Blogging and all that Malarkey

Would you offer a stranger a loan of £4,000 without any agreement in place? That is exactly what you are doing if you do £4,000 worth of work on the promise of payment. Wise words.

Testing on all versions of Internet Explorer will be much easier from now on thanks to their new suite of testing tools, modern.ie. The included tools look impressive on their own, but the website is also full of helpful information. Scanning this site revealed not only that I’m running an outdated version of jQuery but that I can help Windows 8 touch users simply by adding canvas { -ms-touch-action: double-tap-zoom;}. Handy. If you don’t develop on Windows (I don’t) Microsoft are offering three months BrowserStack virtual testing free. I’m baffled by the fact that to get the free offer I have to login using a Facebook account (that I don’t have,) but BrowserStack have their own (shorter, I think) free trial. Hats off to Microsoft. modern.IE may just let me ditch the 63Gb of virtual machines I use just to test Internet Explorer.

In this week’s episode of Unfinished Business, Anna and I talk about deposits and down-payments, getting paid regularly and what you can do if the unthinkable happens and you have to fight for your money.

On Monday evening I had the pleasure to speak with Tim Smith on his show The East Wing. We talk about book authoring, business podcasts and how better to manage client relationships. The East Wing is a great show and I thoroughly enjoyed speaking to Tim.

I thoroughly enjoyed hosting another Fashionably flexible responsive web design workshop at New Adventures on Wednesday. I got the feeling that everyone enjoyed the day. I know that I did.

Throughout my career, I’ve watched immensely talented designers waste a shitload of time creating fully fleshed-out comps of what a website could look like.

Brian Suda’s post is the perfect compliment to episode two of Unfinished Business, out today. I may come back to add my take on Brian’s advice another day, time permitting

In this new episode of Unfinished Business, the often taboo subject of how to decide what to charge for what you do. Getting the balance between too cheap and too pricey can be tricky, so Andy and Anna share their experiences — including Andy’s infamous ‘double your rate Fridays’ — and how to handle uncomfortable conversations about money.

Sophie Schmidt, daughter of Google chairman Eric Schmidt, visited North Korea and wrote a fascinating account of what she saw along with a few photos. Personally, I’ve always been fascinated by totalitarian, propaganda art and North Korea is one of the few places left in the world to see it.

I know how hard it can be, waiting a whole week for a new episode of Unfinished Business. To make things easier, here are two more creative business related podcasts for you to try.