, but we got the gorgeous slideshow of her photos going, and man oh man, does it look good.

The WordPress theme is from http://graphpaperpress.com/.  We are big, big fans of WordPress for a lot of simple to moderately complex sites (like this one you’re on right now).  Wordpress allows a lot of flexibility and customizability, and a well developed CMS backend.

What are the upsides of developing with WordPress?

1. Quick development.  With WordPress you’re building your site on top of a solid base that takes care of a lot of the basic stuff, which means less testing is necessary, and less new code is necessary.
2. Less expensive.  This ties into number 1– as it takes less time for us to develop your site on top of Wordpress, you pay less.
3. Easily extensible.  Because WordPress has such a large user base, there are thousands of extensions available.

(more…)

UPDATE: Scripts are available here: http://hotchkissconsulting.net/177/remember-the-milk-email-scripts/

So, in accordance with my plan to switch client communication from phone to email, I have decided that, instead of a Cell Phone, I will carry a Peek with me.  While it has been a rocky road so far, I trust that the people at Peek have some good updates coming down the pipeline, so I’m going to stick it out for a couple months and see how I like it.

The thing about the Peek is that it’s eMail only.  And I really do mean only.  No calculator, no games, no web browser, and no calendar.  For me, that just won’t do– I am an avid fan of Remember the Milk.  I keep it in my OS X dashboard and on my desktop email screen (I use GFYD, Google For Your Domain).  Having my RTM to go is a must.

Currently, RTM offers a couple email-based options.  You can email in new tasks, you can receive a list of your tasks for the day every morning via email, and you can receive an email reminder before a task is due.  This is a good start, but there are some problems:

1) With the daily schedule emails, you can only see what’s going on that day, you can’t see your entire schedule.  This information is crucial for setting appointments.

2) Reminder emails don’t have the task name in the subject line, meaning you have to open the email to see what you’re supposed to do.

3) You can’t do anything with the tasks– no marking them completed or postponing, you have to do this from the computer.

So, I wrote my own email interface, and will go over it and include my source files so you, too, can build your own (if you’ve got some PHP know-how).  If there’s enough interest, I will build a standalone, hosted solution for everyone of every skill level. (more…)

So, this morning I was reading an article by Eric Nagel (via Steve Poland) about how to estimate the cost of a consulting gig for a client.  Mr. Nagel recommends figuring out about how much time you think it will take, then doubling it and providing that as a quote.  I used to do that, but fell out of favor of it because I think you’re prone to scare away clients by giving them quotes that, for the most part, are considerably larger than the final bill.

I, instead, use a 3-number quote, where I quote the minimum time it will take (no way I’m getting it done faster than this), the maximum time it will take (no way it will take longer than this, and even if it does, I won’t bill you for more than this), and then the projected time (I usually end up coming in within 10% of this number) (more…)