Secure Your Freelance Business.

Flexibility is one of the reasons most of us decide to become a freelancer. As  freelancers, we tend to work from remote places such as our home, our family members homes, the library or a cafe.  We sometimes have our primary internet connection go down plus our back up ( this has happened to me a few times this winter). We have to find a connection fast and most likely this connection is not secure. Why should you worry? Because you are passing along your private information as well as your clients. Confidential information is no joke. You need to make sure you are following some type of security protocol at all times when using your computer/laptop/smart phone/iPad.

My recommendations:

First,  make sure your home wireless is secure. Do not leave the connection open. You need to be sure to have a few security precautions in place such as a very strong wireless key ( please don’t use your family’s last name or even worse, the word password! ). You should also setup your wireless router to only allow certain MAC addresses to connect to it. If you need help with any of this, I’d be willing to help you out for free. Just contact me!

Second, if you are working remotely from open Wi-Fi connections like the ones at Starbucks, McDonalds or the library, you need to do a few things. Look into making sure your firewall is turned on and the big thing is to use a VPN ( Virtual Private Network ) software to connect these open networks.  I’ve always used OpenVPN  but I’ve recently read about some changes to their structure so I want to check them out again as well as a few others. There are several free and open source VPN services out there and I’ve decided to review a few to see which I recommend these days. Stay tuned for a blog post on this within the next few weeks.

Another thing to look out for when connecting to open networks is be sure you are truly connecting to the Wi-Fi of the place you are at. There are people who setup their laptops as Wi-Fi hotspots in public areas with the hopes that you will be naive enough to connect to them. For example, if you are Starbucks, they will name their network Starbucks Free Connect. So when you go to connect you will see Starbucks Cafe free Wi-Fi and Starbucks Free Connect. What is the difference? One is a harmless although insecure connection to the internet and the other is a potential hacker trying to steal your information. How will you know? Here is a great article on PC World.com called Does Your Wi-Fi Hotspot have an evil twin?

Another amazing tip is to not share your passwords via email. This is huge. Recently I was conversing with a client through email and flat out asked her for a password. It wasn’t until she questioned it that I realized I had let my guard down. In my past life as a security office, I would have NEVER done that. If you must email usernames/password through email it’s best to encrypt the email ( more on this on another post ) or do it in code. I can’t go into examples on how to do that because well, it’s not secure! lol. Just be sure and think before sending any personal info across the internet. I am currently  testing out LastPass as a viable option for sharing login information.

These tips can help you keep your guard up when working remotely. I hope to give you a few recommendations on Free VPN software to use within the next week or so. Don’t let your guard down and always keep the gate up. If you can secure it with a few guard dogs and some encryption, even better.

While working all day and night was cool during college ( or high school ) as you get older you will start to notice your body and mind can’t keep up. Perfect example was a few nights ago. I was working on a newsletter for a client and the marketer we were using was so slow I am pretty sure I aged 5 years just waiting for things to load. If you know me, you know that I never give up. EVER. I think this was what made me good at my work in IT. I would love to figure out problems when no one else would ( ok not later in my career, I became the delegate and move on kind of person) and kept on until I found the issue. Recently as my old day job this trait helped me figure out an issue that no one wanted to work on including our very high paid (Hundreds an hour ) IT Consultants. I was so ecstatic when I broke the code. Doing it was so exhilarating!  Ok back to the newsletter. Of course I had a deadline looming ( people, never procrastinate, NEVER ) and it was late. I ended up spending four hours working on a newsletter that previously took me less than an hour to design and a little longer to insert content. The template we were using corrupted. I recreated it using HTML and wanted to just walk away several times. I stuck to it and got the darn thing out just in time, with 20 minutes to spare. Whew!

I think I ended up going to bed around 3:30 AM that morning and had to be up at 6:00 AM because my partner and I co-share our car and I needed it for errands.  By the way B.Alexander and his wife co-share their car too. We will have to explain our views in a later blog. I was so exhausted, I mean beyond exhausted. I am not a coffee drinker, I have a maker I just don’t like to rely on things to wake me up. I love the taste though. So I was just sinking all day trying to keep up. At that moment I took a look back at my week and realized I had miscalculated the time on a couple of projects and that set me back. I also looked at my billing calendar and I realized, I’ve just worked the last 28 out of 29 days. How could that be? I have a little girl, I run my own business. I call the shots.

