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Welcome to Best Practices. I run a freelance web development business, and this is where I share what I've learned and the mistakes I've made along the way. Some of it applies specifically to web development, but a lot of it is just about hanging out my shingle and running a business. If you have any questions, fire away.

August 20th, 2008

…And No One’s Around To Read It, Was It Ever Really Posted?

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Creative Commons License photo credit: John-Morgan

For a while now, I’ve been making posts on this blog at 10am (-500) on Wednesdays.  Last week I shook things up by waiting to post until Friday.  Then I asked if anybody noticed.  There were only a few responses (three) to the poll I created.  I know I have a lot more than three readers, so it seems the most popular response was not to respond at all.

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Aug 15th, 2008

If a Blog Post Falls In the Woods…

photo credit: goldberg
It’s actually Monday night as I’m writing this post.  Normally, I’ll have a new post published each Wednesday at 10am local time.  Even though I’m obviously writing this post in plenty of time to meet that self-imposed deadline, I’m running a little experiment.  I want to see what kind of response I [...]

Aug 6th, 2008

Fork in the Road

photo credit: tonystl
In the past year and a half, I’ve done a fair amount of web work for a local marketing company, Silver Square.  For a variety of reasons (foremost the quality of the people there) the organization is growing at a healthly clip.  So much so that they are looking to bring someone internal [...]

Jul 30th, 2008

The Survey for People Who Make Websites

A List Apart is ramping up their second annual survey of web professionals.  You may be wondering what is the point of this survey.  A bunch of people answer questions.  Then we learn that 0.3% of the world’s web developers live in Argentina.  Okay.  And?

Jul 23rd, 2008

Easy Instructions To Clear Browser Cache

photo credit: prw_silvan
I ran into a problem where one of my clients was having difficulty seeing updates I was making to a site design because her browser (Safari on a Mac) was caching an old stylesheet.  Most browsers these days make it (relatively) easy to clear the cache, but I can’t keep the instructions [...]

Jul 16th, 2008

Lessons Learned From the Online Referral Scorecard

At the beginning of this year, I invested a lot of time in creating a web application that allowed people to keep track of the activity they were doing to build relationships with their network of business contacts.  By giving numeric values to the various activities, the scorecard turns the process of tracking your activities [...]

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