Comments on: What I Use

By: Geof Harries

Geof Harries — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:13:15 +0000

Matt, you didn't mention time-tracking, though I assume you could use Basecamp for that purpose. Personally, I use Harvest because it offers very easy tracking through an OS X Dashboard widget and excellent reporting + invoicing tools. I ran with Blinksale for my company's first year in the business, but at $12/mo, Harvest had more features and what I believe is a much better user experience than Blinksale. You may want to give Harvest a spin.

By: John

John — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:33:21 +0000

Thanks for sharing your list. It's cool to see what other developers are doing. I would add Parallels to the list. We use it all the time to test our work in different OS and browser environments. Having a native copy of IE 6 laying around has saved us numerous times. You may also want to check out Intervals for project management, as it also includes time tracking, task management, and invoicing, and could replace your basecamp+blinksale combo.

By: Harshil Karia

Harshil Karia — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 05:50:48 +0000

I think we use pretty much the same things. MacBook, CS3, WP -all are great.

Only i use:
For Project Management i use Deskaway - works MUCH better than Basecamp. If you’re not invested in the Basecamp experience i’d sincerely recommend DeskAway. Cheaper, smarter, neater.

For hosting - im on Bluehost

I also would recommend you to use SlideShare, Zoho Invoice, Google Apps.

By: Olga

Olga — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 04:25:26 +0000

Basecamp is good enough though its quite expensive.
Have you tried Task2Gather? It works greatly as a collaborative tool. The killing feature is a hierarchial task organisation, sharing and ability to discuss each task separately.
Moreover, it has iPhone client and WM client is about to be released.

By: Winnie

Winnie — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:38:50 +0000

I use webfaction as well and I love it! But yes, the control panel can be better, much better.

Customizing a CMS can be a nightmare if we don’t take into account all the extras like you mentioned, I always tend to forget the extra code I have to write and plugins to install, not to mention the time taken when things mysteriously do not work. ;p

Budgeting is one of the most difficult thing to learn as a freelancer, in my opinion.

By: Kenny Meyers

Kenny Meyers — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 19:25:37 +0000

You should use ExpressionEngine instead of WordPress.

By: Grant

Grant — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 18:02:29 +0000

“Freelancers offering CMS’s of any kind to clients — be very, very careful. I’ve nearly always under-budgeted the scope when of developing a site that’s powered by a CMS.”

Amen. I’ve been there myself - too many times.