Below are the 3 most recent journal entries recorded in A List Apart: The Full Feed's LiveJournal:

Thursday, January 2nd, 2014
1:00 pm	Rachel Andrew on the Business of Web Dev: Your Side Project as Insurance Policy http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/alistapart/main/~3/N9YOWQ40Ws0/your-side-project-as-insurance-policy http://alistapart.com/column/your-side-project-as-insurance-policy For some years I had an insurance policy. It would protect a part of my income if I found myself unable to work. As a client services business, with a business model that involved swapping time for money, this seemed sensible. If I physically couldn’t do any work, I wouldn’t be making any money. The terms of this policy, however, meant that if I was making money due to revenue not tied to me physically working, I wouldn’t be able to claim. At the beginning of 2013, my company finally made the transition away from client services to products. Our product, the CMS Perch, had started out as a side project and over four years had grown to the point where it could now be all we did as a company. With my income no longer linked to my ability to write code all day, it would be hard to make an insurance claim, so I cancelled the policy. Our product had essentially replaced the need for that policy. Little did I know what perfect timing I had in making that decision. Best-laid plans We headed into the new year full of plans, mostly regarding shipping lots of new features and related add-ons for the product. I also had personal plans. I’m a keen runner and I was training for my first marathon, with a coveted ballot place in the London Marathon. I had my training plan all mapped out. All of our plans for the year were turned on their head when I went out for a run one snowy day near the end of January, fell on ice and shattered my elbow. I was rushed into six hours of surgery that day and didn’t get back home until five days later. I am fortunate to still have any use of my right hand. Almost a year later, after a further two surgeries, I still have limited use of my dominant arm. Had we still been a client services business, this would have been a disaster. Most of our client work involved me being able to write code, and quickly. Writing words one-handed is annoying; writing code is near impossible. Even now with my fancy split keyboard and using Sticky Keys on my Mac, I’m slow and can only work for short periods. To our product business however, the effect of my injury has been negligible. Our product effectively insured us against my inability to work in the way I had done for the previous 12 years. Diversity is strength I’m not the only business owner who has discovered the power of products during difficult times this year. Fellow bootstrapper Garrett Dimon—founder of Sifter—had an unbelievably tough year following a routine ankle surgery that led to complications. As he wrote in early December, The other benefit of building a business, especially with recurring revenue that doesn’t depend on your hours worked, is that the income keeps coming in even if you’re disabled. In my case, I’ve barely been able to work for the last four months [...] our income didn’t change at all because the business just kept on chugging. Brennan Dunn, whose products include Planscope and the e-book Double your Freelancing Rate, noted in his end of year review post that in March his wife was hospitalized for a month, and they have two children under the age of five. Needless to say, the hospitalization made me really happy that I didn’t have a full-time job. There’s no way I could have taken on the responsibility and disappeared for a month with one. For all three of us, our products gave us security, an insurance policy against life suddenly taking a turn we couldn’t have anticipated. Strategies that work In some ways my injury has forced me out of the code and made me think more strategically about the business. As two developers, writing more code is our first response to anything. Spending time thinking about marketing, exploring new ways to help our users, or working on the infrastructure around the product can be just as, if not more, valuable. I’ve had to accept that I can’t do everything, and be more careful about what I say yes to so that I can focus my time on what’s most important. I’m not yet 40. Being a runner, I’m not struggling with the effects of declining fitness like many people my age, and fortunate genetics mean I am robustly healthy. Until this year, I believed that my health getting in the way of the crazy schedules and deadlines I like to set myself was something that was a long way off in the future. I was fortunate that, in discovering I am not as unbreakable as I thought, the side project that became our business enabled me to carry on. As Harry Roberts noted earlier in the year, in the web industry we do a lot of things for free. We give away a lot of stuff, and that’s good. However, creating side projects that do bring in some revenue is not something that you should shy away from. Your side project might just allow you to ride out a storm and continue doing the work that you love.
