Helping You Rock Out Your Site Like A Rockstar!

Recently I became a blogger for TwitterWatchdog.com. (By the way, in the title is the little motto “Watching Out for You, One Tweet at a Time”, so I cannot be given credit for making up such a title for this post.) The site is all about Twitter. Topics include Twitter scams, Twitter tools, Twitter Tips and just about anything helpful for users. The site was started by Skeeter Hansen and Al Ferretti, who have made it their goal to help Twitter users harness the power of Twitter effectively. Both men

For those who go to TechCrunch and see all the frequent posts about Twitter stuffed between all the other news, this is a great site to get your Twitter news. In fact, if you are very successful with using Twitter and know some things that most do not, you can become a TwitterWatchDog.com writer. All the the writers are friendly, and both Skeeter and Al are welcoming. I just posted my first article the other day called, You Can Now Publish Your Facebook Page Updates to Twitter!

Although I will still write Twitter posts here from time-to-time, I will be rolling up my sleeves and digging up as much as I can to contribute to TwitterWatchDog.com.

Deciding to freelance is a big choice. It is not easy and often in the beginning, you will have to have a side job to supplement your income until you can be dependent enough as a freelancer. Even being a freelancer, it can be difficult. There are so many others outside in the same niche that it is very competitive. However, during your decision and right after you decide to become a freelancer, here are some things to prepare yourself for the freelancing mentality.

Prepare a solid portfolio. You might get excited and post everything in your portfolio, but your clients are looking for your creativity, versatility as a designer, and your overall product quality. Your portfolio is very much that first thing, just like a resume, that your client will be wowed by and want to use your services.

Make sure you have a good reputation. You might sell yourself short and degrade yourself, but as I have been told by Marcie Hill on As NOT Seen on TV, you should have faith in your work and be proud of it. Each piece of work should be of the same or greater quality than the previous product. Be knowledgeable in your field and able to break it down into simple terms for clients not as savvy in the subject. Be consistent and also do not procrastinate. While some of your clients may be lax, others have a time table in mind. Be professional and for complex projects, a contract may be necessary. Sometimes a contract is mandatory for clients who require a non-disclosure agreement- meaning that you cannot mention to anyone that you worked on their site.

Be prepared to brand yourself in a way that makes you unique enough to stand out. Do you have a certain way you design that is different? What kind of services can you offer? Do you only do web design, or perhaps you can develope complex websites from scratch? Mention that and how your way could help a client’s site pop. Remember, you are designing for another person and they have expectations of you. Your client has a direction they want there site to take and also goals to reach. Your design could make or break them. Make sure you are clear on your services so you do not have clients who are confused on what you offer for a price. Do not undersell, but also overselling can be as much as a killer. While you would like to make money, underselling could be not worth the time. Remember that your are charging for your time, and creativity, so be confident.

Always be on the look for new clients. You might have a few winning clients, but eventually one or all of them may decide to go with another designer. Do not rely on them as things change. It would not be because you are a bad freelancer, but that the person they chose could bring their website to the next level. Or, it could be the result of the economy. It happens, so you have to be prepared and make sure you are always open. It is not the end of the world if you lose a client unless you lost it because you were unprofessional.

Are you considering to dabble in freelancing? How have you prepared yourself? What other advice can you offer?

I am as much a Facebook addict as I am a Twitter addict, and it did not take TechCrunch in their article Facebook Tweaks Design, Drops Rounded Corners to tell me the notices about Facebooks design tweaks.

Already with every application and module a person adds to their profile, along with all the followers (I currently have over 1600 followers/ friends at Facebook), load time can get a bit bulky. Sometimes I even get the Facebook timeout connection too. Kind of reminds me of the Twitter Fail Whale. Yay, and I say congrats to the person who though rounded corners in Facebook would really be an asset, but really – keep it simple.

With the ridiculous and non-relevant advertisements, plus the applications, it is insane. Just in case those of you were not aware, there was an application to be able to change your Facebook background, but you had to download a toolbar. There are others than ask you to add a person, invite your friends to the group, and go to some chatroom to get the link to add your background. That is insane. It should be simple and not involve anything but adding the application itself. I decided to avoid that application like the plague because I really do not want another toolbar on my computer and I am really afraid of what the load time would be even though I have cable internet.

Although I would love to pretty up my Facebook, I am content with what it looks like. Getting fancy with a product like Facebook will degrade it and make it look like MySpace, the immature reject of Facebook.

What kind of design tweaks do you think Facebook should consider trying? What should be added? What should be removed?

I have to agree with TechCrunch’s article Right Before Facebook Bought It, FriendFeed’s Real-Time Stream Saw A Flood Of Usage, that I had no clue why it was bought. Kind of reminds me how no one knows why Yahoo! is shutting down Geocities. In fact, I recall Robert Scoble asking who would leave Friendfeed after Facebook had just bought the site. According to the Friendfeed blog – FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request, things will go on as usual until future plans are decided… or at least that was the gist of it that I got from reading.

So, will yet another social network service go mainstream? Who knows, but I guess until Facebook actually does something with Friendfeed, then until any plans are revealed, we can only hope that Friendfeed does not become integrated into Facebook like so many services that have been bought up by Yahoo and Google.

I wonder if the Sherman Anti-trust Act might have to be enforced with these Internet companies? Or perhaps I am thinking too much into it. I already use both services, but I wonder if Friendfeed will eventually be phased out, forcing using to just use Facebook?

What do you think? Do you use Friendfeed? What do you use it for? Do you see the site either becoming more mainstream or being phased out?

