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If you are a freelance writer, designer or consultant, you’ll certainly get involved in projects where you need to bill your clients by the hour. But how do you track your time accurately so that both you and your client will be happy?

There are several solutions available (both free and paid) which help you with this task. For example, if you are using Firefox or Google Chrome you’ll certainly find extensions that do it.

The problem with most of those solutions, though, is that require you to actively start the timer when you start working on a client’s project, and to stop it once you are done. Sounds simple enough, but what if you working on multiple projects at the same time? Or if you are working on a client’s project when you decide to check your email or chat on Facebook for some time? As you can imagine, it becomes a mess.

Is there a better way? Yep, there’s a time tracking software called Chrometa that automatically starts and stops your timer for you, depending on what activity is going on on your computer. Here’s a small video illustrating how it works:

How does the software know to what client the work you are doing belongs? You can create keyword-based rules and the times will be assigned automatically according to those keywords.

On top of that you can also create invoices on the fly or export your time to a third party billing system (like Freshbooks). Here’s a screenshot of the user interface:

The basic version starts at $19, but you’ll probably be able to make that money back in a matter of days once you start tracking your time more accurately. Reading through their testimonials there were users who increased their billable time by 20% once their started tracking time spent with email, drafts and so on. Here’s the link to their website if you wanna check the product out.

As soon as your website starts growing I am sure you’ll start receiving all sorts of crazy emails. There will be people claiming you are dumb and that your content sucks. People asking really stupid questions that could be solved with a quick Google search. People confusing you with someone else and so on.

What should you do in those situations?

If you listen to your ego, you’ll certainly want to answer. That is what I used to do as well. For example, I often get emails from people confusing my company (called Online Profits) with some other companies and courses (e.g., “Quick Online Profits”, “30 Days to Online Profits” and so on). Here’s one of such emails I got recently:

To whom it may concern.

I have 2 charges on my credit card ending with the numbers 2719, one charge for 2.97 usd from online profits and another charge from quick-support.com.

I have already investigated and know that you are sister companies. I have already sent an email and a phone call to someone who did not appear to want to speak with me.

I am asking you to immediately refund any charges to my credit card and please remove all data and information you may have of me including my email address. I have already stated and am doing so again. Your company, companies are a scam and I’ll go to any length to insure that you stop charging my credit card as requested.

My bank and visa is supporting me on this matter and I urge you to immediately contact me to verify that you will stop charging my credit card for any membership charges, or for any charges at all. I honestly do not know what the charges are for and furthermore I did not sign up for anything that asked me or told me I would incur monthly charges.

My answer was the following:

Hi,

I have no clue regarding what you are talking about. If you visit our website you’ll realize we have no products for sale right now. All we offer is a free ebook and a free course. So how on earth would we be able to put a charge on your credit card?

Second, we never heard about that other company you are talking about.

Third, if you keep making false allegations about our company we might require you to prove them in court. So please check your facts before emailing random companies.

The guy obviously didn’t reply, as he must have realized his confusion.

Did I gain anything by replying, though? Nope.

Did I lose anything? Yep, my time.

Sure, it took 5 minutes to write that email. But what if you start replying to every single stupid email you receive? It will add up.

The solution? Tell your ego to shut up and simply ignore stuff that will not help your business.

I used to be a die hard Firefox fan. Just check the “Software” category on this blog. You’ll see dozens of posts about Firefox, related news and favorite extensions. Then one day Google announced it was going to launch a browser….

As you probably know that browser is called Google Chrome. When it came out I decided to give it a try, just to know what was going on. I had no plans at all to switch, as I was very happy with Firefox.

At first I liked it a bit, but it didn’t have all my extensions, my bookmarks, and things were a bit different, so I kept using Firefox.

Somehow once in a while I would open Chrome and browse a bit with it, and over time I started to notice how faster it was compared to Firefox.

Long story short within a couple of weeks I had ditched Firefox completely in favor of Chrome, and these days it’s just a pain to use Firefox because it’s much, much slower in my opinion. Curiously I haven’t added any extensions to Chrome at all, and I am doing just fine in that regard.

I haven’t tried Firefox 5, and while I still think it’s a solid browser, I think I’ll be sticking to Chrome now.

But I figured maybe not everyone feels like this. Hence the poll. Share with us your favorite browser, and drop a comment if you want to elaborate your thoughts.

Last week I explained why I decided to go with Python as my first programming language. Today I want to talk about the resources I used to get started.

Before jumping into code I wanted to get a general picture of what computer science and programming was about. I had some ideas, but I figured it would be a good idea to cross check them. After researching a bit online I found the Wikiversity website, which proved to be very valuable. The website is part of the Wikimedia foundation (the guys behind Wikipedia), and it aims to provide free learning materials and courses.

The course I used there was the Introduction to Computer Science one. After going thought it you should have a good understanding of how computers work, what are algorithms, how to solve problems using computation and so on.

