TaskCity: Marketplace to Match Freelancers with Employers

As we all know, one of the toughest challenges for freelancers is to consistently find new projects and sources of revenue.   Marketing your services and finding projects is a major key to long-term success for any independent freelancer. Luckily for us, a number of project-matching web services have launched in the last few years, including TaskCity.com. These services are immensely helpful tools built specifically for freelance business development.

I took a look at TaskCity, one of the newer platforms for matching professional freelancers with outsourced projects.  This free market for freelancers and employer services is focused squarely on the following categories of work:

• Web Development
• Software Development
• Networking & Information Systems
• Graphic Arts & Design

I didn’t really find any projects related to writing, marketing or administrative services, so please note that this platform is not suited to every type of freelancer at this point in time. From browsing the site, the greatest number of existing project listings appear to be technical in nature.
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Product Review: GTime Tracking for Freelancers

There are quite a few tools out there to help freelancers manage project hours and billing, and today we look at one of the effective, low-cost solutions. I tried out GTime Tracking this past week, which is a simple, yet elegant software that runs on Adobe AIR and stores your timed-task information with Google Spreadsheets.

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Building an Awesome Navigation Menu with jQuery: Part 1

Do you need to build a navigation interface that has to handle hundreds of product links? All grouped in categories, subcategories? Perhaps even containing thumbnails? If the answer is yes, here’s a usability path to avoid :

1. select categories, wait for a page to load
2. select a subcategory, wait for another page to load
3. check out products
4. click to go to desired product

The typical web user only wants to click once or twice to get to the product they want. And if clicks are unavoidable, make sure page loads are minimized! The more clicks and the more page loading they have to go through, the higher the risk they will get lost and never come back to your site. The good news is that you can achieve a good navigation menu that reduces page reloads.

This article is an in-depth tutorial on how you can achieve an expandable navigation menu using valid xhtml coding, valid css and a bit of javascript.
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Excel Password Recovery

I’ve been freelancing now for two years, and I love the benefits of being able to work from home and have a certain level of independence. Sometimes that individuality comes with a price, as I found out this past week – no in-house IT support!

While compiling a proposal for internet marketing consulting, I knew I had a couple excel reports from a previous job that could be repurposed for this project. Unfortunately, I hadn’t opened the documents in a couple years and couldn’t remember or find the password. Obviously, contacting my previous company for the key was not an option.

Maybe Microsoft can offer an online service to securely store user passwords for documents? I’d love the ability to submit a “forgot password” request and receive a new one via email, much like every online login service in the industry. Oh well, until then we have to use utilities and cracks to access our forgotten files.

I ended up finding a good solution with step-by-step details and a free download for excel password recovery at Petri IT Knowledgebase. Their guide simply shows you how to use the utility’s two available options for recovery, and didn’t take more than a few minutes to complete. Give it a try if you ever find yourself in a similar (embarrassing) predicament as mine.

A Recommendation Engine for Your Next eCommerce Project

Internet giant Amazon.com popularized the product recommendation engine more than a decade ago, by creating a system that suggests items to customers based on what they, and others like them, had previously purchased or viewed. That deep level of personalization is a major factor in the company’s success today.

In 2009, Netflix awarded a $1 million USD contest prize to researchers who could significantly improve their proprietary recommendation engine. In theory, the more Netflix DVDs that customers add to their watch list, the longer that subscriber will remain with the service, since new movies will just keep coming. The prize may seem hefty, but Netflix was so impressed with the results that they granted the prize and immediately announce that there would be a sequel to the recommendation competition.

So how can a freelance web developer implement an enterprise-quality recommendation engine for your smaller e-retail clients? You may think that you’d have a tough time competing with Amazon or Netflix on functionality. However, low-priced service providers are now focused on enabling that process of discovery for small-site shoppers. These engines have low monthly costs, can be easily implemented in an afternoon, and work on the idea that you need to incorporate behavioral targeting in addition to monitoring a customer’s previous purchases.

Strands Recommender provides one of the low-cost recommendation engine options. Their engine suggests products of interest based on a specific customer’s purchases, visits, searches, wish lists, and other behavior. The system is quite flexible as well, with back-end capability to configure your recommendation display widgets. The retailer can also create rules and product filters for each widget, where results can be previewed prior to being applied to the site.

Click for more detailed information on Strands’ eCommerce solutions. They can help make your eCommerce clients successful, and strengthen your site proposals by creating additional ROI.