With recent news of either Tr.im url shortening service closing, Tr.im staying opening, or via TechCrunch, Tr.im Cuts Off Bit.ly’s 301works Idea, Wants to Sell, I am finding it a better venture to just have your own URL shortener. In fact, I have found quite a few recent articles that have stemmed from this Tr.im mess. Regardless if Twitter prefers one url shortener service over another because of close ties, or Tr.im was closing or selling, people only want to know if the service is going to continue and if they can use the service when tweeting links. People want a reliable service, even if it is free.

Shortened URLs are a wonderful resource to use with Twitter, Facebook, and many other social networks because it saves space and the potential eyeful of a URL with many characters. Of course, people could have shorter titles for their blogs, but what fun would that be if you cannot play with words. The title is very much the first thing a person sees and if it is catchy, people are apt to check it out.

Many of the free services are highly competitive for visitors attention. While some people love TinyURL.com, others like bit.ly, or another related short url service with a very short URL like tr.im, they all practically do the same. Some offer user accounts so you can monitor your submissions, and others have different ways of coding. All are usually free. Some have advertisements to monetize the site. However, they are all useful.

There are even free resources that you can install and have your own URL shortener on your domain, or even a side domain. I offer a free GPL one you can install and customize called PHPurl. I am in the works of continuing the PHPurl project to contain a WordPress plugin to twitter with the script using your chosen url shortener, even ones using PHPurl as its core. I also may come up with a captcha version. I am the only developer working on it, and so far my plate has been busy with other things that pay to put food on my son’s and my own plate.

Of course, there are more free URL shortener scripts that you can download. In fact, WebResources Depot has a great list.

What url shortening service do you use? What do you think about being able to having your own url shortener on your domain? And of course, what kind of suggestion would you like to see in PHPurl in the future?

I was feeling in the mood to do something outside-the-box with a roundup article. Some web and graphic designers have an odd, but interesting style… or as the title of this article says – otherworldly. Each of the sites featured below contain something pertaining to the world or environment and are done in a unique way. Some of the sites are featured because of their layout, some for the work they have done, and some – a little bit of both.

DesignSpasm is a portfolio by Sean Geng. If you roll your mouse over some of the graphics, they move, literally giving the page a unique and spacey feel.
One of his designs I liked from his portfolio was his water color effect.

Smriyaz is home to Mohamed Riyaz, a freelance designer from the United Kingdom. His layout features several well done and inspiring photographs. His main page has a photo of a foggy day that it just about looks mystical.

Kinetic Shadows is literally a jungle! From top to bottom, this is every wild person’s dream. If you check it out, be sure to check out the detail of the Seymour look-a-like (Little Shop of Horrors.)

Visual Elixir really is an elixir of design eyecandy! This portfolio by Jim Gunardson contains a lot of illustrations that rock!

Design Disease has a simple but eypopping under-the-sea look. By the way, Design Disease gives out a few of WordPress themes that are well done too!

Studio7Designs is a diverse portfolio that encompasses everything about the natural environment. What I liked first thing was stepping in and seeing their
vector graphics. They are quite unique!

Joolz is the portfolio of Julien Morel. Julien’s site may be simple, but his portfolio packs a punch with abstract graphics that are really bizarre and inspirational at the same time.

Are there any portfolios that you have seen that you believe should be on this list?

With the recent Denial-of-Service Attack (DOS) on Twitter, it has some users wondering what it is and how to prevent it.

According to Wikipedia, a denial-of-service attack is:

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users.

Some ways to create a DoS attack are ping flood, ping of death (PoD), smurfing, IRC flood, nuke, peer-to-peer, fraggling, SYN flood, teardrop, and distrubuted denial of service attack (DDoS). Actually, there are a lot more funny terms for DoS attacks. In the simplest manner, each of these DoS attacks require intense communication between between a computer or several computers to disrupt the site’s server by either using all its resources or slowing it down until it cannot be accessed properly. You can find out more at Wikipedia for each of the DoS terms.

I have had this happen on the first server I co-owned when I started webhosting. We had just reached 350 clients when that had happened and it was only a minor setback. Still, it was annoying and because most of these attackers use spoof IP addresses, it is hard to track, so I left it up to the company that leased the servers to go after the culprit. That is pretty much you can do when attack as it is illegal anyway. Server-side, our server was upgraded to prevent further attacks.

However, to prevent this, it is recommended your servers are up-to-date with the software and hardware on the server, especially those with features that can prevent flooding. Many major sites, even Microsoft have been victims of DoS attacks, so it is not all that uncommon. It might be lame advice, but it is the first prevention against such and your best defense up front.

Have you ever witnessed a DoS attack on a site? Was it yours? What other advice can you give to those wanting to know more about preventing DoS attacks?

After reading both WebProNews and TechCrunch on their articles about the new Twitter homepage, I am still left with questions. Jeremy Muncy does a great job breaking down the new Twitter homepage in his article Breaking Down Twitter’s New Homepage for those needing a little more explanation.

I could care less that the front page looks a bit too trendy in design. The problem is that as Jeremy pointed out, Twitter users would not be able to use this feature. For me, being a Twitter addict, I would love to have access to this feature other than entering it in the search in the sidebar of my profile. Right now, the Twitter search page is very plain and boring. What, are current users? – chopped liver?

There are no links to the main search page for Twitter users to directly visit. I do think that the real-time search function is an awesome attribute of Twitter and I think it could play big in helping them finally monetize their product. However, I revisit this one point again that I have in the past… when is Twitter going to tighten up on watching trending topics and specify what is spam. If people are going to protest, at least pass around a petition link instead of repeatedly throw up on the stream a pointless message. These type of trending topics could hurt Twitter when people visit the page. As anyone knows, your first 30 seconds on a site will leave a huge impression. If people are trending a topic that either seems immature, or pointless, they will turn away. That is the impression I have already gotten in responses from bloggers and my own visitors.

What do you think of this? What would you suggest to Twitter?