RSS Digest, easily include RSS feeds in your web content

I use a neat little service called RSS Digest to link to an RSS feed of my del.icio.us bookmarks. (You can see this in the blog sidebar) RSS digest essentially allows me to automatically publish a third party RSS feed on my site.

In essence RSS Digest allows you to easily syndicate third party content without any technical tinkering.

Be careful though, it is always best to ask for permission before doing this.

TimeSlice time tracking software

It seems I have a constant stream of friends and acquaintances who are becoming independant contractors or starting to supplement their income with contracting work.

As a result I am always answering questions about staying organized and my general business practices.

One of the most common questions I get is about how I manage and track my time. I'll get into time management in another post as it's a much more complicated explanation.

I use a wonderful little application called TimeSlice to track my time. I've played around with a variety of other applications but none of them suited the way I work as well as TimeSlice.

It's quite easy to set up multiple clients and projects, to set your billing increment (by the hour or by the minute), set your hourly rate per customer, and then total up your hours. (You can even prepare invoices from within the application - but I have to confess I haven't tried this feature yet - I use InDesign )

Whether you're billing by the project or by the hour you should get into the habit of tracking your time. You may even want to set up a project for your own company so that you can keep track of how much time you spend on administrative effort versus actual billable hours.

If you use a similar application on Mac OS X and you're really happy with it let me know, I'm always interested in investigating software alternatives even when I'm happy with what I've got.

#8 for Vancouver Web Design today...

Well... it was bound to happen sooner or later. Mastermynde is back to #8 for Vancouver Web Design on google, if only for a day.

Many of my clients are willing to link back to my site and my theory is that as their fortunes rise, so do mine. It seems quite fitting that our fates are tied together. For some of them, the first link to their site is from my home page.