As a small business owner / freelancer one of the most annoying things for me is chasing the money. I love having the money in my account, and I love doing the work to earn it... but the bit in-between is time-consuming and sometimes very frustrating. Over the years I've tried a number of solutions and never found the right one.

FreshBooks seems to be a pretty good solution though. And it's a very low risk trial (free if you only have 3 clients or less).

Account management, payment integration and setup is very simple - took less time to catch up on outstanding invoices for about 6 jobs tonight that I usually take with basic account management each month!

For clients where it's a simple case of billing against a PO or fixed price quote the process is really simple. For clients where you need to be able to produce a timesheet to track billable hours that's also possible (though only via web based time-entry at the moment... can only hope a desktop/PDA add-on eventuates at some point - for Windows, OSX, Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian...a  tough call I guess, but no harm in hoping)

The system automates a lot of stuff that you either have to set reminders for (or pay your accountant extra to do) in other solutions and has seamless integration with a number of payment gateways (from a very simple PayPal solution, up to high end credit card processing solutions).

What makes FreshBooks so interesting is that it's not a big accounting firm, but a small 6 man team who really seem to love what they're doing (and more importantly remember what folks actually need the system to do)

According to (now debunked) legend Bill Gates once said that 640K would be enough for anyone. Well, I for one am glad he didn't really mean that because now my laptop is running with 1GB of RAM.... but it's still not enough!

As RAM prices have dropped and processors have got faster it seems software has been pushing the envelope faster and further and hardware just can't keep up.

I got my current laptop about 18 months ago. It came with a standard 512MB RAM which I immediately doubled - I use my laptop for developing with IIS/ASP and SQL (and sometimes Apache and PHP).

Now I don't push my machine that much. I tend to have Outlook running, a music player, remote desktop connection to my development server, messenger, IE and Firefox, my editor/debugger (sometimes Visual Studio, sometimes Notepad), the usual services (including IIS and SQL) and anti-virus/anti-phishing stuff.

And 1GB is these days no-where near enough. SQL with one database active is using over 1.5GB of virtual storage. Outlook and the SQL Server 2005 Workbench uses almost half a gig each, with the MS Search Indexer (used by Outlook 2007) coming in with a further 300meg.

Couple the thrashing while paging applications in and out of memory with the wasted CPU cycles we have to spend keeping the machine safe my poor little laptop is getting stressed.... but talking to Sony and a number of 3rd party memory vendors the VGN-T27GP can't support more than a total of 1GB (the internal 512MB plus the same sized extension).

While it's easy to be down on the hardware vendors for not thinking ahead it didn't see critical a year and a half ago to be able to stuff in more than 1GB. 512MB had been okay for the preceding machine running a similar mix (SQL Server 2000 not 2005 being the biggest difference) but it's still pretty annoying. I want the horsepower now, but I don't want to splash out on a new machine until the expected crop of Vista optimised boxes appear.

One side effect is that I'm watching how greedy apps are with RAM these days and being quite harsh on the offenders. iTunes 7 required a huge jump in resources over version 6... for no apparent gain, so it's been relegated to loading my iPod while WMP11 Beta is now my day to day media player (no downsides there apart from the current playing song doesn't appear in my Messenger!) and I've started running MaxMem again to let me force apps to tidy their act up.

Makes me think all developers should have to test on really clogged up old machines before releasing their product just to make sure it does still work for us without rolling hardware budgets

According to (now debunked) legend Bill Gates once said that 640K would be enough for anyone. Well, I for one am glad he didn't really mean that because now my laptop is running with 1GB of RAM.... but it's still not enough!

As RAM prices have dropped and processors have got faster it seems software has been pushing the envelope faster and further and hardware just can't keep up.

I got my current laptop about 18 months ago. It came with a standard 512MB RAM which I immediately doubled - I use my laptop for developing with IIS/ASP and SQL (and sometimes Apache and PHP).

Now I don't push my machine that much. I tend to have Outlook running, a music player, remote desktop connection to my development server, messenger, IE and Firefox, my editor/debugger (sometimes Visual Studio, sometimes Notepad), the usual services (including IIS and SQL) and anti-virus/anti-phishing stuff.

And 1GB is these days no-where near enough. SQL with one database active is using over 1.5GB of virtual storage. Outlook and the SQL Server 2005 Workbench uses almost half a gig each, with the MS Search Indexer (used by Outlook 2007) coming in with a further 300meg.

Couple the thrashing while paging applications in and out of memory with the wasted CPU cycles we have to spend keeping the machine safe my poor little laptop is getting stressed.... but talking to Sony and a number of 3rd party memory vendors the VGN-T27GP can't support more than a total of 1GB (the internal 512MB plus the same sized extension).

