Developer

I didn't title this post Network or LAN (Local Area Network) for a reason: it's not only about computer network cables but also about AV (Audio/Video) equipment and may as well include other stuff in the future.

Given my lack of time, budget and patience to search for (free) software able to draw maps and also given that I still have Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash MX (I know, it's old... from back in time of 2002), I thought why not give it a try and draw some boxes and lines to track what box connects to what cable and maybe (I'm optimist) I can even solve the mistery of a couple of unknown LAN cables behind the fridge. (More)

I've come to the next phase with Helpdesk where I will keep track of time spent on certain tickets and projects. Though I welcome the idea of automated reports, invoices, multiple rates per user and customer self-service portals, it's not what I am going to start with. There are a lot of free time trackers out there but each one of them has its own share of flaws. (More)

Web sites depending on user contributions are nice as they usually are more up-to-date but it also could be that items obvious to one are missing as others didn't need them yet. Ohloh,  a website which catalogs and gathers various statistic data on open source software projects, is such a case.

I've discovered some nice software through Ohloh but on the other hand, some quite popular software wasn't there. Not to mention that existing entries lacked such obvious data like news feeds and more/better tags and links. I couldn't resist and within a couple of hours I updated about a dozen projects and added half a dozen new ones which in the end summed up to 253 edits.

My Ohloh profile page: http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/818

Timsheet PHP - aka Timesheet.php or simply Timesheet - keeps track of the hours worked by multiple people on multiple projects. It allows users to log in through their Web browser and manage the times that they are clocked on or clocked off.

Basically, Timesheet is a nice application with everything important to track time; but that's all there is. The reports are way too simple, a mere HTML table summarizing the calendar view. The highlight is an automated cost calculation which however is based on one fixed rate per user. If I'd have to describe the problems of this software in three words, it would be "lack of flexibility".

Why I'm still using Timesheet - for now - is for main reason that I don't need anything more than calculating time. I'll just copy/paste the monthly report into a Word template and send out a PDF. Regarding any fee calculations, I just add and multiply the minutes by a rate and apply discounts or whatever. The 5 extra minutes per month for this manual labour are worth the trouble of either running an overblown software on my own server or signing up for some free Web-based services which I either won't use for long or also offer too much to begin with.

October 22, 2007: image updated.

If you are running several Web Sites which link to each other on various permission levels, you better get organized. If some of those Web Sites are not finished or even started yet, the more important it is to get things in order.

I recently cleaned up my Web Sites and it surprised me how simple the flow between various sites is once I've mapped the relations between each sites. Though I worked with several of the sites on a regular basis, I had somehow lost touch with what went where and who could/couldn't/was(n't) supposed to see whatever on whichever site. (More)