After that I purchased a book called Head First Programming. It aims to teach you the basics of programming while you solve practical problems and tasks. The language used is Python, so it will help you get started with that as well. Costs around $30.

Another very useful book I started reading in parallel was How To Think Like A Computer Scientist. It also uses Python along the way, but it’s open source, so you can read it straight from its website (or even download the PDF).

Once I finished those two books I could already create some basic programs in Python, and I was having a lot of fun doing it. Then I figured it was time to take on something more advanced, and I started looking for online courses from universities.

I came across the MIT Open Courseware program, and decided to follow the Introduction to Computer Science and Programming course. They have all the video lectures, slides and test materials available and completely free.

This course is probably the best introduction to computer science you’ll find anywhere online or offline. You need to understand the basics of programming and have a solid math background to follow it, but if you manage to watch all the lessons you’ll definitely be on the right track to become a real programmer. I was so impressed with the course that I decided to donate money to the MIT Open Courseware program (my name is on their website!).

And that is pretty much all I used to learn Python and programming initially. After that it was just a matter of practicing a lot, coding games, small programs and the like.

Next week I’ll talk about moving from Python to C, and about other books and resources I am using these days. Stay tuned.

Some of you will remember that last year I made a resolution: to learn programming. I have not written about it, but I have been sticking to this resolution ever since.

In fact I have put most of my websites on auto-pilot, so that I just need to spend one or two hours working every day (i.e., 30 minutes answering emails, 30 minutes doing general maintenance tasks, and 30 to 60 minutes researching and writing a post for DBT). The rest of the time I am either coding, reading programming/math books, or attending lessons on a local university (I’ll talk about this on a future post).

I know there are many readers who would like to learn programming as well, so occasionally I’ll write a post about what I am doing, what worked for me, what didn’t work and so on. I had plans to start a new blog completely dedicated to this topic, but I figured this would take away time from coding, so I dropped the idea.

Today I want to talk about the first decision I had to make when learning to code, which is what programming language to learn first.

If you are going to college then you don’t need to worry too much about this question. The college will pretty much pick a language for you (e.g., some start with C, some with Python, some with Java and so on).

If you are going to learn programming by yourself, at least initially, then you need to think twice before making your decision, because the language choice will certainly affect your progress, and if you pick the wrong one you might lose motivation along the way.

I spent a great deal of time researching on the Internet, and if you do the same you’ll find that the discussions about the best first programming language are quite heated! After some days researching I decided that Python was the right choice for me. The reasons for going with Python as a first language were:

• Python is a very high level language, which means it comes with a lot of functions and abstractions out of the box. This means you can spend more time thinking about programming logic and algorithms, and less time thinking about correct syntax.
• Python is a general-purpose language, which means you can use it to create virtually any type of program or software, from web scripts to games. This means you should be able to use it to code projects you are actually interested in.
• Python is an interpreted language, which means you won’t need to waste time learning how to compile code. You simply downloaded an integrated development environment (IDE), write your code and press “Run.”
• There is a huge amount of programming books, videos and courses online that use Python as their language choice.
• Python is used in the real world as well. Some very large companies like Google and Facebook use it on my parts of their platforms and products.

I have already moved to a new language (C), but looking back I still think that starting with Python was a smart choice. It’s like learning to drive first (i.e., coding in Python) and only then taking a look at the engine under the hood to understand how the machine actually works (i.e., coding in C or even Assembly if you want to get close to the iron).

I don’t think Python is the absolute best language to learn first, though. It depends on your goals. If you are planning to make a living writing code (either for you or for someone else) then I believe starting with Python is a great idea. After you know the basics of programming logic and algorithms you can start using lower level languages like C, and after that you can start using Object Oriented ones like C++ or Java (technically Python also offers object orientation, but I wouldn’t play with that if you are just getting started).

If you have a narrower plan, you probably should start with a language more specific to the problems you want to solve. If you want to learn programming exclusively to tweak WordPress or to create WordPress plugins, then I think starting with PHP would be smarter, as it’s pretty much the only language you’ll need to use in the future.

Similarly, if you just want to develop iPhone apps, I would recommend getting a basic understand of the C language, and then move straight to Objective-C, which is the main language used to build iPhone apps.

Finally, Java is also considered to be a good option as a first programming language. It has the advantage of introducing you to object orientation right away, and it’s also one of the most popular languages around the world.

Next week I’ll talk about the resources I used to start learning programming logic and Python.

I knew that people were killing it iPhone apps, but it was only when I talked with Pat Flynn at Blog World Expo that I realized how feasible it was to enter that market, even today (by feasible I mean possible, not easy).

Sure, Pat started a couple of years ago, but if I am not wrong he is putting more effort on that side of his business only lately. Right now he has 27 apps released in the app store, and some of them are really simple yet smart stuff like a “Traffic Light Changer” app (yeah, it’s only a joke app, but people are downloading it).

How much does he make with the free apps? Around $4,000 monthly, and it’s growing…. so yeah not pocket change from where I come from.