Talk about a sobering moment, I just realized I was doing what I said I wanted to get rid of in the first place. Overworking myself. As a freelancer we have so many freedoms that allow us to decide the details of how we work. I think we need to realize that as a small business owner you do not have to work yourself to death. It’s not healthy, its not smart. I don’t really know how I get sucked into forgetting that I love yoga and how I don’t remember that I have the freedom to take my 2 year old outside to dig for worms. I am running a business and work solo most days. My partner in crime B. Alexander is always there for me but ultimately I am responsible for planning my day. What do you do to remedy this?

First, you set a schedule. What time of day do you work best? Is your work flexible? Can you do all your work in a few days and take time off. See the beauty of being a small business owner is that yes you can do almost anything you please. Set your schedule and stick to it. Right now I am doing work in two hour spurts. I have each client assigned to a two hour span if they are on retainer. If they are hourly, then they get fit in wherever I have my extra time allocated on the calendar. It’s not very high tech. I actually use Thunderbird with the Lightening Add on. I love it.

The next thing you should do to get your business on the right track and stop the risk of burnout is remembering to set a lot of time aside for yourself. Running a home business is not like going to an office job for some corporation. You don’t get to just walk out the door when the whistle blows. You have no excuse or reason to leave if you love what you do. This is where you step in and set limits. You are the only person who can do this. You can assign your assistant to help you with reminders but you have to be accountable and remember you have a life outside of work.

So there you have it, two surefire ways to screw up your home based freelance business. Be good to yourself. It’s hard to take care of your customers when you aren’t taking care of yourself.

This is a good thing, in that we’re expanding what people are capable of. Communication is as easy talking. We can dial a person, type a text or compose an email, all by talking to our computers or phones (which happen to be computers…). The speed of excessively technical calculations can be performed almost instantaneously. When it comes to data processing, we can accomplish more in one hour than we could in a 1980 week. When I stop to think about it, it’s truly inspiring.

That’s when I actually stop to think about it. The majority of the time I’m so overloaded by technology that I don’t even realize how amazing it is. I find myself getting frustrated at a machine for not giving me my expected results the moment I press the Enter key or click the mouse button. Being someone who works directly with technology, I sometimes even scoff at the brilliant efforts of others because I’m lacking appreciation (though this is a rare occurrence).

Then, today, something happened. I was reading an article on vector calculations in Canvas and stopped dead in my tracks. (If a website can leave breadcrumbs, I can make tracks on the web!) I just sat and stared at an example. My brain slowly turned on it’s feelings of amazement. I wondered, “could ENIAC even process these calculations?” A self-rhetorical question, but still what popped in my head. Here we are, writing physics calculations in client script. It once took a super-massive physics engine to process such complexities, and now we let our phones handle it. Astounded, I’m simply astounded. We’re progressing so fast it’s become hard to appreciate it.

Hopefully I don’t forget this feeling. I don’t ever want to find myself grumbling at my computer for processing something at breakneck speeds when I expected it before the blink of an eye. Maybe I’ll turn this into a new year resolution. “Always appreciate technology, for it is truly amazing.”

I just saw a tweet on @mashable and just had  to write about it ( because it scared the ____ out of me!). See original Mashable story here.

The question is: are bloggers the same as journalists? The reason we ask is a blogger by the name of Crystal Cox was just slapped with a huge judgement because it was ruled that she is not protected under the same laws as journalists. What did Crystal do? She wrote about a company and its co-founder. Now, before you go nuts, understand that in some of the blogs she wrote some quite detailed and opinionated descriptions of events – you may even say accusations. We all know in journalism, you HAVE to insert the word ‘alleged’ to gain some (minor) protection. Cox said that she had an inside source telling her this information but refused to name them. Click here to see her original blog.

