FreelanceSwitch News and Cyanide & Happiness

Collis Ta'eed |
General
| November 25th 2007

As of today, I (Collis) am your new site editor … ooooo. After 8 months of captaining FreelanceSwitch, Cyan and I have swapped roles so that I can have a more day to day role on the site while she is going to be working on a new, as-yet-unreleased Eden project. So anyhow that’s pretty exciting (for me) and though I won’t be changing anything radically, you can expect more posts from me! Cyan is still going to be about, as I don’t think I could drag her away even if I wanted to, and she’ll certainly on the podcasts. I’m hoping to tell you all about the new project she’s working on soon too!

Additionally some of the upcoming things we have planned on FSw include:

The Freelance Document Library
I don’t know about you, but when I started freelancing, I actually didn’t really know what you were meant to have on a quote, or an invoice, or any document for that matter. That’s why we’re in the middle of building the FreelanceSwitch Document Library which will be a little facility to allow people to upload their documents for other freelancers to use as samples. As part of our quest to help freelancers, and in particular help freelancers help other freelancers, this library will be filled with not just quotes and invoices, but sample proposals, timesheets, estimates, agreements, presentations, and anything else any of you use. The library is being built right now, and I am about to send the HTML off to make it all look pretty! So we should see it online during December.
The Freelance Client Analyser
Ever read The 80/20 Principle by David Koch? It’s a fantastic book and discusses how in many situations the majority of results come from a minority of causes. That’s why we’re building a little tool to help freelancers analyse their clients and see which ones deserve a little more attention, and which perhaps … don’t! This one should be ready just in time for the new year when freelancers doing all their planning for the year ahead.
The Survey … Yes we are still working on it
OK, I think it’s fair to admit, that we perhaps didn’t realise how much work it takes to analyse 3,000 survey responses! My bad. Cyan tells me that where we are at is that she’s had one analysis done on the results, and a second statistician is now midway through another. She then needs to compile it all together – though I think we might abandon trying to make it uber-designed and just get it out quick. I’d give you an estimate on when I think it’ll be done, but let’s face it, we don’t really know
The Freelancing Book
As you know, we have written a 200 page book on freelancing covering everything from getting set up to getting paid to expanding a freelance business. It’s been edited by Cyan and Leo, I’ve put together the cover and layout and it will be available for sale on the 4th of December both as an ebook and a hard copy through Lulu. We’re very excited about this book and it has in fact had a change in title during the edit process, but you’ll see what I mean in a week and a half when we put it up for sale. If you’re interested to get a copy you can add your name to our email list to get $10 off when it’s released. We already have 700 people awaiting publication!

Anyhow so onwards and upwards with the greatest freelancing site around, and before I go I’ll leave you with two episodes from my second-favourite comic strip – Cyanide and Happiness:

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net