I mentioning all these because Pat is writing a kind of a series on the iPhone apps business, and I think those of you who are interested will find it very useful. The first post was called 5 Things You Must Know About Creating Your Own iPhone Apps, where Pat talks about why you don’t need to be a developer to have your own iPhone apps, why getting the app ready and approved is only half the battle and so on.

This week he published a new post on this topic, titled iPhone App Business Models: Paid vs. Free. It’s an interesting discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of charging for your apps or making them free.

The only part of the mix missing is how he actually gets his apps done. Where he find developers, how much he pay them, and how the process works. I’ll send him an email with a suggestion for this post.

Finally, there are a couple of other markets you might wanna try first, because they will probably have less competition right now. The first one are the local iPhone apps markets. If you live outside the United States and the iPhone has a big adoption in your country, for instance, you could develop iPhone apps targeting your local market/language.

The second one is the Android market. If I am not wrong Google is already shipping more Android devices than Apple is shipping iPhones every month, so this might be another good opportunity.

If it was not for the lack of time I would certainly be entering this segment right now. I just can’t imagine how a mobile app development company can go wrong these days. Even if you don’t have enough creativity to come up with your own apps the demand for outsourced development work is just huge.

Are any of you guys already playing with mobile apps?

I knew that people were killing it iPhone apps, but it was only when I talked with Pat Flynn at Blog World Expo that I realized how feasible it was to enter that market, even today (by feasible I mean possible, not easy).

Sure, Pat started a couple of years ago, but if I am not wrong he is putting more effort on that side of his business only lately. Right now he has 27 apps released in the app store, and some of them are really simple yet smart stuff like a “Traffic Light Changer” app (yeah, it’s only a joke app, but people are downloading it).

How much does he make with the free apps? Around $4,000 monthly, and it’s growing…. so yeah not pocket change from where I come from.

I mentioning all these because Pat is writing a kind of a series on the iPhone apps business, and I think those of you who are interested will find it very useful. The first post was called 5 Things You Must Know About Creating Your Own iPhone Apps, where Pat talks about why you don’t need to be a developer to have your own iPhone apps, why getting the app ready and approved is only half the battle and so on.

This week he published a new post on this topic, titled iPhone App Business Models: Paid vs. Free. It’s an interesting discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of charging for your apps or making them free.

The only part of the mix missing is how he actually gets his apps done. Where he find developers, how much he pay them, and how the process works. I’ll send him an email with a suggestion for this post.

Finally, there are a couple of other markets you might wanna try first, because they will probably have less competition right now. The first one are the local iPhone apps markets. If you live outside the United States and the iPhone has a big adoption in your country, for instance, you could develop iPhone apps targeting your local market/language.

The second one is the Android market. If I am not wrong Google is already shipping more Android devices than Apple is shipping iPhones every month, so this might be another good opportunity.

If it was not for the lack of time I would certainly be entering this segment right now. I just can’t imagine how a mobile app development company can go wrong these days. Even if you don’t have enough creativity to come up with your own apps the demand for outsourced development work is just huge.

Are any of you guys already playing with mobile apps?

If you like visual effects and want to add some new tab management features to your Firefox, then this add-on is perfect for you.

You’ll basically choose between six different 3D layouts, and then the extension will give you the following features:

• Top Sites: for quickly accessing your favorite web sites.
• Tab Flipper: to easily flip between opened tabs using mouse or keyboard gestures.
• Recently Closed Tabs: for reopening a tab that was recently closed.

You can also customize the keyboard shortcuts to use the extension, change the size of the extension panel and so on. Here is the official page to install it.

Sooner or later we all need to save web pages locally. Maybe it’s a page with a tutorial for something you’ll need to do in the future, maybe it’s the sales page that you think has great copywriting and are not sure for how long it will stay online.

Regardless of the reason, saving the page as an HTML file is not an effective solution. That is because you’ll need to save both page and the respective files (which usually go in a separate folder), and because when trying to open it again it might be displayed incorrectly on your browser.

A better solution is to use a Firefox extension called PrintPDF. Once installed you’ll be able to save web pages directly into your computer as a PDF file.

It works both on Windows and Linux, and the only missing functionality right now is that links will not be present in the PDF. I believe the developer will be adding this feature soon though.

Finally, yes I know Mac users can do this by default, so no need to brag about it!

If you are a web geek you certainly have dozens of passwords from different services and websites. Gmail, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, cPanel, GoDaddy, you name it.

On top of that you also need to make sure that each password is unique, and preferably long and complex, else they would become a security risk.

How do you manage all that without going crazy? With a password manager, obviously. Password managers are programs that will store your passwords securely (i.e., with encryption), and you just need to remember the master password.

There are many desktop based managers, but there is also a Firefox add-on called LastPass that gets the job done.

The advantage of using the extension is that you might sync it with different computers, and that you’ll be able to auto-fill login forms, logging into your favorite websites with single click. It works on any operating system where you can install Firefox.