Archive for February, 2007


Freelancing with benefits, continued

Filed Under: Clients, Diversions by Debbie — Leave a comment
February 27, 2007

I’m in the middle of my first week of working for a creative staffing company and it’s really pretty enjoyable – particularly now that I can telecommute instead of driving for two hours like I did last Thursday and Friday.

The work is fun and easy – I’m designing a series of ad banners for the client. All graphics work so it’s a nice change from coding, plus it was nice for me to be in an office environment again last week.

The company that I’m temping for has another TCG employee working with them now plus they hired a previous temp for a permanent position. It seems like a good place to work, and I’m looking forward to the possibility of continuing to temp with them part-time occasionally.  It will be a good reference for me if nothing else, but I feel like I’m doing something really valuable for them and it’s different than web design – it’s more of a you-see-the-results-fast kind of thing and I do like that.

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Freelancing with benefits

Filed Under: Business Nuts and Bolts, Web Design by Debbie — Leave a comment
February 21, 2007

Most of the time I don’t consider myself a freelancer; I don’t really seek out jobs with that intent; I like to build relationships with clients that last and that turn into other relationships with other businesses. I fancy that Parallax will become a small studio one day and not just a one-person entity.

But sometimes freelancing can be fun. I start my first temp position with The Creative Group, a staffing company for marketing and advertising companies, tomorrow, working for a web company in Boulder for a week. If we get along, I might have a steady 15 hours per week from them for awhile, plus I get the benefit of working with a known entity in TCG. I’m not quite sure what my duties will be or how this will go, but I’m kind of excited about being in a real design office (I’ve only done this on my own so far) and seeing how it functions.

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Spring!

Filed Under: Diversions by Debbie — Leave a comment
February 21, 2007

I just sat outside on my front porch for a few minutes for the first time since November. It’s 59 degrees and sunny here today – and we just made the list for the second most consecutive days of snow cover in the written history of the Denver area.

The snow is almost gone off the front yard, but still covers most of the back yard (the dogs are unhappy about that). But it smells and feels like spring today; it’s about time.

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Too many rocks

Filed Under: Productivity by Debbie — Leave a comment
February 18, 2007

Today I picked up a copy of David Allen’s book about productivity and creativity, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity“>Getting Things Done, the predecessor to the other book I mentioned here, Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life“>Ready for Anything. Ready for Anything is quite good, but there’s terminology and references in it that rely on the reader having already experienced getting things done, so I’m going to read GTD first. Probably makes sense…

And as a productivity aid, I got a 2007 refill for the paper-based planner I used religiously a couple of years ago. I loved this planner, it was the best one I’ve ever used because it’s so oriented around prioritizing and realizing that everything cannot be done at once, and one of the reasons I like it is because it encourages you to think of tasks like rocks. (Why wasn’t I using it recently? Because I got the Windows version for my computer and because my handwriting is horrible. But having a paper-based system that I can take anywhere has its values too).

Every week you have a big glass container. In it you can put a few big rocks and a lot of little rocks. The major things you need to accomplish are the big rocks and all of the other little tasks, errands, and distractions are the little ones. Big rocks go in first, and little ones fill in the gaps. This is a visualization that makes sense to me.

However, this week I’m going to be working out of town for several days so I have a lot of things to get done before Thursday. What happens when you have too many rocks for your glass and you wind up with rocks on the table and rocks rolling onto the floor…

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Thickbox – cool tool for image display and slideshows

Filed Under: Cool Tools, Web Design by Debbie — Leave a comment
February 14, 2007

One of my clients asked me to create an ‘image of the week’ page for them using whatever method I thought looked and worked best. I remembered seeing the JavaScript/Ajax tool Lightbox JS in another blog recently and thought that looked pretty cool, and had the capability of showing a slideshow as well, so I got it and installed it on my client’s home page.

It worked great, unless the images were bigger than about 400px on a side. Then Firefox didn’t like it and the ‘close’ button’s functionality was lost (actually the clickable part was just pushed down in the y direction so that you couldn’t get to it to close the image. This problem didn’t occur in IE (to my amazement), just in FF and Opera.

So… back to the drawing board. I really liked the way the script functioned so I went looking for similar ones and came across Thickbox. This is another JavaScript/Ajax tool, it functions nearly identically but for my purposes this one was the better choice because it doesn’t break on large images.

Well, let me clarify – Thickbox is set by default to resize images larger than the current browser window. I tried changing this in the code, but if you don’t use it you can’t scroll up or down to see the rest of the image. So…

I put the code back to its original state and showed the result to my client. He’d originally wanted to show 800px images, too big for Firefox/Opera if I used Lightbox JS and forcing a resize in Thickbox. But he was okay with the resizing and is now happy with the results.

Here’s his page with Thickbox in action. Pretty cool and it really only took about 30 minutes to get it installed and running once I decided to use it.

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The Springer Show!

Filed Under: Diversions by Debbie — Leave a comment
February 14, 2007

An English springer spaniel won Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show on Tuesday. My dogs (two fine springers) are quite proud today.

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