I’ve been a big fan of Xero, the online accounting system, for quite some time. Since I first blogged about it almost two years ago, the service has come on in leaps and bounds, and an increasing number of Irish accountancy practices have adopted Xero and are recommending it to clients. One of the great differences between Xero and ‘off the shelf in a box’ software like Sage is the immediate roll out of new features when they become available. Not only can you access your accounts anywhere, anytime (you need internet access of course), but you’ll never have to install any software updates ever again. The latest update from Xero – their Invoice Branding Tool – is rather cool. [click to continue…]
Finally, after a long beta period and 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, WordPress 3.0 has arrived. As a WordPress user on this blog and other projects, i’m excited. This version of WordPress really is a huge step away from it being simply ‘blogging software’ – it is now a CMS in its own right. Here’s some of the cool new features i’m excited about.
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by Hugh on June 5, 2010
I bought my copy of the Diythemes Thesis Theme almost a year ago – in July 2009 – and immediately forgot about it. I’m a clever boy. It’s only now, with the summer providing some more free time than I expected, that i’ve gotten up off my rear end and decided to push forward with some WordPress based projects – and of course i’ll be using Thesis on them all.
But first things first – what is the Thesis Theme anyway? And, at $87 for the single use option and $164 for the developer license, why should you buy it?
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I have a huge confession to make. I’ve not had business cards since 2006. Any self-respecting networker or business owner would think i’m mad by not having had any, but i’ve held off for one very good reason (actually two). I paid through the nose for a few hundred cards in 2003 when I first set up one of my businesses… which I then promptly rebranded four months later, with a new logo and the lot. My business cards were bin-bound. I then ordered some more when we moved into our first offices, complete with our new office phone number, address, the lot. 8 months later we ran out of space and had to move offices – and we couldn’t keep our old office phone number as we were on an internal exchange. Business cards once again rendered useless. I stopped bothering after that.
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by Hugh on September 29, 2009
The internet has been paying my bills for over a decade, and in that time i’ve seen email marketing tools come and go. From open source to paid, there have been massive developments in the space over the past few years, and now the choices are greater than ever. Recently, however, I took the step to migrate all my email marketing lists (double opt in of course!) to Mad Mimi, a fantastically easy web app for managing email lists. Here’s why.
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by Hugh on April 21, 2009
Whether you’re looking to sell ebooks, music, or software, there are two ways to make money from selling digital products online – the easy way, and the hard way. The hard way entails spending thousands on set up costs for your ecommerce website with long set up times and legwork. The easy way simply involves finding ‘point and click’ service providers who specialise in payment processing and digital fulfilment, signing up, adding your products, and promoting them! Here’s a few handy sites which can help you sell your digital downloads and products online.
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Setting up a business is one of the most exciting things you’ll ever do, especially when it’s your first time. However the one thing that usually puts a dampener on all the fun of going it alone is the boring process of preparing and filing accounts. I’ve previously blogged about fantastic web based accounting software which makes the processes involved in generating invoices and recording payments outwards slightly more interesting. However, what if you don’t even want to do that? What if you just want to throw heaps of paper at someone once a month and say ‘do that’! Then you’ll need Mazuma Money.
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by Hugh on December 18, 2008
Running a business should be fun. Most of the time it is fun. Meeting new people, learning new things every day, seeing first hand the fruits of your labour – all benefits of running your own business. However, there is one big downside. Boring, tear inducing accounting. Every time I go to start up my version of Sage to do any boring accounts related stuff, I usually double click the icon, run off to make a coffee, and by the time I get back, the bloody thing has only barely finished starting up. Zzzzzz. As well as all this the interface is quite dated, the computer it’s installed on freezes up constantly, and if I ever want to take my work home with me I can’t. Thankfully several SAAS (software as a service) solutions have popped up, with the best looking one (in my humble opinion) being Xero. Only one problem – unless you’re in New Zealand, the UK, or Australia, you won’t be able to use it. Until 22nd December 2008 that is!
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by Hugh on December 4, 2008
I’ve mentioned a few times over the past while my increasing high regard for Drupal. It has come such a long way over the past couple of years, and you may not know it but you’ve probably stumbled across several Drupal powered sites in your travels. Here are just a few of the higher profile ones for you to check out.
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by Hugh on November 28, 2008
When planning a website, everyone has their own way of figuring out which content should go where. Loads of people use spreadsheets, others use downloadable and installable purpose built tools and – ashamedly – I’ve been using a good old piece of paper and pen for about ten years. After a while though, it can become quite a pain rejigging your site plan time and time again. Today I was once more editing the visual sitemap for Shares.ie to accommodate some new content I signed contracts for today, and pretty much lost the plot because it was becoming such a pain to plan a site with that much content. After a quick search on Google I stumbled across a web based tool called Writemaps, and what a saviour it is!
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