This judgement amount is insanely high, 10 Million but she is ordered to pay 2.5 Million.

I don’t know about you but this judgement scared the bananas out of me. I’ve personally witnessed friends who were bloggers bringing down entire corrupt companies because they used their blog to write about an event. I used to think that blogs were just online journals. I’ve recently changed my mind after seeing friends make a difference using their blogs. Of course the line is grey – a really dark and fuzzy shade of grey at that. Is it up to the blogger to define themselves as a journalist? Right now we are leaving it up to each state to determine the answer to that question.

How you decide and define if a blogger is just a casual writer or a true news source. I know several blogs that I consider new sources, they are run by an individual who does lots of digging on the info they are spreading. So does the fact that they are spreading information to the masses make them a journalist? See another grey area. Is it the content or the writer that defines this? I have a friend that writes a racy column in the paper each week in regards to women and sexuality. It has been said many times that she is not a journalist but she is affiliated with the local news.

Right now I am pondering whether or not the medium has played a role in this decision. If this were back in the day and the medium were a newspaper, something IN PRINT. Would it be different? Is the internet really that far away from newspapers? Who really is to say a blogger spreading news is different than a story on the front page of the newspaper?

As a proud blogger, I am going to watch how the rest of this story unfolds. I am feeling a little uneasy about how much the internet is being threatened and possibly censored. While I’m sure the baby blog I ran a while back when my daughter was born would most likely never qualify as journalism, I do feel that bloggers are an extension of the worlds largest information source.

 Photo Cred: Ede Design

 A website is a very personal thing. I’ve seen some websites with all kind of neon colors, old school banners and funky alignments and thought who the heck created this? I had to realize that not everyone wants and likes the same things and that I should be giving the person kudos for being a website DIY’er who was able to figure it all out. Not to say they can’t improve in the future, I’m just looking at right now. I’m sure they spent a ton of hard work getting their website online.

So we’re asking, how do you feel about your website?..go ahead and describe your website in just three words. It would be fun to hear/see what everyone thinks and feel about their online presence. Leave your response in the comments below!

Yeah I’m old school like that. Whew! What a weekend. I was working on a clients WordPress site building a few pages and forms. I generally find this type of stuff super fun. I always learn something new ( ahem, thanks to WordPress being so nuts ) and I get to make my clients happy. Well tonight I ran into an issue with the plug-in Contact Form 7. I normally have no issues using this oldie but goodie classic plug. Yes I know Gravity Form is awesome but it was not an option on this particular clients site. What the client wanted was for the page to redirect once the person clicked the submit button. I researched the heck out of my options and everything pointed to using this code:

on_sent_ok: “location.replace(‘http://www.mysite.com/mypage.html’);”

and entering it into the Additional Settings box at the bottom of the form I created. I found a heap of posts about running away from doing this since Contact Form 7 has a pretty clean “thank you” message. My client wanted me to redirect this page over to her shopping cart because I was using the form for  questionnaire and service inquiry setup. She wasn’t asking for simply a thank you page. So I skipped over all the opinions and grabbed the code.

I entered the code here:

Clicked Save and checked out the form. I was pretty surprised to see it did not work. I double checked and made sure I was using straight quotes and there were no extra spaces. I had the right URL. So I started reading more about issues with this code and realized, crap, there could be more than a few different reasons why this was not working ( ha, another WordPress lovely ).

A few of the suggestions were to test and see if you had any issues running Ajax, I already knew the site was fine. Of course I went to the Contact Forms 7 website help file and found more advice. It mentioned that if you have tried the above code then you had three reasons why it would not work.

Javascript file is not loaded. It went on to talk about wp_head() and wp_footer() not being in the header.php file. Not true in our case.

It could cause a conflict with other Javascript. This could be possible because plug-ins load their own Javascript. It said that you could run Firebug and sniff out the conflict, which I did and got nothing.

Last it mentioned the HTML structure not being valid and said to use XHTML – CSS Validator to check it. Again not an issue.

