Archive for February, 2008
Sunir, Saul and Mike have arrived in Miami to kick off their RV road trip across the southern United States.
It’s official: FreshBooks RoadBurn 2008 has begun!
Yesterday our intrepid travellers attended BarCamp Miami, and today they’re enjoying the excellent Future of Web Apps conference.
According to the FOWA Web site, starting this evening the whole thing apparently just turns into one big party! A beach party this evening, a breakfast tomorrow morning, and another beach party after that. I always knew my Dad was lying when he said business trips were no fun.
Keep tabs on RoadBurn 2008
Be sure to follow our crew’s journey on the RoadBurn blog, and keep up with new posts by subscribing to the RSS feed or signing up for daily e-mail updates.
Oh, and if you’re somewhere between Miami and Austin, get in touch with us! Judging by the first video update from RoadBurn, Sunir has already kicked off the “most horrific Hawaiian shirt” contest with a real doozy. I’d like to see somebody top that thing.
FreshBooks has been out in force in our lovely hometown, Toronto, in the past few days. We’ve sponsored PodCamp Toronto and DemoCamp, and Mike and Saul spoke at Third Tuesday last night. We’ve also done a couple fun things with customers.
Toronto Marlies hockey game
On Sunday, in conjunction with Yahoo! Search Marketing Canada and PodCamp Toronto, we held a contest to take folks out to the good ol’ hockey game. We also brought along a few of our customers. It was a sell out game, and although the Marlies lost 1-2 to the Hamilton Bulldogs, it was a hoot. Thank you, Yahoo! for providing the box and the munchies. And go Marlies! We’re rooting for you to win the Calder Cup!
Left to right: Ahmed El-Daly (Rails ninja), Dmitrii Boldyrev (Makmalauto), Val Zamulin (Seologist), Sunir Shah (me), Tommy Vallier (Talk shoe), Greg Majster (Stro1), Natalie Bomberry (pilot PMR), Himy Syed (Torontopedia), Allison Greenbaum (The Little Green Book), Alex Lahaie (Yahoo!), and crouching, Jp Dhanoa (Techsos).
Toronto customer dinner
To kick off our RoadBurn road trip from Miami to Austin, we took a few customers out to dinner in our home town yesterday.
Back row: Aaron, Mitch, and Sunir from FreshBooks. Front row: Paul Vlaovic (Sequoia Legal), Alfredo Arias (Flash Fog Security), and Stephen Megitt (Filament Creative).
Thanks for the great time, folks!
We don’t do many software reviews here at FreshBooks, but every once in a while there is an application deserving of note, and CSSEdit is most certainly one of those apps.
If you hadn’t guessed, we really, really like our accessibility and standards here at FreshBooks. We’re always working hands-on designing our application, our Web site and our blog. This means a lot of our work flow involves tweaking and adjusting the little things in our CSS.
There are several options in both the PC and Mac worlds that allow you to visualize your work before you take that latest layout live. Many show great promise but are stuck in the dreaded version one, or even beta. Some are just too complex, making the simple jobs complicated, all the while hoarding valuable system resources while you switch between Photoshop, Illustrator and whatever else you run during your standard work flow.
Enter CSSEdit, which has everything one could want in an application. Simplistic design, easy learning curve, visual styling, lightweight footprint and a host of features to increase your productivity and allow you to focus on getting your work done. Designing is a visual world, and CSSEdit allows you to code, reference and see your designs in real time, easily and powerfully.
Features
Preview: Gone are the days of make changes, upload, refresh, repeat. CSSEdit’s built in preview and X-ray features make finding errors or locating erroneous code as simple as using your eyes. X-ray determines where the element is on your page, so you can discovering how elements are interacting.
Selector Builder: If you work in Web standards you can imagine creating more advanced selectors can become quite the learning experience. Selector Builder is a feature that removes the guessing game and lets you work in plain English.
Powerful source editing: Repetition be gone! CSSEdit automatically adds brackets, (semi-)colons and appropriate spacing for you. If you encounter a style sheet from someone who didn’t have that luxury, you can always do a re-indent to immediately apply your spacing settings. Tada!
Milestones: We all have faults and can obviously make mistakes — and web browsers, like people, are no exception. If you happen to break something while trying to adjust for one of these “browsers” you can use CSSEdit’s milestones to go back to a previous time and figure it out. It lets you fix bugs without fear of losing your valuable work.
Verdict
I’ve been using CSSEdit in conjunction with TextMate leading up to this review. With the switch I’ve managed to remove some of the much larger and more expensive Web design behemoths from my repertoire. The big application companies would do well to look at the way apps like CSSEdit can slip so smartly into a designer’s work flow, removing overhead and streamlining production.
With a price point of $29.95 USD, creating Web sites has never been so rich, or affordable.
I am Jan Walsh, a freelance wine, food and travel writer. More recently I’m also the owner and publisher of three niche content-based websites, supported by sponsor advertising.
