Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

I've adopted this idea of Patrick's for my own stuff. The card only contains things that I want to do personally for that day.

Client work goes in my Moleskine where I need a more permanent record of day to day progress.

Starting a re-design

After reading Matt Gemmell's post on designing blogs for readers, I decided to assess my own blog for a re-design.

Here's the parts of my blog I'm not that happy with at the moment:

  • I used another template for my site that was similar to the default Octopress theme. They're fine themes to use but I've always wanted to design a theme that suits my requirements.

  • The side bar is a busy place. Perhaps too busy. While I do want to have extra information like links to other accounts and other information, I feel this information would be better suited at the bottom of the blog. This way the reader isn't distracted during the reading of my post.

  • The fonts used in the current theme make it difficult to differentiate headings from paragraphs. Easy to fix, but I don't want to put a band-aid on the current theme. I want to start from scratch.

With this information I've decided to put together a new layout for the site over the next few weeks. I'm putting a couple of products to the side for the moment. For the next few weeks I am really busy with client work, so I want a side project that doesn't demand too much of my time. This will fit the bill nicely.

A great idea: Weekly pricing

Dedicating yourself to a project weekly means you don't have to switch contexts. I wake up in the morning, get myself ready and then I start on the tasks for a weekly project. I don't have to decide what clients gets my priority today, I just work on the project for the week.

— Weekly Pricing for Web Development by Curtis McHale

I love this idea. Basically it amounts to charging for iterations or sprints. Nice to see Curtis picked up on my task switching post as well.

I can afford to lose some time during the day as I am working with mostly one client at the moment on a number of their applications, so a little lost time is to be expected.

Tonight I took the final step in making the move away from Google. After much deliberation I made the move to migrate my Google Apps email account to FastMail. It was certainly less painful than I thought it would be and took the best part of an hour to get all three email accounts over to FastMail.

As for the other services from Google, I've found suitable replacements for many of their services over the last few weeks.

  • Switched to Pages and Numbers from Google Docs - I don't have that many documents to manage and I don't need them when I am on the move, so setup will be sufficient.
  • Switched to Feedbin from Google Reader - Feedbin is still young but it's growing and it's supported by the Reeder app for the iPhone. A no-brainer decision there.
  • Switched to Gauges from Google Analytics - Github's analytics service is ideal for my needs at the moment. It's dashboard provides all the information that I need at a glance and of course it has a greap API that's easy to use.

There are of course other Google services that I never really took too like Google+, Chat, Picasa, and their Drive service. I already use alternatives for these that I find to be much better so I never really got round to using these.

So why move from Google?

It was the all your eggs in basket argument. Google aren't going to go away anytime soon, but simply having all my information in one place was nerving. I wanted more control over my data, so I elected to find alternatives that would do just that.

I'm happy with the choice that I made in Google free. It's not for everyone, but having more control and investing more into products and apps that provide a better service certainly does give a better feeling than handing all my information over to one provider.