So I sat, frustrated as all get out and scratching my little head with one finger. I also found tons of opinions saying to completely remove the plugin, delete files and reinstall. I just had a hunch that would be a waste of time too.

I came across about 25 pages with references to this issue and all of the answers people posted were not working. So I gave it one more go and sure enough. I found the golden ticket.

To my surprise it was actually easier than I thought it would be. Here is the fix I used:

Edit the Messages: “Sender`s message was sent successfully” and add some javascript on the end like so:

Your message was sent successfully. <script> location.href=”http://www.yoursite.com/wp-signup.php”; </script>

Yeah, this little buddy right:

That is it ( shakes fist ), yes that is it. So before editing php, javascript and scratching my pointer finger through my skin all the way to my brain…I just needed to google, once again and read more posts. Sometimes half the battle of working with WordPress is never giving up.

Thanks Contact Form 7, my client is happy and the world now has yet another answer to throw in the bucket o’ solutions.

Hmm, maybe we should call it HTML Stew since Spaghetti Code has a very specific meaning.  Stew is actually a rather good analogy, since there always seems to be random bits of elements floating all over the page.  Just try to pick up a spoonful of div without that unsavory span sneaking in!  You may be expecting it to taste a certain way, then suddenly you end up with a flavor that just isn’t right. This is one of the main issues that is so hard to avoid when using visual editors. The editors will likely assume your intentions and you often end up with undesirable results.

The visible results of this are obvious but some parts of this are not so obvious. What’s visible is seen right away. Check a preview; see how it looks. Notice your new section oddly offset to the right? Notice those ten extra line breaks? This is just at the level of annoyance though. These are the issues you can fix now and move on from.

Sometimes… Other times there doesn’t seem to be anything you can do to make your page look right. You may end up having to rely on someone else to fix it for you. When that someone else is picking through The Stew looking for the cause of the problem. They may end up taking hours to resolve what could have been a quick fix. A fix you could have handled yourself (and not paid someone else to do) if you could only read the code you were working with.

The other problem that can arise is SEO incompatibility. When a search engine tries to parse your code, it can get stuck in the muck. It won’t be able to find the information from your pages it’s looking for. Basically this means low visibility for your company when potential clients search for services you may offer. Now you may be stuck with the most expensive bowl of stew you’ve ever purchased, unintentionally of course.

Don’t worry, I won’t leave you sitting there staring at your bowl, wishing it would go away.

As a business owner I sometimes have a hard time using the term freelancer. First, let me say I totally respect the word. The issue is I struggle with the idea of telling my clients I am a freelance business owner. To me, the word freelance, sometimes implies that we don’t want any long term commitments. Totally not true for some freelancers. Some of us thrive on the notion of being a freelancer AND long term commitments with our clients. That would be us!

When I was working at my day job I craved being able to do things freely. I worked in IT and work came only when things were broken. The rest of our time was filled surfing the web or going to 5300 meetings a day.  Work that came from new ideas was a limited concept and the word micromanage ran rampant. I always felt that I could make the situation better by getting creative in my internal thinking to survive those non-creative days at work. Often working on auto pilot and putting out fires ALL THE TIME can lead you to lose some essential skills like critical thinking and true problem solving. That being said, moving to freelancing wasn’t wrong. It was just the opposite. What was I waiting for? I just  had to start listening to that little  inner voice that kept telling me I wasn’t really suited for the office grind.

1. I was tired of overhearing my co-worker talk about his baby mama drama or the results of his blood tests because of his baby mama drama. Also the coworker who sits on the phone with her bff all day talking about the hot guy in the cube next to us. Really? you don’t think we can hear over the cube walls? You’ve dated how many of our coworkers? I mean heck no I’m not listening!
2. I disliked office politics. Maybe I was more sensitive than most but it was hard to get work done when you had no walls and listened to people ( bosses and employees ) who were bullies or jerks. This was just like the playground back in school, minus the fun monkey bars.
3. The rule where we were no longer allowed to listen to music at work. Yes, to me this is nuts and it is hard to believe there are companies that enforce this rule in this digital age. Can a sister at least listen to some relaxing Kenny G while working on an intense technical project? Don’t judge.
4. I was tired of someone stealing my lunch out of the fridge. Yes this happened at two different day jobs! I’m like the Mother Teresa of the office. I give away food and buy people lunches all the time. What did my lunch karma do to deserve this?

