It’s difficult to contact them – Why? They have the internet. They have phones. We may get signal issues from time to time if we go through a tunnel but mobile problems are nothing a visit to o2.co.uk or the Orange shop won’t fix. And generally they do answer calls, unless genuinely busy. And even then they will call you back.

Freelancing is risky – Admittedly there is no guarantee of work but if you don’t feel like you’re getting enough business from freelancing, keep a hold of your full time job too, or downgrade to a part-time job and balance the two. Where there’s a will there’s a way.

A freelancer won’t meet a deadline – Actually most are very professional and self motivated, so yes they do stick to deadlines. How would they make any money if they didn’t?

Freelancers aren’t reliable – Okay, so they don’t necessarily get up at 6.30 in the morning to commute, but freelancers understand the concept of reliability. And freelancers can balance their workload to suit the best times for them. The work will get done. It doesn’t matter when or where.

Freelancers results aren’t to the same standard – Aren’t they? Freelancers tend to become so once they have the skills and experience behind them that gives them the confidence to work on their own. Most spend money on bettering their skills. Otherwise the competition would trample them.

So don’t write a freelancer off based on misconceptions. If they weren’t good at what they did, they wouldn’t have a business. Freelancer doesn’t mean ‘slacker.’

My experience being that of a PHP developer (mainly using the CakePHP framework) and a forum software enthusiast (I’ve even written my own forum software for kicks). Personally I think that I’d fit perfectly into a support team role, or even a software development job. Those are the types of jobs I’m looking for. I’d also make a semi-competent server-guy person, as I’m pretty familiar with ubuntu and debian-based linux distro’s as I have administrated several of my own servers only from the command line.

If you need examples of my work you need look no further than this very site. My websites are all listed here, and my code is available for all to look at here. Can’t get much better than that.

Anyway. Thought I’d throw that out there. If you are hiring, or even if you know of anyone who’s hiring and want to do your good deed for the month, drop me a line.

Just started yet another forum, lol.

“Mikey, you don’t have time for your current forums, let alone this one!”

Yeah I know, I know. But just in case anyone was interested. It’s a gaming forum (can anyone say DDoS? Nah, I’m kidding), and I have had this spare license for a while now and just had some time tonight to set it up. Coolios!

http://gaming-madness.com/

Here’s how:

• Download the kwn.me IPB API files from here
• Unpack and Upload the “kwnme” folder into /admin/sources/classes/url/apis/
• Edit /admin/sources/classes/twitter/connect.php
• Find on line 220:
  $data = $shorten->shorten( $url, IPS_URL_SHORTEN_SERVICE );
• Replace with:
  $data = $shorten->shorten( $url, 'kwnme');

(if you want to change to bit.ly, just change ‘kwnme’ to ‘bitly’)

I’m working most nights now, and when I’m not working I’m either too tired, sleeping, or too depressed to do anything online. I’m missing my online friends.. online, and the only people who I seem to talk to in real life are .. well, my work colleagues. Offline social life = +1, online = -1.

Of course because I am so busy I am neglecting to talk to friends, so they don’t talk to me, it’s fucking brilliant really. Defaulting on responsibilities and not being able to do the things I used to like to do online, just depresses me even further.

The problem for me is that, even though I’m not working as much as I could be, the shifts are spread out over the week in an awkward way, I will have a shift on a Monday, then a Tuesday, then nothing ’til the Sunday, so Wednesday through Saturday I have free (In this hypothetical scenario), but then I lack the motivation to do anything.

So to the few friends I have left (you’re possibly reading this), I understand you not talking to me if I’m not around much, and when I am around, I don’t contact you, so what can I complain about. Fucking depressing.

I coded the site in 30 days, that was my “30 Day Challenge”. If you register on the site you can read that here: http://30daychallenges.net/challenges/info/2. It’s a nice story to tell, but a lot of long nights coding were involved, and a lot of poking from my friends, so once more, thanks to them

I’ve set myself another challenge to continue, you can view my progress on that one here: http://30daychallenges.net/challenges/info/51

You should probably read this blog entry on the site itself: Welcome to 30 Day Challenges, feel free to comment over there!

I started following people with the twitter account a few hours ago so you may have noticed already. Why the odd name? Cos it matches the short URL which I’ve integrated to certain parts of the website, which is 30d.me

I really have high hopes for the site, personally I love the idea, but that’s just me. If you’re confused about it I suggest you read this blog entry, the FAQ, or this Getting Started page.

1. Flash is Evil, designed as a competitor to the web, not to be used on it. Try HTML5 for Video.

2. Don’t rely on external libraries to load your page, such as javascript/jquery, prototype, flash/actionscript, mootools, or any other libraries. If a user has Javascript disabled, your web page should still display fine.

3. In addition to the above, if you do use javascript extensively to display content (you really shouldn’t), please for the love of any omnipotent being, don’t use a Hashbang in your url’s. It’s horrible.

4. Don’t use <table> or <font> tags. They’re deprecated for a reason, in 1999 it was fine to use tables to lay out your content, but since the advent of CSS, it’s often easier now to use divs and classes, or even HTML5 Elements combined with CSS. (Switch To HTML5) The same can be said for adding styling to your text.

