ReachCustomersOnline.com

Rent A Coder

Posted by TimSlavin at June 5, 2004

Welcome back. This week I finally gave up my dream, delayed eight months already, of hacking out a home page design that includes one more thin column on the right. I want to add a whole set of content that might be of use to visitors to ReachCustomersOnline. Because my home page design is CSS and XHTML compliant, it's a bear to add a third column (to me, at least). The CSS box model is not as easy to figure out as HTML tables.

So I posted the job on RentACoder.com and spent the week fielding three or four bids. I chose someone in Petaluma, California (because I work out there at times) but I had interest from people in Florida, Italy, and Greece (the runner up). All but one appeared to be highly qualified. The one I was not sure about simply did not have a reference history with the website to back up their qualifications. A friend of mine in Poland pointed me to Rent A Coder and, so far, it's been a great experience.

The only oddity is their payment process. I have to go through two security hoops that I've never seen: a phone call to verify my phone number and a call to my credit card company. That's great to ensure the coders get paid but waiting three days would have the same effect (credit card companies reject charges within 2-3 days, if that is appropriate).

I did not get to post many items this week, only a good day's worth, due to workload. But yesterday, Friday, I did find a number of good items that should appear next week, if you're interested to look now: an incredible collection of Favorite Favicons, the little icons that appear in your web browser address bar, to the left of the URL; the favicon article has at least two good links buried in it, one way to create favicons and a decent site that reviews lots of cool stuff; I also came across another dense but highly interesting essay from Clay Shirky about social behavior, despite the cryptic name of the essay, Nomic World.

Finally, MarketingSherpa has an excellent (and scary, if you use email to reach your customers) early review of Google email (Gmail) and it's impact on emails sent by businesses, Special Report on Google Gmail: Six Concerns & Three Solutions for Emailers (the article is free until June 13th). Basically, among other issues, Google Mail is optimized for their AdSense products so it is possible your email pitch will include ads from competitors. Their article is worth a read.

My work deadlines have passed for now. So I only have small fry projects this weekend and will most likely find time to prime the website again with 3-4 days worth of posts, including the ones above and from last week (like BaseCamp). My apologies for going AWOL this week. Thanks for reading and visiting the website!

Tim

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