Blogging and all that Malarkey

Last November I switched from a 13" MacBook Air to the equivalent MacBook Pro with a retina display. How does that feel?

It’s once again that time of year when almost every web designer, developer, podcaster and bottle washer that you follow on Twitter is asking you to vote for them in the annual Net Awards. Well, if you can’t beat’em, join’em.

Laura Kalbag is back on Unfinished Business this week to talk about how far in advance we book client projects and what we you do if a client wants more work done, but we’ve other work booked for the next few months? We discuss upping our day rates and how Laura’s client suggested she charge more. No Unfinished Business would be complete without talk of pirates and smugglers and the Milton Keynes Geek Night All Dayer conference which took place last week.

It’s a really good, funny episode of this week. I’m joined again by Elliott Kember to talk about whether being acquired is just a poncy way of saying that you’re taking a job at a big company. We discuss Google buying a nest thermostat Nest Labs for $3.2billion when they could’ve got one for a hundred quid at B&Q and why some people have reacted very negatively to the deal. Best of all, we start and end this episode with a song that sounds absolutely nothing at all like Purple Rain. You don’t get singing like that on The Freelance Web or The Big Web Show, I can tell you. Thanks to our sponsors this week, they were Espresso and Shopify. Please support our show by visiting them.

I won’t blame you if you didn’t read it, but a couple of Septembers ago I wrote something personal about my name, how it made me feel, why I changed it and then regretted it ever since. You can read it now if you like, but the general gist is that being called Andrew when I was young reminded me of something I was missing and that made me terribly sad. So I asked everyone to call me Andy instead, and they did that for the next thirty-five years.

This week on Unfinished Business, I’m in a relaxed mood as I’m joined by Josh Cleland to talk about how we filter enquires from potential clients through our websites and emails. We also try really, really hard not to talk about movies films.

An interesting piece from lonelyplanet.com’s Ian Feather on their move from icon fonts to SVG. I switched all our icons to SVG during our latest redesign (with PNG fallbacks for IE8) and they’ve proved incredibly reliable. That’s why I was slightly surprised to find Jon Hicks promoting icon fonts over SVG at the Handheld Conference back in November. Am I missing something, I wonder?

Zeldman in fine form: Never fear, web design generalists: many companies and organizations require your services and always will — from universities still seeking webmasters, to startups seeking seasoned folks with multiple areas of understanding to direct and coordinate the activities of younger specialists. But if jack-of-all web work is feeling stale, now may be the time to up your game as a graphic designer, or experience designer, or front end developer. “Diversify or die” is overstating things when the world needs generalists, too. But “follow the path you love” will always be good advice.

Talking with Dan on this week’s Unfinished Business got me thinking about photography and workshops and wanting to learn to make better photographs.

Two weeks before Christmas I took a train to Birmingham to meet a new client. After our meeting I wandered to the Bull Ring and went into the Dr. Martens shop there to buy a new pair of boots.