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Communications and networking are the sole properties we look for in web applications. The Internet has improved our communications tenfold and allowed us to share information at a much quicker pace. As such I tend to jump around through many different applications just to get a feeling for their interfaces.

Freelancers can understand this plight in finding the perfect networking solution. There are a lot of tools out there, and depending on your line of work you may not require as much communication as others. But freelancing is a tough job, especially when you’re holding video chats and calling clients all day long. Below are some of my favorite tools to share between freelancers which I hope you enjoy!

Google Talk/Jabber IM

Instant messaging has come a long way from AOL IM. Back in 1999 I can remember all the chatrooms just full of any topic you can imagine. Nowadays the Internet has become much more refined, and there are more direct means of communication – especially compared to AIM.

The open-sourced Jabber protocol fits the bill perfectly. It has been in development for a few years and already supports tens of hundreds of platforms. The most popular is notably Google Talk where you can stream text and video chats directly in-browser. You can sign up for a free Gmail account and this address becomes your GTalk Jabber handle.

But if you don’t want to go through Google there are other XMPP clients which relay chats over Jabber. Adium is one such application which Mac OS X users can’t get enough of! Another universal chat client Pidgin is very popular supporting OS X, Windows, and Linux users. You can’t go wrong with any single app, so if you are in need of a chat client try out a few and see which ones stand out from the herd.

Dribbble Players

If you perform any type of design work such as websites, graphics, user interfaces, illustrations or otherwise then you’ll love Dribbble. It’s a social networking community launched a few years ago which focuses on design ‘shots’. You can post up small previews of past projects or even future releases.

I have met a lot of awesome freelancers where we have discussed the latest trends in digital design. Dribbble recently added settings where anybody can set their project status to available and share the profile link similar to an online portfolio. Then potential clients have the option of sending you an e-mail for work proposal directly from your Dribbble page! It has revolutionized the design industry in more ways than one.

And as we all know, Twitter has grown dramatically in just a few short years in comparison to Myspace and Facebook. If you have an account Dribbble will include a Twitter-specific link in your profile based on your username(or handle). Tweeting seems a bit pointless to many, but if you have information to share it’s one of the quickest growing networks on the web. Not to mention the rich, innovative communication methods such as direct messaging and @replys.

The biggest problem which most designers encounter is that Dribbble requires an invitation to join. The network is very secluded and you’ll have to contact someone to find an invite for yourself. But other portfolio networks, most notably Carbonmade are totally free and still provide networking opportunities between designers. You also get a chance to show off your work and share these links around to potential clients.

Freedcamp Project Management

So far we have discussed a couple ideas when you start out with solo freelancing. But how about when you and a buddy(or 2 or 3) decide to launch a small studio? Sure everything is great when you’re working together, but communication shouldn’t end just because work hours have finished. Or even consider working long distance with people all around the world.

Freedcamp is a newer startup affixed with the slogan “free project management”. It holds all the tools you would need to share ideas, collaborate on projects, and assign tasks to different people in your group. The signup process is very simple and you can expedite this through OAuth connection with Facebook, Twitter, or Google accounts.

Once you are logged in you have the option of choosing which project workspace you need to view. Freedcamp actually lets you create multiple projects which you can manage from a single account. In any project space you have a select number of people saved into the group, and each person is setup with their own public tasks list. It has never been easier to dish out project work between co-workers and even communicate on issues directly from within the app.

The Future of iCloud

This feature is unfortunately reserved for Mac OSX 10.7 Lion users and currently has no port onto Windows or Linux. When you first sign up for an Apple ID you can also setup your iCloud account free of charge. This comes with an online dashboard where you can store contacts, SMS messages, documents, and even e-mail under your own @me.com e-mail address!

It should be noted you have the option of choosing which pieces of data are synced into the cloud. If you are constantly using the calendar to plan appointments this may be more useful than your full contacts list. You can read more about iCloud from the Apple website to see if this is something you would use.

Conclusion

This small collection of networking tools should give newer freelancers a chance to catch up in the market. Starting out as a freelancer in any field can be one of the most stressful decisions. You have no guarantee of a fixed income and you must rely on clients or other institutions for profit. However I also decree freelancing can be the most enjoyable profession if you stick it out for the long haul and enjoy the freedom!

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Eventually, we’ll all stop talking about responsive web design – not because it will go away, but because it will become what’s expected. Flashback ten years ago and we were all talking about CSS and tableless design, but today there’s no need to mention it. It’s simply the way modern websites are built, although sadly, I’m sure there’s a few out there still using tables.

Nevertheless, the concept of responsive web design is still relatively new. So it’s our job to help you learn about it and to help you find the stuff that makes building responsive sites easier. For this post we’ve gathered a collection of Responsive Web Design Templates and Frameworks.

Mobile Boilerplate

Mobile Boilerplate is your trusted template made custom for creating rich and performant mobile web apps. You get cross-browser consistency among A-grade smartphones, and fallback support for legacy Blackberry, Symbian, and IE Mobile.

Skeleton

Skeleton is a small collection of CSS & JS files that can help you rapidly develop sites that look beautiful at any size, be it a 17″ laptop screen or an iPhone.

Hardboiled CSS3 Media Queries

These hardboiled CSS3 Media Queries are empty placeholders for targeting the devices and attributes I’m interesting in making responsive designs for right now.

tiny fluid grid

The happy & awesome way to build fluid grid based websites.

FluidGrids

A CSS framework for rapid interactive prototyping.

