fredleblanc

I think it's important to remember that in the world of the Internet, "running your own business" doesn't have to be "a startup." I'm 32, and had a similar realization a couple years back. I hated having bosses. I don't know if my ideas were the best, but I feel like I tend to have good gut instincts. I was tired of not having control of what I was doing.

I worked at a small web shop, a big ad agency, and a tiny remote-only web thing. I saw what people were doing, and what was out there, and knew that I knew enough that I could survive.

The hardest part was making the leap. To say "OK, I design and develop websites under my own flag," and then to find people. Having worked in the industry for a while, I had contacts, and so far (knock on wood) I haven't really had to do a lot of marketing. It's all mostly word-of-mouth. Build something, do a great job, get remembered/recommended, repeat.

Even though when you first get started you'll take a couple projects you might not be thrilled with to get your feet underneath you, soon enough you'll be raising your rates, getting to say no to projects your not interested, and maybe even working on small product-like projects too to mix in with your client-work. That's what I'm doing, I also co-lead development of a little CMS called Statamic. I use it on a lot of my clients' sites (if they're OK with it), and using it lets me improve it, while improving it helps me sell it.

It's not glamorous. It will probably never net me a 7-figure-profit for a year. But it's fun, challenging, and rewarding. You don't have to build a product that makes hundreds or thousands of people happy. You can build one site for one person and they'll be just as thrilled. And on top of that, all the challenges of business are there too. You get to pay taxes and everything. :)

You also mentioned family obligations. For me, being self-employed helps with that too. If something comes up, I can walk away from my desk and go help out — whether it's picking up the kids, or just meeting my wife for lunch if she's having a bad day.

Self-employment is risk, but it's a calculated risk that balances with freedom. If I want to make more, I take on more projects. The hardest part I've found is turning that off. ("You mean working 80 hours pays me 80 hours!? SIGN ME UP!" — that just leads to burn out.)

Anyway, I know Hacker News is more startup-focused, and that you're probably more interested in that, but I wanted to throw my two cents in that there are other things you can do relating to the Internet that are just as interesting and just as rewarding.

It seems like the general idea for the full story was done, and "The Book" (as he called it) "existed" in a very rough draft, but with each release he's going back, re-editing and re-working them, adding bits here and there, improving the story until it's to the point that he wants it to be. It would make sense to me that, with each book, the ripple of stuff that needs fixing in the story later on needs more and more re-work.

I believe the first two books were released 4 years apart. It seems that that's the cadence for the books. And hey, Auri novella this fall! :D

With all of this dedication to a project, I had to download it and try it. Early on there's a room where everything is pitch black and it wants you to go back and find something "luminous." So you're thinking, probably a flashlight or torch or something.

Nope. It's a paintbrush with luminous paint. And it doesn't just light up the room, you have to fling gobs of luminous paint all around to reveal platforms in an otherwise dark room. And it's not just a ball at a time, each gob also trails lesser speckles that also help out.

I know this isn't ground-breaking or anything, but it's certainly a refreshing surprise from what you expect from games these days. It's something you wonder about, where the answer is clearly, "well, why not?"

I went from interested to impressed in a matter of minutes. I thought I was just going to download it to see what it was like, but now I'm curious what other great ideas will come out of no where.

This quickly went from "I'll play for just a minute" to "where are those darn last triforce pieces!?" Nice work!

I think that the best ideas come from that things that the creators personally want/need. You found a problem relevant to you, and solved it in a simple, elegant way. It's going to help you, and might even make you a couple bucks on the side. Sounds like a win all around to me.

I'm not deaf, and I have virtually no experience building things specifically for those that are, but this seems like a great idea. Nice work!

For clarity, Statamic is not open source. A license will get you the zip file full of code, and you can tinker with it as much as you'd like, but this is the actual license agreement: http://statamic.com/license-agreement

Hello, I'm one of the Statamic developers.

Statamic is both a content management system (in that it has a nice, responsive, client-friendly admin area for managing content) and a website-building platform (in that the admin area is completely optional if you're someone that's comfortable with writing content files, and you can fully create and maintain a site easily without it). A license gets you the software itself and allows you to run it on one domain.

At the moment, there's a folder where you place all of your content files. I've seen people play with syncing that up with systems like Dropbox and even maintaining that folder as its own git submodule. There's no ability to do that automatically at this time, but I bet someone could figure out how to make that happen.

It seems out marketing message could be a bit more direct in that instance, certainly noted!

Or perhaps he has some secret knowledge that has been hidden from us!

I try to short-circuit awkwardness by putting my hand up to high-five people. If there's someone between handshake and hug, I've found that gesture is comfortable enough for most, explains the situation without saying anything, and gives everyone a way out. Your mileage may vary.

According to this tweet, "neglected" may be as good as it gets from here on out. https://twitter.com/DeeSadler/status/331209193451315202

Edit: here's a blog post too: http://blogs.adobe.com/fireworks/2013/05/the-future-of-adobe...

I didn't fully realize that I had this issue (I mean, I saw freezes, just assumed it was Photoshop or something causing it). Did the reboot fix and things seems to have worked. Whereas before mdworker errors were entering the console every 2-3 minutes, it's been 30 since I did the reboot and haven't seen an mdworker error since.

I've been using Glyphs on a Mac to create web-icon fonts for the site I make, but it also seems to be able to edit fonts (most of the time). I don't really know a ton about font-making, but it seems that with most of the fonts you'd edit, the kerning and all that is already defined.

