Brian T. Cooke

Icon by Erika Greco

Simply Invoices is a project I’ve been working on for about a month. The idea is to create a site where you enter in your basecamp info, select a project and a person and create invoices from the time logged for that person within a given time range. Since I track all my billable time in basecamp, this is something I really wanted.

I’m shooting for a mid-June beta and an early July launch. If you use basecamp to log your billable time, please sign up for the announcement mailing list. The first bunch of folks that sign up will be given access to the beta. There’ll also be discounted pricing for the first month after the site goes live to the public (and that discounted rate will be for the lifetime of your account, not just the 1st month).

I know there are a lot of different time tracking apps out there. Please let me know how you’re tracking your time (either in the comments, or email. I’d like to support as many inputs as makes sense.

One of my favorite features of NetNewsWire is the ability to highlight differences (it’s an option in general prefs). When a post you’ve previously downloaded is edited, the deleted lines are shown in red and struck through and the new content is in green. Most of the time someone just changes the wording of something. Every now and then, something funny changes. This morning I noticed a ruby on rails job posting was edited in a humorous way:

I’m guessing that line about maintaining a Java app turned some folks away ;) Or maybe trying to make your job posting “Rock” was the flaw.

Earlier this week I was doing my taxes and came up with the simple idea for mybizexpenses.com. The goal was to create a web app to keep track of my business expenses to make filing my ‘07 taxes a tad easier. About eight hours worth of work later, it’s here, and useful (to me).

Anyway, give it a whirl. What’s up there now is and will always be 100% free. I may add the ability to upload and store receipts associated with an expense. There’d probably be a small monthly fee for that. Let me know what you’d like.

The simple interface was inspired by basecamp’s time tracking feature (which I quite enjoy).

indeed.com search for “rails” in boise, id vs. indeed.com seach for “rails” in reston, va

Thank goodness most gigs can be done remotely :)

12 Stone Art is now online. This was my first Rails gig and it went great. The whole thing took about 38 days (part time) and went surprisingly smooth. Tim fed me some great HTML/CSS templates and I wired ‘em up. I think things went so well because we each got to focus on what we do best. I barely spent anytime futzing with the front-end and Tim rarely had to wander into the rails stuff. I don’t think he ever went beyond the views.

Now that the project has launched I hope to be able to take some time and blog about some lessons learned and some of the rails-ish stuff that went into the 12 Stone store. But for now, there are some more details over on my portfolio page @ briantcooke.com.