Category Archives: Question

Troubles in Finding Freelancers

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So for a long time now, I have been looking to grow my list of people I can trust to pass work onto. I have had some successes, but mostly failures. The problems seem to partly stem from my limited budget, but also being too trusting.

I troll forums looking for people with the talents I need, and when I contract jobs out to them, I try to make everything as fair as possible when it comes to paying a certain percentage up front, or paying before I receive the files. This has always been a mistake.

Once people get paid, they lose interest.

I will give you an example. A few months back, I decided I was going to build the biggest web application I have ever thought of. I commissioned a person I know through the web only to do the work. He has always been great before on smaller projects, and was giving me a quote that seemed feasible and reasonable.

The payment schedule would be split up, because it was a multi-month job. After seeing and hearing about his progress, I sent the first payment to him. After he received the payment, I haven’t really heard from him since. I got an e-mail a month ago filled with excuses, but no real information on what was going on related to my project.

Another month passed, and still no updates. So today, I have had to e-mail him asking him if he is still interested. If he isn’t and I don’t get my money’s worth of work, the amount I paid him is enough to warrant some form of legal action. What a scary though!

Before I had paid him money, he seemed to be working well. He had shown me a non-functional mockup of the administration panel, and had showed excitement at getting the database schema set up in such a way that the site should work well, and not have too many growing pains when we filled it with insane amounts of data.

It really made me sad to see the whole project fall apart. Despite his professionalism at the start, his interest quickly disappeared, leaving me in the lurch.

I have had the same problem finding competent and trustworthy bloggers, designers, and all sorts of programmers. The money I made isn’t enough to allow for losses related to projects people just “decide” to drop after taking a payment. Not only does it make me angry, but I end up having to do certain things on my own to make up for their disappearance, thus costing me time on other work I could be doing.

Is it just my bad luck, or have others had the same issues? How do you find good, trustworthy freelancers without breaking the bank?

Originally posted on February 12, 2008 @ 11:28 am

Backup Concerns: Network Attached Storage

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So, I am looking at getting a better backup solution set up for my data. I have a desktop and two laptops to keep properly backed up. Each using a different operating system, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X.

About two years ago, I was doing monthly backups on three 700 MB CD’s a month. About a year ago, I started doing them on one 4.3 GB DVD each month. Now, with the increase in the amount of computers, and the raw data I am creating, I am thinking about going to a hard drive backup system.

I have an external hard drive that I use for backing up before formatting a system, but it is only 120 GB, and I would like to keep it as that quick, one time use backup solution for getting my machine ready for formatting.

So I am considering buying two 500 GB SATA hard drives, and an external USB 2.0 drive bay. This is the cheapest way to start backing things up regularly, but not the most effective. I will have lots of space, and I could stagger my backups so that one week they are on the first hard drive, and the second week they are on the second hard drive, and back and forth. That way if one hard drive ever fails, the most I would lose is a week of work.

What I am seriously considering though is going a step further and getting a small, two bay, network attached storage device. I could put the two hard drives inside, and set them to RAID-1, which would mirror the data on both hard drives. This would give me only 500GB of space, but if a single drive ever failed, I would be protected from any data loss. This is also one of the more expensive options I have to keep my data backed up, as it requires two drives, but really only gives me one drive worth of space.

I could take my computer tower that isn’t really being used for anything, buy a serial-ATA controller, throw some hard drives into it, and using some software, change it into a network attached storage box. This could also provide me with a RAID-1 setup, as well as some other features. I haven’t really looked into doing this as of yet, but it seems like a cheaper, and infinitely more expandable option. I am not sure which software I would use to do this, and would love to hear some options if anyone knows of some.

Of course, some might wonder why I don’t consider a Drobo, despite its popularity, the device, while really interesting, is far too expensive for me to splurge on. At nearly $500 for just the four bay device, Drobo would set me back over $700, where my other options are around half as expensive.

Yes, Drobo has some interesting features, like a light that tells you the status of the hard drive, and being able to used mixed size drives, among other things, I don’t think its features warrant the current price.

The last option on my list is to get some storage online. I haven’t really investigated something like this yet, but I think it would be interesting. Either something like using Amazon’s S3 service to back up my hard drives, somehow, or a data server from some web hosting-like company. If someone has done research into using a web service as an online backup solution, I would love to hear it. My main concern though is that the cost will mount quite quickly compared to a hard drive based solution.

How do you back up all your files? Do you have an automated system, or do you have to remember every week, month, or quarter? If you were going to buy a backup system today, and your budget was under $500, what would you select? I would love some advice if you have any.

Originally posted on January 5, 2008 @ 1:57 pm

Do You Post Enough?

4 Replies

One issue I have been having lately, with my job pulling me in all sorts of directions is making sure to post enough on the blogs I am part of. I didn’t think that posting regularly on all those blogs would be that difficult. When I first started blogging full time, I was writing on nearly a dozen sites, posting over a dozen posts a day, but each and every article was fairly low quality.

Now, with all the work I do for Splashpress Media, I sometimes don’t feel like I have enough time to spend on crafting articles. So now my posting speed has gone down, and my quality is fairly low, and so that brings up the question of posting routines and whatnot. Do you post on your blog enough? And if you do, is the quality as high as you would like it to be?

The really funny part about this whole post is that I almost want to start another blog for a subject I am interested in.

Originally posted on December 20, 2007 @ 8:15 pm

Does Anyone Know Who I Am?

15 Replies

I have been around, blogging long before certain other bloggers, and yet they have quickly become household names. I have watched certain bloggers for a long time, and basically, they are celebrities to me, and after over two years of blogging, I wonder if I have made a difference to anyone. Have I, David Peralty, been noticed at all?

I have made some great friends, contacts, and networked with some of the best online, but I sometimes feel like the path I took in becoming a full time problogger made sure that I didn’t really get noticed.

When I first started blogging for money, I wasn’t really much better than those automated spam blogs that shoot out hundreds of posts a month that do nothing more than quote news from other sites and link back to them. I slowly got better, but writing on half a dozen to a dozen blogs meant that people didn’t really attach themselves to me, but instead to the site, and its content.

I have participated in making over a two dozen WordPress themes, about half of which have been given out into the community for free. I have written over five thousand posts, attended a few conferences, been a co-host on a variety of podcasts, and been interviewed for an article on blogging for a local paper, and so I would like to think that I have become relatively well known online.

I bring this whole insecurity up, in part because I watch as Chris Garrett, a well known writer continues to publish material on dozens of sites, and people will read those sites because he is there writing on them. He has a following.

I watch as J. Angelo Racoma, Abe Olandres and John Chow get covered by television reporters.

It makes me wonder if I have made mistakes in my career. Missteps that might have brought me more attention online.

Why is attention so important? Well, things change, especially in the online world. People change companies, change blogs, and as such, without a following, they have to start all over.

I know it is vain, and probably doesn’t seem important to anyone else, but I’d love to know where I stand online.

Originally posted on December 13, 2007 @ 9:55 pm

How Many Times a Week Do You Update?

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One of the things that you have to think about is how often you update your blog. Different niches have different needs for content to make them successful.

I try to update most of my blogs every weekday, with a few blogs getting bi-weekly posts, and others getting some weekend posts. I do this so that their is some fresh content being pushed out as often as possible. I would like to think that others do the same, but I watch as some blogs get half a dozen posts every single day, while other blogs remain devoid of posts for months on end.

How often do you update your blogs per week? Please let me know via the form below, or by leaving a comment.

Originally posted on August 27, 2007 @ 8:11 am