It started small two years ago, with Birmingham Wine. With approximately six sponsors, billing was no big deal.
“Billing all my sponsors became a nightmare.”
After launching Birmingham Restaurants in 2007 and Birmingham Brides in 2008, the number of sponsors quickly grew to 72, and continues to grow weekly. Billing all these sponsors became a nightmare, because I’m mostly a one-woman show.
I already billed via e-mail and had an Authorize.Net account for clients to pay online, but I didn’t have a system for tracking payments, past-due accounts and renewals — other than a calendar!
“Finding FreshBooks was like hiring a bookkeeper for $27/month.”
I tried other software and web applications, but none were Mac-friendly enough to suit me. I couldn’t even log into some of them! Plus, my invoices are semi-annual, and many had no option for semi-annual billing.
Then I found FreshBooks. It was like hiring a bookkeeper for $27/month. This web application is perfect for my business. Every day I go online and see who was invoiced, who got a late notice, and who paid online.
“My favourite feature is seeing which clients have viewed their invoices.”
With one click I run reports showing everything from past-due accounts to recurring revenue. But my favourite feature is seeing which clients have viewed their invoices.
If they haven’t viewed it, they obviously haven’t mailed a check. So I “snail mail” invoices to these clients using FreshBooks. They print the invoice, put it in an envelope with a return envelope, put a stamp on it and mail it for a nominal fee.
Another feature that’s invaluable to me is their support team.
I’m a fast person, and I like quick answers to my questions. I don’t have time to look through a website for answers to my questions. I want to call and get immediate answers, which is just what I get with FreshBooks.
“A real live person at the FreshBooks office answers the phone quickly and provides immediate solutions to any questions I have.”
I don’t punch in my account number and listen to music while waiting, or have a machine ask me all the wrong questions. A real live person at the FreshBooks office answers the phone quickly and provides immediate solutions to any questions I have. They’re very knowledgeable, friendly, and most of all are helpful.
I even recommended FreshBooks to the company that develops my websites — they send me invoices using QuickBooks, but it isn’t Mac-friendly. Sometimes I can view an invoice, other times I can’t. And nothing is worse that a client having issues trying to pay! I rest assured my clients don’t have this problem with FreshBooks.
This morning’s upgrades are complete, and version 4.3 of FreshBooks has arrived on the scene with lots of great improvements and a few exciting new features.
Here’s a quick summary of what’s new and improved:
Expenses
- At long last, you can now manage expenses inside FreshBooks using the “expenses” tab.
- Expenses can be assigned to a client which allows for easy application to invoices.
- Expenses can also be assigned to a project, and you’ll be prompted to include any associated expenses when generating an invoice for a project.
- There are new expense reports under the “reports” tab.
PDF invoices and estimates
- You and your clients can now view (and save) your invoices and estimates in PDF format.
New and improved client import
- Our client import tool has been completely re-designed! You can now import your contacts directly from Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail.
“Save and add another”
- We just made life easier when adding multiple expenses, items, tasks and support departments.
Minor updates
- You may now choose to have no currency symbol.
- Invoice numbers can now contain the following symbols: ‘:’, ‘-’, and ‘.’
- Uploaded logos are now automatically (and optimally) resized for better presentation.
- Status legends can be permanently turned on or off.
- Help boxes can be permanently turned off.
We’ll be highlighting a few of these new features in greater detail over the course of the next couple weeks.
To see these improvements now, log into your existing FreshBooks system or create a new one for free, and enjoy!
Hey folks, just a quick note that FreshBooks will be briefly unavailable this Monday morning while we perform an upgrade.
When will FreshBooks be unavailable?
The upgrade takes place Monday, February 25 at 11:00 AM GMT (that’s 3 AM PT, 6 AM ET, et cetera). It’s expected to take 1–2 hours. During this time there will be periods when you will be unable to access your FreshBooks account.
Once the upgrade is complete, watch our blog and your e-mail inbox to find out what’s new!
We at FreshBooks are all about bringing the fun to the middle of your working day. We are sponsoring three contests right now, simultaneously!
FreshBooks and Yahoo! take you to the good old hockey game
In conjunction with PodCamp Toronto, FreshBooks and Yahoo! Search Marketing Canada are taking three video/podcasters to see the Toronto Marlies vs. the Hamilton Bulldogs this Sunday, February 24 at 4 PM ET.
Go here for details, and enter by Saturday at 5 PM ET for your chance to win.
SEOs fight fat for charity!
A bunch of SEOs realized they needed to lose some weight, so they got together and made it a public event. FreshBooks is pledging $500 on long-time customer, Jennifer Laycock, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Guide. Ever the mommy blogger, if she wins the Human Milk Banking Association of North America will get a cheque for thousands of dollars. She’s currently leading! Cheer her on, or make a pledge yourself!
MediatorTech book launch!
Tammy Lenski, another FreshBooks customer and professional mediator, is having a virtual book launch party, for her new book, Making Mediation Your Day Job, her marketing guidebook to help mediators open their own private practice. It has five stars so far on Amazon! FreshBooks is offering up a year-long “shuttle bus” package as one of the prizes in the drawing. Be sure to check it out!
Back in December we asked our customers, “who inspires you?” Armed with that information, we set out to ask those people a few questions.
First in our series: Web standards guru Eric A. Meyer.
For those of our readers who might be unfamiliar with you, please give us the basics: age, nickname, serial number…
I’m in my late thirties and never really have had a nickname. They just don’t seem to stick. Similarly, my serial number was filed off years ago. Don’t tell Homeland Security.
Let’s see: I hold a B.A. in history with a small clutch of accompanying minors; I spent two years working for Netscape (long after the really good stock options had been issued, sadly); I’m a big fan of progressive and hard rock but the overall scope of my musical tastes borders on the indiscriminate; and I live in an inner-ring suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, with my wife and daughter. I love it here, so much so that I’ve turned down more than one job offer from Silicon Valley firms because they all would have required me to move out there.
And of course I’ve written six books and a whole bunch of articles, all on the topic of CSS and Web standards, which is what got me on your radar in the first place.
What led you into the world of Web design? And what’s forcing you to stay?
I fell in early, first encountering the Web in late 1993 and CSS in mid-1996. I was just in the right places at the right times. What keeps me here is what lured me onto the Web in the first place: I want to make it as easy as possible for people to share information and experiences.
Do you relate accessibility and standards with Web 2.0?
Certainly! Web 2.0 is just Web evolved. Everything there is built on the same basics, only now it’s been made more complex (and, arguably, more advanced). The problem is that not enough people doing Web 2.0 stuff are thinking about accessibility. The greatest fade-in-pop-out effect in the world is wasted if its technical execution blocks some users from your content.
Are you a designer with a passion for standards, or a “standards guy” who can also do the design, or some other combination of the two?
I’m a “standards guy” who can explain the technology to people who are designers. Designer, not so much. To the extent I can be said to have a design sense at all, it can best be described as “minimalist”. And that’s the charitable version.
What’s the single biggest change you’ve seen in the industry in the last ten years?
Technologically, the adoption of AJAX and related techniques, which make the browser much less dependent on full-page round trips to the server. Professionally, the success of web standards as a best practice — there was a time when that seemed an impossible dream.
What’s the first Web site you ever designed?
The main Web site for Case Western Reserve University. They’ve long since replaced it, and rightfully so; that was an early 1994 design and we’ve kind of moved on. Then again, I’m not convinced their current design is really an improvement.
How do you blow off steam? Have you ever actually burnt out?
Burnt out? Who has time?
How do you avoid distractions in the workplace? Put another way, how important is it to have a great environment for managing your workload?
I work on my own and have a third-floor office, so the only distractions I have are those I bring myself. I don’t know what makes an environment great besides good music and the ability to turn it off as needed, though, so I’ll have to pass on that one.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
An astronaut.
What blogs do you read most often?
The ones I follow that update the most often.
If you could give one piece of advice to people starting out in the field, what would it be?
Love it or leave it. Seriously, this is not a field where you can coast by on “it’ll do for now” or “eh, it’s a living”. There’s too much need to be creative and sharp, and there are too many nagging little problems to deal with on an ongoing basis, to be doing this for anything short of love.
When you find yourself with rare downtime, where can we expect to find you?
What is this “downtime” of which you speak?
Is there anything else we should know that you aren’t telling us?
Because I just wasn’t busy or stressed enough, I founded a conference series with Jeffrey Zeldman called An Event Apart. It’s been going like gangbusters and I’m very proud of what we’ve built, so I always have to bring it up. In fact, I have a wallet full of baby conference pictures if you want to see them.
We are still a week away from the FreshBooks RV spreading its love all over an open road but the fun has already started over at the “official” RoadBurn website. We will be posting everyday from now until we get back so please bookmark the site and follow the adventure… I have a feeling it will be just like Pirates of the Caribbean… except without the boats, pirates, swords, cannons, parrots and scurvy!
The dictionary definition of a “superhero” is a person or thing having extraordinary or superhuman powers, and an exceptionally skilful or successful person.
That describes how I feel about FreshBooks.
Being a freelance artist and illustrator I have spent most of my life creating superheroes and futurist universes, so it isn’t unusual for me to spend 8+ hours a day at my drawing table.
“Now that I use FreshBooks to assist with that side of my business I can see, at a glance, what’s owing.”
Before I found FreshBooks I could spend another few hours trying to make sense of the jumbled mess I liked to call my invoicing routine. Like most artists, I’m known for my art, not for being the most organized person in the world.
Now that I use FreshBooks to assist with that side of my business I can see, at a glance, what’s owing. The only “mess” now is on my art boards — right where it belongs.
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