While it's easy to be down on the hardware vendors for not thinking ahead it didn't see critical a year and a half ago to be able to stuff in more than 1GB. 512MB had been okay for the preceding machine running a similar mix (SQL Server 2000 not 2005 being the biggest difference) but it's still pretty annoying. I want the horsepower now, but I don't want to splash out on a new machine until the expected crop of Vista optimised boxes appear.

One side effect is that I'm watching how greedy apps are with RAM these days and being quite harsh on the offenders. iTunes 7 required a huge jump in resources over version 6... for no apparent gain, so it's been relegated to loading my iPod while WMP11 Beta is now my day to day media player (no downsides there apart from the current playing song doesn't appear in my Messenger!) and I've started running MaxMem again to let me force apps to tidy their act up.

Makes me think all developers should have to test on really clogged up old machines before releasing their product just to make sure it does still work for us without rolling hardware budgets

After a few little hiccups the new ClubAV site went live this week. Cat had given me page templates and from there I built a simple CMS so they could edit and manage the content.

To keep things simple for the client used the TinyMCE editor for WYSIWYG editing (rather than force them to use HTML) and their MCImageManager component to allow simple edit and upload of images.

It was a bit of a challenge as I've not written any PHP code in anger for over a year - and we had no end of fun with the hoster who, unlike our usual preferred supplier HostingShop, won't be getting any business from me in a hurry! For some reason it scares me when a hoster provides a site that doesn't have a scripting language available by default, when it does get activated they give you old versions of PHP and some add-on components that they don't even know are installed (and can't be turned off - eAccelerator seems to cause a problem for the MCImageManager component) and promised upgrades to PHP5 take days rather than the promised 15 minutes (all this is when they do bother to respond to emails)!

I think it's quite a nice little site - hopefully it gives the client what they need for some time.

After a few little hiccups the new ClubAV site went live this week. Cat had given me page templates and from there I built a simple CMS so they could edit and manage the content.

To keep things simple for the client used the TinyMCE editor for WYSIWYG editing (rather than force them to use HTML) and their MCImageManager component to allow simple edit and upload of images.

It was a bit of a challenge as I've not written any PHP code in anger for over a year - and we had no end of fun with the hoster who, unlike our usual preferred supplier HostingShop, won't be getting any business from me in a hurry! For some reason it scares me when a hoster provides a site that doesn't have a scripting language available by default, when it does get activated they give you old versions of PHP and some add-on components that they don't even know are installed (and can't be turned off - eAccelerator seems to cause a problem for the MCImageManager component) and promised upgrades to PHP5 take days rather than the promised 15 minutes (all this is when they do bother to respond to emails)!

I think it's quite a nice little site - hopefully it gives the client what they need for some time.

One thing that slows me down a fair bit as a developer is when I want to post a code sample in a blog. It takes forever to get it formatted just right, or I use an external tool and have to mess about with cut'n'paste and hope everything is good

Well, one nice thing about the Windows Live Writer is that thanks to it's plug-ins most problems will probably get solved in the tool and I won't have to go scratching around any more.

The latest neat add-on I found is a Syntax Highlighter that supports multiple languages and is one-click easy to use - adding this sample was as easy as copy from the original source, paste into the highlighter and then hit insert to put it into the post.

<%
	fileFld = request.files(0)
	If fileFld Is Nothing Then
	Else
		if fileFld.ContentLength > 250 * 1024 Then
			ErrMsg(2) = "Error - File must be less than 250Kb"
		Else
			If (fileFld.ContentType).ToLower() <> "application/pdf" Then
				ErrMsg(2) = "Error - Filetype must be PDF"
			else
				PDF = System.IO.Path.GetFileName(fileFld.FileName)
				fileFld.SaveAs(Server.MapPath(uploadDir & PDF))
			End If
		End if
	End if
%>

There's not much about it that I'd like to see change/improve apart from maybe for it to have a full understanding of the VB.NET classes, methods and properties just so I can get a bit more colour in here... but compared to what I had before this is a real help.

Of course, now I just need to start writing better code!

One thing that slows me down a fair bit as a developer is when I want to post a code sample in a blog. It takes forever to get it formatted just right, or I use an external tool and have to mess about with cut'n'paste and hope everything is good

Well, one nice thing about the Windows Live Writer is that thanks to it's plug-ins most problems will probably get solved in the tool and I won't have to go scratching around any more.

The latest neat add-on I found is a Syntax Highlighter that supports multiple languages and is one-click easy to use - adding this sample was as easy as copy from the original source, paste into the highlighter and then hit insert to put it into the post.

