LinkedIn has introduced an endorsement system which lets you ‘endorse’ the skills of your connections. A few quick notes about this: I haven’t checked whether these are skills you entered yourself; that seems to be the case though. I have endorsed wide, easy skills, such as mastering your native tongue. I have endorsed specialized skills … Read More

About 95% of my income as a front-end web developer comes from large ad and web agencies that hire me to be a part of project teams. These teams build websites that cost anywhere from 10,000 to 1,000,000 euro.* The other 5% is from small jobs, and the smallest of those are when other freelancers … Read More

Six years ago I blogged that open source CMSes tended to be too difficult to set up and use to be usable for small business and non-profits. I suggested that a number of blog systems and nukes could step forward and supplant them, and that is exactly what has happened. In 2008, Joomla!, Wordpress and … Read More

Belastingdienst, the Dutch tax service, sent a form for me to fill out in which I needed to indicate projected future earnings. They do this almost each year—well, regularly—so that they can let you pay your taxes for 2020 in 2019 instead of the more reasonable 2021. And every year I postpone filling out this … Read More

I found the following in a mail from a client: I want this done tonight or tomorrow. It can’t take long and I don’t understand how to do it. I have nothing to add.

Today I had to move a Drupal installation from one domain (dev.example.com) to another (www.example.com). Most of my time was spent in waiting for back-ups to finish, but there was one other problem that took a good half hour to solve: one page (www.example.com/portfolio/) would give 403 errors, even though the page existed (as a … Read More

A couple of years ago I reviewed a book by web usability experts 37 Signals called Defensive Design for the Web in which they gave side by side examples of how to do web shops right and how to do them wrong. One of the examples had two sports stores go head to head. Both … Read More

I have been using the simplests of wikis, Usemod, as a business organizer on my laptop. For every day in the near future I make a link. I link to days from other days, and from month pages, and to month pages from year pages. The great advantage of the wiki as opposed to proprietary … Read More

I feel like such a rube! The Discovery Channel is organizing a reality show “in which the contestants will build elaborate Rube Goldberg machines“, according to BoingBoing. Being of a sometimes curious nature, I decided to check out the site they linked to, RealityWanted.com, but in order to view the entire application form I had … Read More

It’s a question I have to ask regularly of the direct marketing scum that call me on the phone: “Excuse me, are you calling me to sell me something?” For some reason, the phonetards try to postpone the anti-climax of the conversation as long as possible by trying to obscure the reason for their call. … Read More