TessaBlakeleySilver.com

If you're not one of the above, just check out lynda.com's software tutorials or cartoonsmart.com's training videos to pick up a few of those skill sets.

Beyond that, it's a simple two-fold process. I've outlined them below and also included some helpful resource links to give you further insight:

1. Find a prospective client and negotiate the project scope and price with them.
   For an understanding of how this process will go, please check out Scofield Editorial's illuminating YouTube video on The Vendor Client Relationship.
2. Once negotiations are finalized, design and build away!
   Fellow web developer and SEO guru Mathew Inman has taken the time to chart the process of Design and Development of a Typical Web Project (or: How A Web Design Goes to Hell).

Have fun with your new, free-stylin' work-from-where-ever-you-want business! Your friends will all be jealous! Many thanks to Scofield Editorial and The Oatmeal for sharing their expertise and insight!

1. I have a lot of ideas that I just like to get sites out for quickly.
   • I like to focus on the design and custom PHP features of these sites and not have to worry up front about incorporating them into a system. If as site does well, it's always easy to move it to a system like WordPress so other people can start to help managing it. With a simple template, Blogger FTP incorporated into my designs quickly.
2. Most of my side projects are light or certainly start off light and just don't MySQL to serve up minimal text and image content. I like how Blogger handled the DB and pushed out nice, organized flat files.
   • Along that same reasoning, I find I do prefer most of my sites to be flat-file. My hosting provider, while incredibly cheap and overall feature packed, seems to have some um, occasional MySQL “issues”. Flat-file PHP has always served up quickly without issue, while my WordPress, Drupal, Joomla friends have had to gnash their teeth and manage support tickets (Some even have left, only to find ALL cheap, virtual hosting providers have performance issues with MySQL, especially when you have thousands of customers, any of whom can put up a poorly written form which allows the db to be attacked).
3. I spend a lot of my time upgrading and patching WordPress and other MySQL CMSs for clients, I don't want to have to constantly do that for my own “quick idea”, pet projects. I just want to pop out a great design, add core content and also have an easy way to update items of note with an RSS feed. Blogger FTP was perfect for me.

Don't worry, I'm not leaving Blogger all together, I'm a general fan of Google and do find it hard to just “let go” of my blogger account, especially as some of my pet projects will probably do fine in an all Blogger, custom domain (looking forward to that migration tool on February 22nd). However most projects, especially ones that have custom PHP won't.

For those of you in the same boat, I'll be trying out the following solutions:

• Since I like WordPress so much, yet flat file works best for me, I'll be checking out WP Cache and WP Super Cache. From the look of it, WP Super Cache will be more for me as it produces actual flat files, not a cache of the MySQL db call. drawback: I'll be adding WP upgrades and management to my own projects in addition to client maintenance.
• DocuWiki's blog plugin. I already use DocuWiki for my own general project management and documentation. I've helped several clients streamline their internal documentation and project management with it. It's a super sweet and awesome little flat-file wiki. I love that the content is just text files and directories (I'm fine with Wiki Syntax). I sync my local Docuwiki's data/page directory with my Palm phone and can look up info and add/edit info using Documents To Go. It's then easy to sync locally and then to my web server (I also sync/share some Docuwiki directories with other client's Docuwiki directories on their servers). Adding a blog within this system would be great. drawback: creating custom skins for Docuwiki is a tad more time consuming than creating themes for WordPress and as with all CMS systems there will be upgrade/security maintenance.
• For fun, I'll also check out a couple flat file CMS, just to see if they'll work a bit more like Docuwiki yet be easy to custom template: razorCMS and skyblueCanvas. drawback: having to “learn” a new system and spend a little more time maintaining it, kind of a lot for just wanting a simple Blog with an RSS feed.
• Last, and what will probably suit me best in most instances: All I really need is a basic blog/news update capability with an RSS feed. The RSS feed is what's really important to me. If I just start handling my RSS feed manually, (I'm no stranger to raw XML especially RSS) and use PHP to parse the XML into my sites (PHP5's XML capabilities are just excellent), I can keep my XHTML/CSS designs simple and dynamic with custom PHP and get the benefits that Blogger FTP used to provide. I have a couple of my own PHP XML parsers and I've had great success using Simple Pie for RSS parsing on a couple projects. However, if your PHP skills are not that robust (or non existent!), you can try Feed For All's RSS to HTML script. I have placed this script on a couple client's sites and it works quite well. Non-PHP coders can easily adjust the template which works very similarly to Blogger's “Classic” FTP templates. I see the Feed For All site also has a “feed manager” which basically provides an interface form to the feed. The Blogger feed is not “Tidy'd” up. You can use something that has HTMLTidy built in, or Feed For All's 30 day free trial to get your Blogger RSS into a clean view that's much easier to work with.