5 Development Tips I Wish I Knew 2 Years Ago

Inspired by this post, Ten Web Development Tips I Wish I’d Known Two Years Ago, from Hackification, I’m going to list 5 Development tips I wish I had learned earlier and better.

1. Learn the basics first:
I don’t have a degree in Computer Science – I’m a self-taught programmer and web developer. A lot of things I leanred from copy and paste programming – finding some good code that works, and implementing it. That’s fine for getting things done – but you can really limit yourself if you don’t understand why things work or how it works as well. Learning early on to cover the basics of programming will save you a lot of debugging time later on, I promise.

2. Read the Docs – Read them over once before you start, and then follow along while you code. This is especially true for API specifications.
a. Keep reading the docs. Some programming projects can go on for months – keeping checking the API docs for errata and changes. Especially web service API docs like Amazon, Twitter, Facebook. These can change often and drastically. You’ll save a lot of time making choices based on the future instead of back-tracking to fix things that used to work and suddenly stopped.

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CrowdSpring announces new affiliate program – hot!

Normally I don’t post on Blerz about affiliate programs, but I do love crowdSPRING
– I think it’s a great service, and a great idea, and a new-ish way of using the web for design freelancing. So now Crowdspring has an affiliate program. I go there a lot for design inspiration and to watch 13,000+ designers compete for freelance contracts

crowdSPRING
also works for web business or website owners – it’s expensive to hire a full-time on staff designer – so why not Post your design project, name your price and watch 13,000+ designers submit ideas.

5 Free Business Applications You Need To Do Business On The Web

1. Wordpress - It’s almost impossible, and very inadvisable to have any kind of public business without a blog. Wordpress is the easiest blogging/CMS there is, and also the most feature-packed. The plugins directory is huge, and with the number of developers working on plugins, themes, and improvements to the Wordpress base, you need to use Wordpress.

2. Google Analytics – You’ll never know how much traffic you’re getting, where they are coming from, where they are going, without an traffic analytics tool. Google Analytics is free and has tons of features – the interface can be a bit puzzling at first, but my advice is to figure out one report/feature at a time (say, 1 per week). Pretty soon you’ll be a Google Analytics pro and can actually use the information to make more traffic (and more money).

3. Freshbooks – I use this for all my freelance invoicing – it really is a snap to set up and use, I promise. And I hate invoicing!

4. Twitter – Use Twitter. And a blog. Combine. Repeat. USE TWITTER.

5. Google Webmaster Tools – Can’t tell you how many times this has answered many questions about Google Page Rank algorithms, and where to improve my SEO.  Invaluable.

6. Delicious – I work on several different computers, and I am always using google to search for solutions to tricky programming problems, or graphics resources for projects, etc – so Delicious is one of my most used applications – being able to store bookmarks on the web and access them from anywhere is beyond useful – it’s necessary.

Making new sites in the Blerz network

Hi all – been super busy releasing 3 new blogs on the world – Twitter is one of my main interests lately, and is only gaining buzz as the rest of the web/world start hearing more and more about Twitter. To that end, I’ve set up 3 sites to capitalize on the new buzz:
TweetDollars.com, TwitterDollars.com, TweetMoney.com. Right now, these are just fun hobbies, but I’m using them to test the waters in blog-flipping, another interesting subject. Blog flipping is where you quickly build out and release sites, and then sell them for a profit to marketers, affiliate marketing companies, etc. Not sure how it will work out, but I’ll keep you posted!