<%
	fileFld = request.files(0)
	If fileFld Is Nothing Then
	Else
		if fileFld.ContentLength > 250 * 1024 Then
			ErrMsg(2) = "Error - File must be less than 250Kb"
		Else
			If (fileFld.ContentType).ToLower() <> "application/pdf" Then
				ErrMsg(2) = "Error - Filetype must be PDF"
			else
				PDF = System.IO.Path.GetFileName(fileFld.FileName)
				fileFld.SaveAs(Server.MapPath(uploadDir & PDF))
			End If
		End if
	End if
%>

There's not much about it that I'd like to see change/improve apart from maybe for it to have a full understanding of the VB.NET classes, methods and properties just so I can get a bit more colour in here... but compared to what I had before this is a real help.

Of course, now I just need to start writing better code!

Even after many years of hacking up HTML pages it surprises me when I discover some new tricks. Or even better old tricks than now work how you expect them to! One of the great things about the forthcoming IE7 release (currently at "Release Candidate 1") is how it's adding a lot more consistent and correct support for CSS. Things like the hover attribute now work everywhere, not just on address links. Now if only Safari would implement the <label for="{id}>label text</label> I'd be happy (oh and if the CSS folks could trouble themselves to come up with a decent 'float:bottom;' type solution for site footers/copyrights that doesn't involve too much fiddling around).

Anyway, I digress. The two old yet new goodies I found (while, as usual, hunting for something totally unrelated) are firstly the <optgroup> sub-element for a <select>... it allows you to group related items together while not itself being selectable

<select>
	<optgroup label="Sites">
		<option value="s01">BigBrother</option>
		<option value="s02">ClubAV</option>
		<option value="s03">AMD Means Business</option>
	</optgroup>
	<optgroup label="Clients">
		<option value="ess">Endemol Southern Star</option>
		<option value="csa">Cat Savard Advertising</option>
		<option value="zzarg">Zzarg Advertising</option>
	</optgroup>
</select>

The next discovery is the <fieldset><legend> pairing. This allows you to create a block of related fields with a common boundary. And it's stylable with CSS. In fact, with the new IE7 style capabilities you can even change the look when it has focus

<fieldset>
	<legend>Log In:</legend>
	<label for="un">User Name:</label> <input id="un"> 
	<label for="pw">Password:</label> <input id="pw" size="10">
</fieldset>

<style>
fieldset {
	width: 450px;
	border-top: 1px solid #efefef;
	border-left: 1px solid #efefef;
	border-bottom: 1px solid #cccccc;
	border-right: 1px solid #cccccc;
	padding: 1em 1em 1em 1.5em;
}
fieldset:hover {
      border: 1px solid #ABC2EC;
    }
</style>

It all goes to show... you can teach an old dog new tricks. And it's even better when the tricks are actually old ones, that now just happen to work fine!

Even after many years of hacking up HTML pages it surprises me when I discover some new tricks. Or even better old tricks than now work how you expect them to! One of the great things about the forthcoming IE7 release (currently at "Release Candidate 1") is how it's adding a lot more consistent and correct support for CSS. Things like the hover attribute now work everywhere, not just on address links. Now if only Safari would implement the <label for="{id}>label text</label> I'd be happy (oh and if the CSS folks could trouble themselves to come up with a decent 'float:bottom;' type solution for site footers/copyrights that doesn't involve too much fiddling around).

Anyway, I digress. The two old yet new goodies I found (while, as usual, hunting for something totally unrelated) are firstly the <optgroup> sub-element for a <select>... it allows you to group related items together while not itself being selectable

<select>
	<optgroup label="Sites">
		<option value="s01">BigBrother</option>
		<option value="s02">ClubAV</option>
		<option value="s03">AMD Means Business</option>
	</optgroup>
	<optgroup label="Clients">
		<option value="ess">Endemol Southern Star</option>
		<option value="csa">Cat Savard Advertising</option>
		<option value="zzarg">Zzarg Advertising</option>
	</optgroup>
</select>

The next discovery is the <fieldset><legend> pairing. This allows you to create a block of related fields with a common boundary. And it's stylable with CSS. In fact, with the new IE7 style capabilities you can even change the look when it has focus

<fieldset>
	<legend>Log In:</legend>
	<label for="un">User Name:</label> <input id="un"> 
	<label for="pw">Password:</label> <input id="pw" size="10">
</fieldset>

<style>
fieldset {
	width: 450px;
	border-top: 1px solid #efefef;
	border-left: 1px solid #efefef;
	border-bottom: 1px solid #cccccc;
	border-right: 1px solid #cccccc;
	padding: 1em 1em 1em 1.5em;
}
fieldset:hover {
      border: 1px solid #ABC2EC;
    }
</style>

It all goes to show... you can teach an old dog new tricks. And it's even better when the tricks are actually old ones, that now just happen to work fine!