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.

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

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!

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.

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

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!

My favorite resource for this is Pretty Cool People Interviews. A fantastic selection of video interviews from creative people in all industries, and constantly updated. I watch a lot of these types of things on YouTube but never bookmark them! If anyone knows of any similar videos please post links below.

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RELATED: While many people were critical of her best-selling book Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert delivered a really special talk at the TED conference on creativity, and the pressures of success: