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.