5. Don’t use <style>. It’s horrible practise. For a development site just to see how it looks and to tweak, it’s perfect, but in a production site it’s not really an option unless all other options are unavailable.

6. Don’t make your navigation cluttered. This one is more web design rather than web development. People need to be able to navigate your site without needing a phD in computing. If an 8 year old can find the “log in” link after less than a minute, you’re good.

7. Add a search feature. If someone can’t find something on your site, and there is no “Search” box, you’ve just lost a visitor. If all of your visitors are potential customers, then you just lost money. If you don’t know how to code, it’s easy, Google offers a free embeddable search engine for your website with CSE.

8. Don’t rely on images to display your most important content. I see web hosting companies doing this mostly, some text, then their price as an image. Your price is the most important part of the page, and if you display it as an image, someone with a slow connection will possibly not see it.

9. Don’t make a crap web design, simple as that. Don’t use excessive bright colours, Don’t use a million and one different fonts, no comic sans for the love of god, try to keep it uniform throughout. People like consistency.

10. Don’t spam it up with ads! If you have a sidebar, use it for content, not advertisements.

11a. PHP: Don’t use shorthand. It’s the same as styling using the <style> tag. <?= ?> tags only save a tiny bit of typing, so don’t be lazy, do it right.

11b. PHP OOP: Don’t edit the core controller!! If all of your controllers extend “Controller”, please don’t edit “Controller”.. Any errors you make in that file are passed to all the Controllers extending that class, and it makes debugging a pain. Please don’t tell users to edit the core “Controller” class if you’re writing a tutorial, it’s horrendously irresponsible.

In conclusion, just think it out before you do it, consider the implications of putting that there, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, I suggest you learn before trying to put a website/Web Design together. Paint and Notepad a web designer does not make.

So.. I’ve been researching PHP frameworks and such, as everyone says I should use one and that they would never dream of coding a whole web-application with bare-bones procedural PHP.. I looked into symfony – too complex, I looked into Zend, and didn’t really like it, and finally settled on CakePHP.

It’s light hearted attitude to itself and programming with it is exactly what I need, and that’s exactly what I enjoy most about Cake. After reading the Cake Cookbook I really feel I know most of what Cake has to offer, and I had a fully fledged registration and login system done within an hour, it was great.

I’m using Cake to develop a new site idea of mine, which I’ll probably blog about later, however one of the few things which I find to be a love/hate thing with Cake is the rigidness. You can’t possibly have a table for users that isn’t named users! The way the framework forces you to use certain naming conventions, and disallows certain names annoys me, but it’s also the thing which makes it easiest to debug.. Most of it can be battled by overrides in the controllers though, so it’s not that big a deal once you’re no longer a newbie (like I am). So like I said, love/hate thing.

Of course, this is my first foray into Object Oriented Programming, and Cake eased me into the MVC (Model View Controller), which some apps that I use and want to code for also use (read: XenForo), quite nicely, I kinda understand the basics behind the MVC now, but I’m still having to stop myself from using Procedural PHP every now and again.

After seeing this, someone mentioned to me that it would be awesome if they could “pick and choose” options, it would be awesome. So I set about doing just that, and SwitchToHTML5 was born.

In the four months since it’s inception, switchtohtml5 has been tweeted by SmashingMagazine (if you’re reading, thanks, I love you guys ), reviewed by makeuseof.com (thanks to you guys too) and many other sites too numerous to mention, but I google the sites name often, and I notice each and every one of you.

I tweeted in early January that I aimed to get 50k hits by the end of January, , and you haven’t disappointed me. So a big thank you to everyone who has used the site, tweeted, retweeted, emailed and anything else.

Figured I’d just say.

I’ve learnt so much coding wise this year, made existing friendships stronger, and made brand new friends. Failed college again, made lots of websites, had a lot of happy clients.

What exactly did I do on the web in 2010?

Some epic partnerships: We made kwn.me, we made baa.nu (still for sale btw, send me a mail), we became experts in everything ‘short’ . We found out about XenForo via their facebook page and we started and prepared XenFans to do what it has continually been doing, outperforming the rest. We worked on the framework which powers failpic.info, as well as a lot of other coding help questions and answers via our numerous caturday skype calls (mainly me asking for help, Floris and Chris helping)

I made SocialSig.me which most people on XenForo.com liked, I made SwitchToHTML5.com which has been open around 2 months and has had 25k+ visitors in that time. I found reddit and submitted countless wallpapers via i.mikeylicio.us. Then when I could no longer afford the cost of that site to me financially and via server resources, I closed it and released the torrent. I’ve started NUMEROUS forums, including The Geek District, Inception Forums (sold), Off Topic Hut, and more. The Rogue Forums, a place which I used to spend alot of time at was sold to wetalk. The wetalk.network was converted over to XenForo. vBulletin fucked up (more) big time with vB4, and more.

You’re still here? I’m surprised, I waffled on a lot. Here’s a video:

Anyway, I just wanted to visit and sum up some of the things I did in 2010, a sort of recap on events. I started this blog late november 2009, but I have used it the most (so far) in 2010. Hopefully I’ll use it more in 2011, and I wish any and all my readers a safe and happy new year.