This week I found myself in need of some design help for a client. I went to a site I’ve used before – guru.com. This is a spot where you can post jobs for freelancers to bid on. The platform allows you to pay directly through that and go from there.

It’s always a little challenging working with someone you’ve never met, and aren’t sure how they will work out. So far this is going well, but a few tips if you need to sub out a job:

1. Clear requirements – the clearer you are in your request, the better chance of getting bids from relevant pros. If the project is time-sensitive, clarify that up front, so you don’t get pros who have a backlog of work.
2. Ignore placeholder bids – bids that are just generic, or don’t seem tailored to your needs, you should probably ignore.
3. Communicate often – set milestones and get / give feedback often. If you can do a live phone call, that is best to ensure the other person is understanding.

I spent some of this week working with an old friend – wget. For those that don’t know, wget is a command line tool to query a remote website and get the response (a web page, or whatever). Anyway, in my case, I was tasked to build a tool to check various URL’s and send alerts if any were not responding or responding incorrectly. With php, I should have been able to the built in curl functions, but couldn’t figure out how to make curl use the system proxy settings (some urls needed to go through a proxy). Anyway, sometimes I go with what works, rather than beat my head against a wall for too long.

Also, I moved this website to hostgator, an old hosting friend. For a long time I’d had the site on AWS, to learn more about cloud services. But AWS doesn’t give all the bells and whistles of a hosting platform out of the box, and it just got too tedious to get set up. Who wants to set up a load balancer just to add SSL to your website anyway?

So it was a week of old friends, if you can call technology a friend!