Forums, Blogs, Wikis

I’ve found that it’s very difficult for me to stay motivated on projects from home.  At work there is a boss breathing down your next, but at home you don’t have that pressure.  Sure, no boss is one of the benefits to working for yourself.  But having a boss certainly helps to stay motivated.

What else can you do?  What are some tricks that you can use to stay motivated?

Dress the part
Even if you wake up and walk down the hall to your home office you still should get ready for work.  For me that means getting some exercise, taking a shower, and dressing for work.  Doing these things help put me in the mood for work.

Make a to-do list
When you turn on your computer you need to know what you need to accomplish.  I like to work out what I need to do the next day as the last thing I do each day. 

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Have you ever spent way too much time looking for a solution to a problem?  Ever felt like smacking yourself in the head when you finally found the fix?  Well today I spent about half an hour trying to find out why a MySQL INSERT query wasn’t working.

I was working on a logging table for my photography forum.  The first page shows a random image as a featured image and I needed a way to keep track of what images were being displayed and when.  So I created a new table and added an insert query to fill in the data.  But only one record was created.  No matter how many times I reran the function, only the first record remained.

Turned out I had forgotten to set the id field as auto_incr and wasn’t inserting it as part of the query.  Since it was primary key every time the insert query tried to run it failed because there was already a record with that primary key. Editing the field to set it to auto_incr and all was set.

As much as I think I’d enjoy starting a podcast I doubt I ever will. I just don’t like the sound of my voice enough. But, if I were to fire one up this post on Performancing.com titled A Beginner’s Podcasting Guide has links to all sorts of things to consider before plugging in your microphone.

The FlickrFS allows you to mount your Flickr account as a file system on your Linux system. There’s instructions for Ubuntu along with a few other distributions.

Unfortunately I’m not using Linux for anything other than my development server right now so this isn’t really useful, yet. With any luck they’ll come up with a port for Wintel machines. Seems like it would be a lot more useful.

But, this does look like something that could be very useful for web developers to work with Flickr libraries.

If you do much programming you’re probably at least heard of Regular Expressions. If you’re anything like me any time you need to come up with a regular expression you open up a book and look up the list of characters.

Next time take a look at RegExr. It let’s you enter a regex expression and test it against a block of text. Hovering over the regex commands will popup an explanation of what each means (\b = word boundry, \w = any word character, etc).