I recently had the experience of working with an individual who had two hard drive failures at once.  My initial thought was, “Okay, let’s get your backup and toss it on a new drive.”  We may have lost a day of work at worst, we could recover.  Anyone who has dealt with this situation knows the horrors in hearing, “There is no backup.”

That statement wasn’t 100% true.  He did have a backup.  In fact he had his hard drives striped (RAID-1).  The problem was, both drives died at once.  So what do we do?  Let’s start troubleshooting, gather the supplies, this is war!  By war I mean the card game, because this would be a slow and tedious task.

Supplies:

• A Quiet Room
• Screwdriver
• External Enclosure
• Ziplocs
• Freezer

So going through this list we did what anyone would do.  Listen to the drives, are we hearing any spinning or clicking?  Re-seat the cables and reboot.  Move the drives to an external and try to access the files from a different computer.  Freeze the drives in a Ziploc bag and try again.  Nothing…

What else can we do?  Well, sometimes Lady Luck wants to make you earn her blessing.  The two drives in question were purchased at the same time, and happened to be the same model.  How did this help us?  Use our friend the screwdriver, open up the drives, switch out the logic boards, and try again.  We managed to make a single working drive.  Working long enough to extract all the data we needed at least.

But after all this work, and processing the what if of losing that much data, we were both left wondering how we should go about backing up our data.  Do we use a generally reliable method that almost failed us?  Do we subscribe to an online service and continue doling out the $$ for a little peace of mind?  Maybe we can mix these for our own benefit…

I will admit upfront that this isn’t a solution for everyone, but when you’re entire life seems to be stored on hard drives, extreme measures are needed.  You can easily interchange extreme with expensive here.  The solution here was to purchase a NAS RAID Server (don’t even pretend you don’t want one), and run only applications on a local set of drives (RAID-0 for a little performance boost).  A few drives of powerful storage and a nice RAID-10 setup later, our security blanket felt more like a tank.  With this miniature monstrosity in place, it was a lot easier to accomplish our tasks as well.  I no longer had to wait for files to be sent to me since I could access them directly on his network, and the speed of access was top notch.

All of this brings be to these two thoughts:

1. Analyze your dependency on your data, and build a backup solution that works for you.  We can give you some advice if you need it.
2. How do I get my own NAS Server?

Really, what better time to work with an Admin that can help you through the holiday and new year chaos. It doesn’t have to be crazy this year!

1. Send Holiday Cards out – too techy for hand written? Have your VA create your cards on Tiny Prints. Want to try them out? They often have free card specials have your VA keep an eye out for them for you!
2. Have them scope out the best deals for any holiday presents you need to pick up from a list you provide them.
3. Help alleviate any deadlines you have coming up during the traditional time off by helping you plan and execute tasks NOW.
4. Provide you with a spreadsheet that shows all of the black Friday deals online and locally based on your interest!
5. Round up the perfect gift ideas if you have NO CLUE what to get.
6. Purchase handmade goodies and gifts from Etsy for you if Big Box ain’t your thang!
7. Book a massage for you to help you distress from the holidays and your in laws.
8. Plan your family’s holiday trip from start to finish leaving you more time to enjoy it!
9. Hold down the fort (your email and other essentials) during any time off.
10. Write your child/grandchild a personalized letter from Santa.
11. Perfect your holiday newsletter EARLY this year.

YEAR END HELP

For those clients in the US ( and a few other places around the world), year end is fast approaching. Work with a VA to accomplish some of these tasks.

1. Data entry of any receipts into your accounting system.
2. Log mileage sheets.
3. Consolidate online bills into a spreadsheet for easy tax preparation.
4. Coordinate any end of year specials for clients.
5. Begin work on any early 2012 projects so you can get a head start!

So what does it take to get started? Use our handy contact form above and get moving!