Friday, December 27th, 2013
12:05 pm	Laura Kalbag on Freelance Design: The Silent Subcontractor http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/alistapart/main/~3/lxl4i2rqTNo/the-silent-subcontractor http://alistapart.com/column/the-silent-subcontractor For the last four years I’ve had this daft rule: I don’t work with agencies. It wasn’t one of those opinions I’d always share with people, I’d just find excuses to turn down any agency work that came up. A few weeks ago I blurted out my agency-phobia on Twitter: Working out the best way to add “work with agencies/as a subcontractor” to my What I Don’t Do page… — Laura Kalbag (@laurakalbag) November 11, 2013 And then I realized how foolish it sounded. Why was I doing this? I was really just attributing a few dodgy practices to all agencies—and minimizing my potential to work with great people. By a basic definition, an agency is just a collective that produces work for clients. If I worked with one more person, I could be an agency. Now I’m feeling a bit silly for discriminating for so long. So I took the time to understand what it was about some agencies that made me feel I couldn’t work with them. There may be a few processes and practices that some agencies use that would make me feel uncomfortable, but looking at the real reason I dreaded working with agencies, I realized I just don’t want to be a silent subcontractor. The silent treatment When a freelancer working for an agency (or even another individual) can’t pitch the project, communicate with the client, or get any recognition, they become a silent subcontractor. They don’t pitch the project As designers, we need to have a say in how long it should take to do a good job on the project. In order to do this, we need to be able to discuss how much budget is available. And when we understand the time and budgetary needs, then we can make a reasonable estimate about how the project could be executed. When a freelance designer is brought into a project after the brief has been written and the budget and deadline set, there is little room for movement. The architecture of the project has already been designed by another party, so the designer is expected to just sit down and execute. They don’t communicate with the client For the duration of a project, designers need open and direct communication with their clients. The ability to communicate and justify our design decisions is a significant part of our jobs. If we have no contact with our clients, then we can’t field feedback effectively or explain our reasons for creating work in a particular way. If design feedback is filtered through another party, such as an account or project manager, then this intermediary is expected to impart feedback truthfully and accurately. But even if they do, the intermediary still breaks the flow of a conversation as they stand between the designer and the client. Even if the feedback from the client has been reported back to the designer word-for-word, there’s a significant part of the communication missing. What was the client’s tone of voice when they said, “I’m not sure about the navigation…”? What was their facial expression? What were they looking at when they said this? What was the discussion that came before and after it? Inevitably, these scenarios result in the intermediary saying, “I’ll go back and ask the designer,” or, “I’ll go back and ask the client.” As either a client or a designer on the receiving end of this type of feedback, it’s frustrating hearing a summary like “they say it’s not possible because they tried it already and it didn’t work,” without any further explanation. The more separation that is put between the processes of the client and the designer, the harder it is to understand each other’s decisions and motivations. These removed forms of communication can make the client and designer appear to each other as a distant, egotistical enemy: someone out of your reach who is saying no without giving you the chance to explain yourself. The ideal process is one that unites the client and designer, allowing them to share the reasoning and responsibility for design decisions. They don’t get any recognition In a recent article on 24ways, Geri Coady pointed out how unusual it is for each contributor to be properly attributed on a web project. A designer’s portfolio is one of the few places they can promote the projects they worked on to potential clients. If our right to claim credit as creators isn’t enforced in the contract, designers often feel they should comply with agency requests to stay quiet about their role in a project. When an agency is giving the client the impression that the designer is in-house, or puts the freelancer under an NDA (non-disclosure agreement), the designer is unlikely to be able to display their work publicly. If a designer isn’t allowed to share their involvement in a project, it’s a noticeable gap in recent work. It isn’t about our egos, but designers do need recognition. Without a good portfolio that backs up their skills and experience, a designer will find it harder to get work. Breaking the silence In 2014, I’m going to have a better chance of collaborating with great agencies. I’m updating my website, but it’s not going to say that I don’t work with agencies. It’s going to say that I don’t work as a silent subcontractor—and I recommend that other freelancers also think twice before allowing themselves to be used in this way.
Monday, December 23rd, 2013
5:03 pm	Get Started With GitHub Pages http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/alistapart/main/~3/iF95KkpsjW8/ http://24ways.org/2013/get-started-with-github-pages/ » Get Started With GitHub Pages Anna Debenham explains the basics of using GitHub Pages with Jekyll to create simple, template-based collaborative websites.