If it's a matter of adding a couple slashes to 7's/Z's or to 0's, that should be reasonably straight-forward to do. In Glyphs, it would be a matter of adding a new shape for the slash wherever you want it. Then File -> Export and you're on your way.

(And obviously you might run into license violations if you're changing fonts you're not allowed to. This post isn't meant to address the legal side of it, just a guy at his desk fixing fonts for his own use.)

(Edit: typo.)

I have nothing to do with the project, and I agree with you on the caching in tandem. I think my point is that those numbers might shoot way up tomorrow after a decent showing on HN (and presumably other places).

I really like the idea, the look of the game, and the execution of the site. I'm in for the full $10.

Keep in mind that some figures only will update once per day. It could be much more by the time tomorrow hits.

My last job was doing websites for higher education, and I can tell you that it's very much a thing. It's a part of many universities' emergency protocols, sometimes paired with an alert banner on the homepage. (And that banner may or may not link to a further page of information.)

While things like a gunman on campus is most certainly an emergency, these systems also serve other messages. Things like other emergencies (earthquakes, for example), snow days, we're just testing the emergency alarms today, etc.

Edit because I had another thought: the whole field of emergency preparedness in higher education is rather fascinating. Most of what I found interesting I had heard second-hand from clients, but you might find it quite interesting.

Also frustrated by this. I understand there are other things happening, but we have absolutely no representation on this thing? Even some sort of absentee voting for such an extreme circumstance?

Mostly agree. It seems like they're saying that they're sorry there aren't enough servers to handle the online requirement, but not sorry that SimCity has an online requirement. (They also want to remind you that they're making a lot of money, as it's a major hit across all major markets.)

This is fun! Really great work, runs nice and smooth on my machine.

If I could make suggestions (and this should be taken as "constructive feedback" and not "I hate this"), they would be pretty minor:

- I'd have the green-star progress bar be green to match the thing I collected (maybe even stick a little tiny star next to the bar to label it), and make the it go the other way. Right now the bar fills up, but I think of it as an ability running out, not filling up.

- A collision sound when I hit something, and maybe on the high-score screen tell me what I hit when I died. "You mid-air collided with the red dude. It was both devastating and awesome."

I think that's it. Really great stuff.

Edit: one more thing worth noting, I know the music is just a loop, but I didn't find it annoying at all. It fit perfectly.

Completely agree with you on Matt Smith. I hated him at first, but I think I just wanted more Tennant. After clearing my head and going back in, he’s now my Doctor.

(Although I disagree with you on last season. It didn't feel like traditional Doctor Who, but I really liked the direction, and although Season 5 was much better end-to-end, Season 6 had some of my favorite episodes.)

Have they added the ability to prevent that darn menu helper thing from loading in the menu bar? That's all I really want in an upgrade.

Full disclosure: I backed the project.

I think it's fine if marketers use the service. It's similar to Twitter in that you can choose who you follow. The difference is that if I want Coke in my timeline, I have to follow Coke (or someone cleverly disguised as not Coke) in my follow list.

If companies add their brand to app.net, fine. If people opt-in to follow those brands, also fine. No harm to everyone else.

It's not too late to bring it back.

It's horrible that this is so prevalent in the tech community (and really any community, but I come from tech, so I'll just speak from what I know). It probably doesn't mean much coming from some random commenter, but I can assure you that there are a lot of great people (male and female) out there that don't think or carry on this way.

That said, my areas of knowledge are in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. What I know in PHP could probably be translated to a lot of other languages. If you have any questions, you can certainly throw'em my way. Here are a bunch of ways to find me: http://fredhq.com/contact

And that goes for anyone reading this. I'm not always available (obviously), and I may not have the answer, but I can bounce ideas back and forth which sometimes is just what is needed.

True, but just this morning I was asking people which Android devices should I get for testing on (for web development), and this really helps answer the question. The overall share may be small, but of that share, Kindle Fire is the most common — and, it seems, getting more common all the time.

So: still a useful article.

I wish they had added the original iPad to the chart. As an original iPad owner (and one that really enjoys the device), the new iPad looks pretty enticing.

Saying, "it's just an iPad 2 with a better screen" sounds pretty great to me.

Man, this takes me back.

When I built cars that were in our local Pinewood Derby, we had a big, expensive fancy thing that told you which car placed where. It was high, and all it did was light up lights next to 1, 2, 3 and 4. I can't even begin to imagine how much it cost.

It's pretty awesome how far we've come in just a little while. Now you can build an entire instant replay system with things you can get at common stores!

And they have an inventing merit badge now!?

I agree with others on the legal view, but also, to me this site just focuses on sour grapes. As a result, I can't see anything positive of helpful coming out of it. I'm not going to search a blog each time I get a client to see if they've been written about here. And aside from that, this site will only ever tell one-side of the case.

What if the developer did really poor work, missed every deadline by weeks, or the client still says there's work to be done before being paid? All this site shows is angry developers complaining about less-than-ideal clients. For me, that's the kind of talk you have over beers at a bar — you say your piece and then you move on — not something you permanently record into a collection on the web.

I'm still at GoDaddy, and I would like to leave, but I'm still doing research where I jump to. I'd rather not have to do this again for a long time, so I'm taking my time to make sure I get it right rather than jump on the first company that waves an anti-SOPA flag.

So "no" for today, but "most likely" in the near future.

Is there a list of anti-SOPA registrars anywhere? Haven't been able to find one.