5 Web Developement and Freelance Tools You Will Use Every Day

The tools you use to do web development can really make the difference between success and failure – the better your tools, the more efficient your development, which means quicker time to market, which means more time to spend on making tweaks and bugfixes to the apps/sites you release out into the wild.

1. The Internet: OK, it seems a little silly to list this as the number 1 tool to use every day, but it’s true – using the Internet is the most important part of successful web dev. Knowing where to search, how to search, and how to use what you find – these are all vitally important to success in developing web sites, web applications, or really any kind of software development.
2. Development Server: I myself use WAMP, which is a super simple easy toi install and use ‘full stack’ (server, database, web dev language (PHP)) solution. It’s free, stable, and after using it for a couple weeks it will feel like home. If you’re coming from the Windows world, it’s invaluable – if your a Linux user, you most likely have a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, perl/PHP) baked into your Linux distribution, or you can get it easily via apt-get, rpms, or other ways, like the Ubuntu SoftwareCenter. You can download WAMP from here
3. Graphics Software – I use Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended, which is very expensive, but totally worth it – I used Macromedia Fireworks before they were bought out by Adobe, and found it to be almost as good, at least for rapid visual prototyping, with the use of layered PNG images.
4. Free Web Resources: SmashingMagazine regularly has freebies they offer for download that are most likely as nice or nicer that anything you can design yourself, at least for WordPress themes. and Icons. Make sure you locate and read the terms and license, if you are planning to use any of the resources in public facing projects. Generally they offer stuff that you can use for personal sites/projects, and sometimes for commercial use as well.
5. Development tool – A programming IDE. I do most of my freelance programming in PHP, and
   Dreamweaver CS5 – but it is very expensive. I’ve used Komposer, Komodo, vim, emacs, Notepad++ and so on, and I keep coming back to Dreamweaver, since I’ve been using it since version 3. This is 100% personal preference, but my advice is to find a good IDE, and really stick with it – really get to know every aspect of it to improve your workflow – the faster you develop good code, the more money you’re going to make in the long run.

5 Ways To Make Easy Money Online – Work Your Business At Home And Make Money With These Techniques

5 Ways To Make Money Online

1. Create a blog, and put up Google Adsense ads. This is the easiest, by far, but also one of the least paying, unless you get a lot of traffic. Pick something you enjoy writing about, and know a lot about, and just start writing. Later on you could morph it into a niche social network and get advertisers to pay you to show their ads.

2. Selling Stuff on Craigslist. CL has become the favorite place to buy and sell local items and services. Buying and selling on CL from towns other than your own can be risky, so use caution.

3. Doing Freelance work. Craigslist usually has a bunch ofd people need temp office workers who can work from home. Data entry, light web design – if you have a skill, chances are someone out there is looking to pay someone a few bucks to take some grunt work off their hands. You don’t make much per job, but the freedom and choice more than make up for it.

4. Sell/Buy and Sell on Ebay. If you live in a big city, you can sell items available there to smaller towns where hard to find items are rare. With cheaper and cheaper shipping rates from UPS and FedEx, this is getting easier and easier. This should also tie in with your niche blog/socail network.

5. Monetizing your twitter accounts with services like Twittads.com. No word on how long Twitter will continue to allow this, as they may have theor own ideas for monetizing your tweets.

Building Your Own Social Network Site With WordPress Multi-User And BuddyPress Part 1 – Choose the Platform

Recently, I’ve created two social networks – both as experiments in creating them, and as opportunities to join communities of which I am very much a part of. The first is Fan made videos – I used to create a lot of Fan Made Videos for Youtube, for bands who didn’t have videos, or films who hadn’t had trailers released. I stopped making the videos for fear of being sued, as litigious as the record and movie companies are these days. But I still enjoy watching the videos, and decided to create www.fanmadevideos.com as a place for other creators and fans of fan created videos to gather.

The second network is closer to my heart at the present time - www.ReadNerd.com is a social community for readers and writer’s of Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy fiction. I am a writer of genre fiction (see my personal/writing blog here), and of course I have been a lifelong fan. There are other good community sites out there for readers (GoodReadsis my favorite) and writers (WeBook is my favorite), but all of them are missing the community that I am most in tune with – that is, fans of real horror (not young adult or Twilight – I have nothing against the genre or the books, but I don’t read either), real science-fiction (space opera, hard sci-fi, and even the comedic sci-fi of Robert Asprin or the Adventures of Retief), and Fantasy. If you’re a fan of genre fiction, please feel free to visit ReadNerd.com – it’s a work in progress, so don’t expect it to be feature complete/defect-free, but poke around and meet everyone!

Keeping in mind that Twitter and Facebook are the default social networks. It wasn’t my intention to try and compete with either of those platforms, obviously, but I believe there is space for every niche on the Web, and every niche should have its own network that can talk to Twitter/Facebook, let users from either/both services loogin and/or post as wither their Twitter identity, their Facebook identity, or as a new user at the niche social network.

1) Choosing a platform:
After a month or two of research, I narrowed down my choices to a few options. Joomla, with social extensions, WordPress with the Buddypress plugin/platform, or Elgg, an open source software social network in a box. I know those aren’t the only players, but there were a couple of factors that caused me to narrow it down to these choices. Joomla has a large and taltented pool of contributors, and is written and extensible with PHP. However, the social extensions in Joomla tend to be a bit expensive. Eliminated – both BuddyPress and Elgg are free and open source.

Elgg is an open source, community driven platform for creating your own social network site. The installation to my hosting was simple, at least as simple and easy as the WordPress install. I really like Elgg, and set up a test install and played with it for a solid week. The plugin ecosystem seems promising on the surface, but it seems as though in the community there is a lot of stale plugins (haven’t been updated in a long time, no longer compatible with the Elgg core, which is version 1.7). This was the only factor that prevented me from using Elgg – other than WordPress’s track record and community.

WordPress, is, of course, by favorite blogging platform. As a CMS? It used to require some hacking around to get WordPress into a decent CMS platform – but I’m happy to say that WordPress MutliUser is now far and a way the best (heck, the only) choice for solid, mature, free, open source easy social network in a box. Boonex Dolphin, for example, is more feature rich, at least in the core, but it has a steep learning curve. If you’ve blogged over the past few years, it’s very likely you’ve used WordPress – and so has everyone else. SO that means a large and diverse group of developers and just as importantly, plugin developers, have been adding to the platform. It recently went to version 3.0, and should now be considered perhaps the premiere blogging/CMS platform on the web. BuddyPress is more than a simple plugin for WordPress – it extends WordPress to bake in social networking functionality. As soon as I installed a test version of BuddyPress, I knew this was the right way to go.

The Winner is: WordPress with BuddyPress!

In part 2, I’ll go into the initial steps I took to set up WordPress and Buddypress and turn it into a full-featured social network in about 20 minutes! Yes, it is that quick!