I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to go through the arduous task of making a seamless pattern! Well, I actually like making them, but it can be time consuming.  I found this website online that will make seamless patterns online for free.

http://www.studioludens.com/repper/

It comes out a little odd if you were to put a picture of a person in there, but for making seamless patterns of textures this rocks!

There are also online sites for making diagonal stripe, and tartan backgrounds that I have used in the past:

http://www.stripegenerator.com/
http://www.tartanmaker.com/

While working on a freelance project I was asked to submit an invoice detailing the work I had done done and the payment along with a due date.  I had never made an invoice before and I didn’t have any idea where to start!  I googled around and came across this website:

http://invoicemachine.com/home

It was exactly what I needed!  You only get 3 invoices a month for free, but I have yet to need more than that.  It was very simple to input my information, my employers information, and add all the details I needed.  Once I was finished it allowed to export it all into a very professional looking PDF.  It does add a little watermark at the very bottom of the page, but if that really bothers you – you could always edit it out before sending it off.

All in all – a very simple to use application that did everything I needed.

Learning to type properly is something…I’ve just never gotten around to.  I can type up a storm!  While staring at my keyboard…which just isn’t that great for productivity!  I found a great online resource for learning how to type, it’s online and free – just the way I like it 🙂

http://www.typingweb.com/

I also learned of this nifty little site called Type racer.  You can invite friends to play with or you can get randomly matched with other users online in a battle of typing speed!  It’s a bit more fun than typing web…but it can be a little to easy to steal a glance at the keyboard when you’re falling behind.

http://play.typeracer.com/

Sending a file through e-mail can be a cinche!  But sometimes the file sizes are a bit too large and you won’t be able to send them through e-mail.  An easy way to get around that is to use and online file hosting service.  A few tht I know will support some larger files sizes are:

http://www.filesavr.com/
http://www.mediafire.com/

File Savr will host files up to 10GB.   That should solve pretty much all your file transferring needs one problem is that it doesn’t allow free accounts.  Therefore you can’t manage your files, and they’re not clear as to how long your file will be available for download.  Also, it’s pretty slow and doesn’t save the files for long.

Mediafire allows for both uploading files with and without an account.  So when you need to be able to delete a file, or just want to keep track of them you have that option as well as the ability to just quickly upload something.  However, mediafire will only let you upload a file up to 200mb in size so you’ll have to go with the other one if your file is too large.

https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTUxMjYwOQ
http://www.filemail.com/default.aspx
http://www.dropsend.com/

I found myself a bit curious as to what server side scripting languages people are using out there.  After mulling around google I found a few suggestions to do a job search to get an idea of the demand for different scripting languages.  I came across this post from August 25, 2008 and thought I would repeat the analysis by searching for “Ruby on Rails”, “PHP”, “ASP.NET” in the same job sites as the previous blogger.  These are all searched for in “San Francisco, CA” like the original post.

I was pretty surprised to see the dramatic difference in Hot Jobs than from the other two.  I thought it might have something to do with the cost of using the job site itself, so I decided to throw in Craigslist – which gave similar results(I did have to remove the “.” on craigslist – a bug?).  So maybe PHP employers are “cheaping out”  on their recruitment services.

PHP still comes out ahead *whew*, but it seems ruby is on the rise.  What is most distressing though is that the total amount of job listings is almost half of what it was two years ago!  A little scary.

ADDITION: JULY 1, 2011

Alright, it’s a year later and I’m back again to make the same comparison! 🙂  However, since last year Yahoo! Hot Jobs has gone out of business 🙁  That makes me pretty darn happy I decided to add in Craigslist last year, and now I’m also adding in the technology focused job site “Dice” in case another of the other jobs listing sites goes under for next year’s comparison.

This year I calculated the percentages for the totals to make the data a little easier to assess, and I used “ASP NET” for Craigslist like last year.  Monster is the only site that has RoR in the lead. It’s distressing, but according to this data, it looks like PHP has slowly been loosing ground at a steady pace of 1% a year.  RoR came up a lot between ’08-’10, but has lost a little ground this year.  ASP.NET has recovered a bit since last year, but still isn’t back to where it was in ’08.  Mashable dubbed 2011 as the year of Ruby, but these numbers arn’t too convincing.  I’d rather see PHP gaining ground, but it’s still strong at 66%.

As far as the total number of jobs goes – things are looking up since last year. Career builder and Craigslist both have more job listings then they did last year.  Dice and Craigslist have a lot more listings then the others, but I think they just use a larger search radius. One interesting point is that Monster is the only site to have less listings from last year, though I feel it may be more due to Monster rather than a reflection of the job market.  Monster may also deal more with higher paying jobs, which could be why their numbers are so different then the other sites.  These numbers might also be a reflection that, while there are less of positions available, RoR has a higher pay grade than PHP.  Which isn’t too much of a stretch considering that lack of support for RoR and that RoR has a steeper learning curve than PHP.

ADDITION: JULY 2, 2012

About 200 less jobs then last year, but still double of what was available in 2010. Although it looks like the percentages are a little closer to what they were in 2010, but all in all not a lot of variation. It looks like PHP has been steadily the most popular, with RoR and ASP fighting for 5% of the market share.

ADDITION: JULY 2, 2013

Again, 200 fewer jobs then last year.  A bit of sobering news there…  With PHP waning and RoR growing a bit in popularity, and ASP.NET just looks like it keeps going up and down..

ADDITION: JULY 1, 2014

This year I’m adding on two new languages, Python and Perl. I keep seeing Python here and there, and there’s even a course for it on codeacademy.com right now. I’m thinking of looking into that so I wanted to start tracking it…and Perl is there just for the lols. But, this messes up the numbers a bit, so I have totals and percentages that just include PHP, RoR, and ASP.NET so I can compare those to last year’s numbers.

Total jobs are up by 114 according to last year 🙂 Only gained about half what was lost compared to previous years, but that’s nice to see things going up.

RoR has stayed the same, while PHP has taken a 2% chunk out of ASP.NET. Over the years, it looks like RoR has been slowly gaining popularity, while ASP and PHP just kinda fluctuate a lot.

Adding in Python was really surprising, it’s the most popular language here. And it has quite a decent margin over it’s peers as well, PHP is the next popular, but it’s only 4% greater then half of the amount of Python jobs available. I’m thinking this may be because Python isn’t limited to web development, and there are software development jobs using the language as well. However, I’m not particularly knowledgeable about the language and I’m very interested in learning more about it.

Perl is a bit interesting as well, I tend to think of it as a dying language, but there are more than twice as many jobs in Perl as there are in RoR. I do assume that the demand of Perl is due to maintaining older systems that still use the language, but there’s still a decent demand for Perl coders.