Blogging and all that Malarkey

More importantly, it gives David, and the rest of Tumblr’s team, the freedom to continue making the best product they can while offloading a lot of the grunt work to Yahoo’s leadership, staff, and infrastructure. As for me, while I wasn’t a “founder” financially, David was generous with my employee stock options back in the day. I won’t make yacht-and-helicopter money from the acquisition, and I won’t be switching to dedicated day and night iPhones. But as long as I manage investments properly and don’t spend recklessly, Tumblr has given my family a strong safety net and given me the freedom to work on whatever I want. And that’s exactly what I plan to do. Lovely, genuine and inspiring writing.

While Anna’s away in Amsterdam, I talk with designer Laura Kalbag about Star Trek Into Darkness, how we name our wifi networks and whether location really affects our businesses. We discuss about how to find good sub-contractors and the differences between working for clients direct or via third-parties.

In this week’s episode of the nation’s favourite creative business podcast, I tell bad Dad jokes and Anna doesn’t laugh. We answer listeners’ questions about charging expenses and project assets to clients and when it’s appropriate to charge for ‘learning’ time. We talk about making the transition from a steady job to running a new business and why it’s important never to burn bridges, and how to compete with bargain basement website designers.

I’m struggling to believe it quite frankly, but The CSS Zen Garden was planted ten years ago today. I don’t think we should underestimate the importance of The CSS Zen Garden in the history of the web. Its influence still resonates today. Now it’s back accepting submissions and making some of us feel very old.

Last month I moved off Adobe’s Creative Cloud and back to a ‘boxed’ version of Creative Suite – laughably just in time for Creative Cloud to be the only way to use Adobe applications in the future. One of the casualties of the move was Adobe Edge Inspect, a tool that I have used and liked for testing designs across multiple devices. So today I downloaded Ghostlab and so far it looks promising.

People seem to like Rock Hammer, our little “curated project library for Hammer For Mac ” We designed Rock Hammer to help us here at Stuff and Nonsense design faster using HTML and CSS and we use it every day to do just that. Talking about Rock Hammer, some news:

On this week’s Unfinished Business, I mentioned how I ask our clients to name our projects’ shared Dropbox folder so that we don’t end up with dozens of folders called ‘redesign’ or ‘stuff-and-nonsense.’ It turns out I needn’t worry as Dropbox lets you move or rename any folder without breaking sharing. You can rename or move your shared folders just like you would any other folder on your hard drive or via the website. Even if you rename it, the folder will still remain shared. However, changing the name of the shared folder or its location will not change its name or location in the Dropbox of other members. I did not know that. Thanks to listener Steven for writing to let me know.

This week on Unfinished Business, Anna and I talk about biscuits and business software. Anna explains how she uses FreeAgent to keep track of her finances and berates me for not trying it. We talk about back-up software and how Stuff and Nonsense use Dropbox to collaborate with clients during projects. I run through my favourite design tools including Gridset and Typecast and no discussion about software would be complete without bemoaning how Adobe are abandoning Fireworks.

I didn’t know about this FRont End Developers’ meet-up in Manchester until I heard on Twitter someone there was discussing the pros and cons of my new beard. Beard talk aside, I’m planning on attending the next McrFRED, whenever it’s happening. (Maybe my beard will go with me.) In the meantime, organiser Simon Owen’s videos from the first event are online now.

Fighting gifs: 125 fighting game backgrounds.