Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Spent most of the day looking at Wordpress as a CMS for a local school. Like what I’ve seen so far.

Search for deeper understanding of approaches to programming that seem strange or incorrect to you. Don’t look for wrongness in what someone else is doing or what you’re thinking.
— Programming Advice for a Younger Me by Adam Keys

One of my biggest problems in my career has definitely been a lack of confidence in the code that I wrote.

40 rules for managing clients including this one:

Working weekends for clients: I’ll do it once if there’s a genuine emergency but, unless you pay me obscenely well for your inefficiency, I won’t do it twice. Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.

— 40 essential rules for client management by Bad Language

I'll be pinning this list up somewhere I can see it every day.

Deciding on a Pricing Strategy

I've been working on a new idea for a service for the last few weeks and I'm just about ready to take the wraps off it. While the core functionality of the service is happily working, I've been thinking a lot about the pricing strategy for it.

Freemium

I considered giving a basic level of functionality away for free, but the problem I have with this is that it is difficult to work out just what to include when you give a service away for free. Too much and you end up with more customers sitting pretty on the free service, too little and it's hard to get customers just to sign up. There's also a little bit more work involved in separating the free functionality from the premium functionality in a service. You have to ensure that the free tier of customers can use the application at the same time as paid customers who will have added features available to them.

Given that I prefer this pricing strategy for the services that I use, I found it strange that I didn't sway towards this from the start. When you make a product or a service, you want people to use it and the easiest way to do that is to provide part of it for free. It's certainly not the best strategy for getting lots of sign ups, but it is the easiest.

I hesitated on using a paid strategy to begin with because I wanted people to experience the service first in it's entirety before deciding to pay for it. The only way to do this then is to give people a free trial period of the application in it's entirety. No locked or restricted features, just a window of time to try the whole application before they decide whether it's for them or not.

I'm Going Paid

And that's what I am sticking with. A paid strategy with just a 30 day window to try out the application for free before the customer has to decide whether to subscribe to the service or not. I think it's definitely the best strategy. Committing to a paid service or product means that you are more accountable for the success of it and therefore you are more likely to want to make it succeed.

I've had positive feedback on this already, but the only way to truly see if the service will be a success is by releasing it to the world and that will hopefully happen in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

A fantastic piece on the drawbacks of using publishing platforms such as Medium.

In truth, Medium’s main prod­uct is not a pub­lish­ing plat­form, but the pro­mo­tion of a pub­lish­ing plat­form. This pro­mo­tion brings read­ers and writ­ers onto the site. This, in turn, gen­er­ates the us­age data that’s valu­able to ad­ver­tis­ers. Boiled down, Medium is sim­ply mar­ket­ing in the ser­vice of more mar­ket­ing. It is not a “place for ideas.” It is a place for ad­ver­tis­ers. It is, there­fore, ut­terly superfluous.

— The billionaire's typewriter by Matthew Butterick

My Wall Calendar Problem

I would love to have a wall calendar that would give me an at a glance view of what's coming up the next few months. Here's the problem though, my office is just a small corner of a larger sitting room we call "the den". I already have nice pictures on the wall and therefore I would rather not try and squeeze in a wall calendar when I only need to see it when I'm working. So what are the alternatives?

Whiteboard + Wall Calendar

One idea I had was to use a whiteboard to put my chosen wall calendar on and bring it out only when I'm working. The only issue I have with is that the only space where I could put this is behind me and therefore it wouldn't be within my sight. This is only a minor issue though. It would still be within easy reach to keep updated.

Printable Calendars

A printable calendar might be an option but then I think the main problem I'll have with this is size. The biggest I can print to is A4 and even printing a calendar across two pages is going to be still too small. Also spreading the calendar across separate pages loses it continuity.

In searching for printable calendars though, I did discover a great calendar by David Seah. Although it isn't suitable for my needs, I think there might be a few of you who might find it useful.

Desktop Wall Calendar

Right, I know what you're thinking. This is probably the last place you would want to view a full year calendar. Well, yes and no. Ideally I would like to have something away from my desktop, but I'm pretty limited in choices there so why not explore the possibility of a desktop calendar? My monitor is big enough that I wouldn't need to squint my eyes to see the details and I run most of my day to day applications full-screen anyway, so why
not?

I've tried running Calendar full screen using the year view but this isn't what I'm looking for. The months are spaced out with white space between them and I already have various calendars populating this. I would rather just see a blank calendar that doesn't show me my day to day appointments.

I also tried creating a wall calendar using Trello, but with it only showing seven lists on my screen, it's hard to see the whole year at a glance. This was a long shot to be honest. I knew this might not work but still I gave it a try.

Next I turned to the Internet yet despite the vast volumes of free tools and resources on the web, I couldn't find a tool or open source library that can do this for me or even come near it.

My next step is to spin up a web page and run it full screen but given my commitments at the moment, it's probably the last thing I need to be doing. I'll keeping hunting for a solution in the meantime.