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I’m a dink.

Posted on: July 13th, 2011 by Sam Hotchkiss

So, Becky and I have been watching 80′s sitcoms on Netflix lately, and this word keeps coming up.  “Dink”.

I guess I was too young when the 80′s ended to fully embrace and appreciate this word, but it fully describes how I feel about myself right now.  I have always hated it when web developers have crappy sites, or incomplete sites, and especially when they put up stupid cliches like “the cobbler’s children have no shoes”.

This site has been completely barren of content for the better part of the last 8 months, because toward the end of last year, I was migrating hosts and didn’t properly backup before hitting the fateful “terminate instance” button.  Lost 50+ blog posts which were generating hundreds of hits a day, lost all of my portfolio, about pages, everything.

I found an old backup which had 20 or so of my posts, and put those back.  I’ve restored the screen shots of my portfolio, but still need to write the descriptions for each of the projects featured.  I’ve redesigned the site and got that up.  I’m going to be working on re-writing some of my more popular blog posts which were lost, and posting some new stuff.

Sorry for being a dink.

Another successful site launch!

Posted on: April 12th, 2009 by Sam Hotchkiss

SureShotPhoto.netThis 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.

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Building an eMail interface for Remember the Milk using PHP

Posted on: March 6th, 2009 by Sam Hotchkiss

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

rtmSo, 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…)

Quoting Programming Work

Posted on: February 10th, 2009 by Sam Hotchkiss

rates-freelanceSo, 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…)