The blog has been quiet recently, and the main reason is because I’ve been working hard on a brand new project called PlanCrunch. PlanCrunch helps you compare mobile phone plans against hundreds of others, in order to find the best value plan for you. I started developing it after trying to plod through all the various plans, their options, fees, and fine print in order to find a new personal mobile plan. What a nightmare. The goal of PlanCrunch is to present the visitor with all the options in an easy-to-use manner, and without any bias, not simply recommending affiliated providers or whatnot.

PlanCrunch first asks you your current mobile provider & plan, then calculates for you all the plans that are better value, for the same or lesser cost.

The service is still in development, but it’s online now to gather feedback from users. A proper press release and launch is on the cards soon, but in the meantime please try it out and let me know your thoughts. Oh and yes, a section for viewing and comparing mobile phones is also coming!

At it’s core, Freshbooks is a service that allows the managing of estimates and invoices via a simple web interface. There’s a lot of other great features such as time-tracking, recurring invoices, and invoicing via snail-mail. However, I use the estimate and invoicing functionality about 95% of the time, and this is what it does best.

Of course, Freshbooks and online invoicing in general isn’t suitable for every business, but for mine it’s perfect. I can quickly draft an invoice, send it to the client via email where they can log-in to Freshbooks and print off a PDF, or forward it to the accountant. It’s a simple process, and much more intuitive than creating an invoice in Word or Excel, saving it to a crowded Invoices directory, printing it out and dropping it in a post box.

I’ve had a Freshbooks account for almost five years, and since first signing up the team have made a number of improvements to the service. A favourite of mine is the quarterly ‘Report Card‘. The Report Card shows you how your business is performing compared with others in your industry. It compares statistics such as number of invoices sent, average invoice size, average time to collect payment, etc.

Example Report Card

For me, the only missing feature is the ability to group items on an invoice. As far as I’m aware it’s not possible to create an item (i.e. Web Development) with sub-items (i.e. Cross-browser testing, WordPress installation, etc).

There are other invoicing services, such as BlinkSale and Invoicera that offer similar services but Freshbooks is the one I’m most familiar. Overall I would definitely recommend small business owners check out Freshbooks for their invoicing solution – it’s a simple, inexpensive and time-saving service.

The flash flooding in Toowoomba yesterday was unprecedented for the city, and my thoughts are with those who have lost loved ones and those who are still missing. There have been 9 confirmed deaths so far and over 60 people still missing (ABC News).

I’ve included some images and video below:

Cars being washed away by East Creek, Near Chalk Drive

Compilation by ABC TV

Dent St Rescue

Compilation of Images and Video (made by 14yr old Kiera):

Goggs St:

4WD Gets Washed Down West Creek:

More Information

Bureau of Meteorology SE QLD Radar
Toowoomba & Darling Downs Flood Photos & Info (Facebook page)
ABC Flood Coverage

It’s difficult to manually keep track of who is saying what about your business and its products online, but Google Alerts goes a long way to help you automatically monitor your online buzz. It’s a free service that anyone can configure to receive email notifications whenever you or your business is mentioned in websites and blogs. You can also use it to keep track of how your competitors are faring in your niche, and what marketing strategies they are using.

A Google Alerts Example

Here’s an alert I set up for my business:

Putting double quotation marks in between the business name ensures that only results with the full business name will be returned. I also added “toowoomba” as there are other businesses overseas with similar names, and I don’t want the results to include them. You can also use the minus operator to exclude certain results, just like in Google search (for example: “- brisbane”). Visit Google’s help page for a more complete guide.

Using Google Alerts for your business is a really invaluable way to keep a pulse of your online presence. If you own a business and have not already set this up you are truly missing out!

I recently had the pleasure of developing a new website for Toowoomba photographer Amanda Newman. She does truly excellent work, and since she started her photography business she has been booked out for months in advance.

She provided the following testimonial:

Being a brand new business, having a website of my own was at the very top of my list of ways to get my name out there and show my work to possible clients. I researched for a few months on different Website Developers and just wasn’t happy with the ones I was finding until I came across Andrew. Not many other developers give you the option of having a lot more control of your website, and this is very important to me. Andrew was really wonderful and easy to work with in building my website. He was able to explain things to me so I could easily understand it all and I get many compliments from clients, and other professionals about the simplicity and fun, fresh look of my website. I highly recommend Andrew to anyone thinking of using him, it will honestly be one of the best business decisions you will make. ~ Amanda Newman

Read more about her website

INFLUENCERS is a short documentary that explores what it means to be an influencer and how trends and creativity become contagious today in music, fashion and entertainment.

The film attempts to understand the essence of influence, what makes a person influential without taking a statistical or metric approach.

American retailers Diapers.com show off their unique way of processing orders 24 hours a day.

This reminded me of the BigDog project by Boston Dynamics. Amazing and scary at the same time.

The upcoming HTML5 standard is an exciting one for us designers & developers, and its being integrated into modern browsers like Webkit (Chrome/Safari), Firefox and Opera quite quickly. There are lots of people doing interesting things with this new standard, but Hakim El Hattab’s HTML5 experiments are really impressive.

Impressive LED watch design from Japanese designer Hironao Tsuboi. Hironao recently was showcased in D&AD‘s Faces To Watch, which promotes new talent.

Does the internet, in it’s current form, need to be censored? Does the internet, in it’s current form, need compulsory censorship by the government?

Back in 2007, ‘Internet Filtering’ was an election promise from the Labour party during the Australian Federal Election. I’m not sure if, at that point, the extent of the policy was fully known. It certainly wasn’t a highly publicised policy. Nevertheless, the Rudd government is fulfilling it’s promise through Senator Conroy to protect Australia from websites which contain child pornography, drug use, crime, sex, cruelty, violence, and anything else deemed morally objectionable by the government.

I think the decision to censor anything, be it books, television, films, games, or the internet is something which should be decided based on the cultural values of the community. While Australia isn’t the most liberal of all countries, we do enjoy a high level of free speech and democracy which should be protected and defended wherever possible.

That’s why the decision by the government to push ahead with compulsory internet censorship despite widespread opposition from industry, the media, and internet users is very worrying to me.

Putting aside moral objections, the technical issues involved with censoring this type of content are too vast to properly police. The kind of illegal materials the government wish to censor are not shared on websites, they are shared in chat rooms, file sharing (P2P) programs, and newsgroups, because of the anonymity they provide. The government’s solution to provide ISPs a blacklist of websites which cannot be accessed will to absolutely nothing to stop the flow of illegal material to those who want it. This basic misunderstanding of the issue will leave tax-payers footing a huge bill, slower internet access (Australia already lags behind the rest of the world in this), and joining the ranks of China and the United Arab Emirates in compulsory internet censorship.

Today saw the leaking of the government’s blacklist, which has been widely covered in the media, and cemented how fickle and ridiculous this proposal really is. There is renewed hope that this will not get passed in the senate, but there is still a  chance it will get tacked on to existing legislation.

Here’s hoping thats not the case!