I’ve also updated all the thumbnail images in the portfolio, after I figured out which Inkscape setting was degrading the quality. If you go into Inkscape Settings, then Bitmaps and set the ‘Oversample bitmaps’ setting to ’16×16′, you’ll get much nicer anti-aliasing on your bitmaps, especially if you’re rotating or resizing them.

I also took the opportunity to resize the thumbnails to make them a bit larger and to tidy up the formatting of the older ones, which looks much better.

I just added Codeistry to Sortfolio, 37Signals portfolio hosting/aggregating thing for web developers. As usual for 37Signals stuff, Sortfolio is very slick, simple and easy to use. The only thing that I didn’t really like is the budget range – it doesn’t really fit my experience:

Codeistry jobs are significantly more variable than these categories allow; I could really do with a ‘$100 – $10,000′ category. I don’t really want to drive away interesting smaller clients by saying that I only care about jobs that are over $3000, but I also do $10,000 jobs occasionally too. Hmmm…

Anyway, I’ll be updating the Codeistry entry over the next few days, adding more examples and screenshots. I’ll assess things in a couple of weeks and let you know if it works – and if I actually get any leads and new business via Sortfolio.

Anyway, I’ve now carved out some time in my schedule to devote solely to working on my own stuff, so I’ll be keeping this site up to date from now on.

As a start, I’ve added a new job to the portfolio. A ‘new’ website for The Cambridge Interfaith Programme, completed at the end of 2009. I have a queue of other jobs to add, so expect to see a load more turning up soon.

I’ve also souped up the metadata that gets output in the page’s code, so that I’m now outputting a meta description tag – this outputs whatever I’ve typed into the page’s Description field in MODx.

I’ve also started using MODx built in meta keywords system, so some pages now have some keywords set.

A little while age I also added a Creative Commons license to the page footer but forget to mention it on the blog. This means that the site’s content is now actually marked as copright of Codeistry now – which it wasn’t before. As I’ve chosen a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license, this also means that anyone can re-use, re-mix, translate or re-purpose any of the stuff on here for whatever they want, provided it’s non-commercial and they credit the original source.

Anyway, here’s the old footer:

and here’s the new one:

This list is intended to make you think about your own website and give you practical, actionable steps that you can take right now to improve things. None of these things are difficult and most of them can easily be done in an hour or two. Print this off, mark the ones that you think you need to work on, and tick off one a week.

See the 9 Steps to Improve your small business website article for the steps!

One of the ways I want to give back, is by getting more involved in the MODx community and to start contributing some of the snippets and code that I’ve created for MODx over the last year. This is code that I’ve created for my own use that I think would benefit others in the community and that we can all help improve. I’ve started this process already with the ChunkIf snippet (below) – but there’s lots more where that came from.

I realise that I have a pretty nice life, working for myself, working at home on my own schedule and doing OK, financially. So the other thing that I had in mind was helping those less fortunate. I’d like Codeistry itself to do some good for other people, as well as me. To this end, I’m planning to start investing a portion of the proceeds from each job Codeistry does into small businesses in need around the world. Small amounts of money can go a long way in Africa or rural South America and provide seed capital for entrepreneurs to start their own businesses, lifting themselves and their families out of poverty; this is called microfinancing.

Best of all, there’s a really simple way to do this called kiva.org – a site which makes it easy to invest in small businesses in the developing world.

The plan is for each Codeistry job to invest in one entrepreneur in the developing world, via Kiva. I can then link to the progress reports on Kiva and see how they’re doing – and maybe get my clients involved too, forming a connection between all our businesses.

New ventures

I’ve also got a few ideas for new web based businesses and sites which I want to get off the ground this year. I’ll be talking more about these later, so watch this space!

Build up Codeistry

In order to do all of these things, I’ll need to keep myself clothed and fed – which is where Codeistry comes in. We had a pretty good start but there’s lots of potential in my niche, so I want to do even better this year.

I’ll be blogging about progress with all these throughout the year. Hope you had a good 2008 and have a prosperous 2009!

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been as much holiday as we’d hoped – as I’ve suddenly got more work than expected – but for me, it’s proved to be a very useful and successful experiment in flexible working.

While I’ve been sitting in our apartment on Sutter Street, I’ve been continuing some web development work for clients in Memphis, TN & done some consulting for a client in London, followed up with a transatlantic training session via Skype.

My wife had a job interview in beautiful and (unusually) snowy Vancouver after the conference, so we spent a day there too. I ended up doing a couple of hours work there, including a Skype call to Memphis, all on my little laptop – which I bought last time I was in Vancouver.

Back in San Francisco now for a few days of proper holiday and then back to the UK for Christmas Eve – it’s been a pretty busy couple of weeks!

Tools for flexible working

There were a load of bits of software that helped to make seamlessly working on the road possible, even easy. My laptop is a HP NC6400 that’s been upgraded to 4Gb of Ram and runs the excellent Ubuntu Linux (Intrepid 8.10). This setup is easily capable of running a full LAMP stack, so I can develop websites on the go. I generally use gedit for code editing, setup basically like textmate as explained here, minus the ruby specific bits.

I keep a copy of everything – the contents of my /home folders from my desktop and laptop – in the cloud using SpiderOak. This means that I have rolling versioned backups of everything, automatically kept, all the time – this is very handy on its own. It also means that I can download anything from any of my computers, wherever I am, given internet access. This is very useful when you’re away from home, as you know that you can’t really forget anything – if it’s available on your desktop PC at home, then you can access it via SpiderOak.

As a last resort, Ubuntu ships with remote desktop support built in, so I can also just connect to my desktop PC over the internet and use it like I was at home, albeit rather slowly.

I also use Basecamp for project management which means that my clients and I can manage projects together and keep in touch, wherever I happen to be.

Those are the bits of software that really shone on this trip – but all the other little ones that I use everyday, most of which are open source, were also just as useful as they always are: gmail, pidgin/empathy, dropbox, firefox + firebug, tomboy, GnoTime, bazaar, etc…

I also don’t want the support contract to be onerous or expensive – it should be good value and you should only pay for what you use. I want to create the kind of support contract that I’d want to sign up to myself, basically.

Only pay for what you use

There will be no monthly fee or retainer – you only pay for what you use. I’ll keep track of the support time spent and invoice you at the end of the month. If you don’t need anything for a few months, that’s fine – no charges & no invoice.

I’ll provide a fully itemised list of all the support incidents and follow-up work done, so that you know exactly what’s been going on and where the money went.

Free stuff

I think it would be nice to offer some free pro-active support, on the same pay for what you use principle.

Periodic website health checks might be something that people would find useful.

This would consist of an automated health check, making sure that the site is available and that all the links, pages, images and files are present and correct. This report would be automatically supplied to you, for nothing. I’m thinking that a sitemap, with broken links highlighted in red, plus a text report, might be quite nice.

Optionally any issues (missing pages or whatnot) could be followed up, on a pay-as-you-go basis.