Less Framework

Less Framework is a CSS grid system for designing adaptive web­sites. It contains 4 layouts and 3 sets of typography presets, all based on a single grid.

CSS Grid

The 1140 grid fits perfectly into a 1280 monitor. On smaller monitors it becomes fluid and adapts to the width of the browser.

inuit.css

inuit.css is built to work on smaller screens (such as tablets) and tiny screens (such as phones) straight out of the box with minimal effort.

flurid

A cross-browser CSS grid framework that doesn’t hide pixels in margins!

Fluid Grid

A web grid system designed by Joseph Silvashy and New Gold Leaf that allows designers to use the screen real estate on large monitors and retain great design on smaller ones.

320 and Up

‘320 and Up’ prevents mobile devices from downloading desktop assets by using a tiny screen’s stylesheet as its starting point.

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Whether you’re new to Twitter or an experienced user, Twitter tools make everything easier. Here are some of my favorite new tools to make Tweeting easier and more useful for any user. Try one or two that looks useful and leave a comment in the box at the bottom if you like.

1. Send Tweets At Optimal Times In Just a Click With Buffer

Whenever I see an article I like I just click on the Buffer icon and it becomes a Tweet that is then automatically posted at the next optimal time. Buffer makes Tweeting great content on a regular basis easy. Whenever you’re online simply click the Buffer button in your browser on anything that looks interesting.

Cool Feature: With every Tweet you send via Buffer you will get detailed analytics about how many clicks, retweets and reach.

2. Auto-Organize Tweets And Label Conversations With Colorful Twimbow

Twimbow is a great way to stay on top what people are tweeting to make getting started Tweeting easier for you. It color-codes your replies, retweets and hashtags to help you easily see what’s going on at a glance. You have to tweet from somewhere, so why not do it from a place as colorful and useful as Twimbow?

Cool Feature: You can add pre-set hashtags (learn more about what hashtags are in #4 below) to your Tweets to color-code them for other Twimbow users, which connects you to other the Twimbow community of users.

3. See How Popular Links Are With WhoTweetedMe

WhoTweetedMe will not only show you how popular your tweets are, it will help you find influential people interested in the same topics as you. (That means if you follow them they are more likely to follow you back, since you share the same interests.)

How it does that is by showing you how many retweets any link got and when, and by showing you the potential reach and follower count of each person retweeting the post. So all you have to do is teview the reach and follower numbers to find the top people for any topic.

Cool Feature: Top 20 people tweeting a link are listed, so if you are tracking a link you tweeted, you can thank them right there with just one click!

4. Participate More Seamlessly In Twitter Chats with TweetChat

Hashtags are just words added to tweets that act like topic or event labels. They let you search more easily for tweets by topic. Even before you start tweeting yourself, hashtags are a fun and useful way to get value out of Twitter. To turn a word into a hashtag topic label, all you do is add a “#” to the beginning of it (so iPhone would become #iPhone, for example).

One of the coolest uses of #hashtags is to create Twitter Chats. To talk about the topic, just add the topic hashtag to your tweet (such as #BlogChat or #ToolsChat). They are one of the very best ways get started tweeting. You can just listen, or chime in anytime!

Chats let you participate in discussing a particular topic with other Twitter users, and last only an hour or so. There are Twitter chats for web design, blogging tips, Social Media and much, much more. Here is a great list of hundreds of Twitter chats.

TweetChat makes chats easy for you. Set the dashboard to the chat hashtag you want to follow, and it will automatically show you all new chat Tweets as they are sent.

Cool Feature: The interface lets you hide any user that might be over-tweeting or off-topic to keep things focused and useful for you.

5. Get Full Stats On Any Twitter Hashtag With The Hashtracking Tool

Once you have begun to understand the power of hashtags, you’ll want to study more of them.

To see how many people are using a hashtag or for tracking an online or offline Twitter event or chat that you want to start, Hashtracking is a great solution for getting powerful, free reports on any hashtag.

It shows how many Tweets were posted, how many people potentially saw a hashtag, and total retweets. Additionally you will get a display of the top 10 users from the hashtag, which is very helpful to identify key people for any topic, chat or event, as you did with WhoTweetedMe.

Cool Feature: Hashtracking makes it very easy to export all results to be used in a presentation, and will also soon include a geographic analysis option.

6. Create Twitter Lists Auto-Efficiently With Formulists

Twitter lists are a powerful way to grow your community, and an easy first step when you begin tweeting and following people. But it can be time-consuming to remember to organize everyone into lists!

Fortunately, with Formulists you can easily automate triggers that put people into the right list. So if someone retweets, mentions or follows you, you can have them in the right list of your network…automatically. And by reviewing lists that show who is retweeting you the most, you can stay engaged with your growing community.

Cool Feature: The most engaged people in your network are always shown in an open tab.

7. Clear Out Spammers, Quitters and Low-Value Users With ManageFlitter

After you’ve been tweeting and following people for awhile, you will sometimes come across people you want to unfollow. The longer you’re on Twitter, the more frequently you’ll encounter this problem.
Some people you follow just quit, others simply waste your time and clutter up your stream of tweets. ManageFlitter has a wonderful, easy interface to help you keep your Twitter connections with great people uninterrupted by folks you don’t want to connect with any more.

Cool Feature: ManageFlitter has one of the simplest integrations of Google Plus into Twitter.

8. Share Categorized Tweets On A Personalized Website With Twylah

As you send out more and more tweets, you’ll want people to see them, and to be able to browse through them yourself.

Twylah is great for that, because it automatically turns all your Tweets into a beautiful website, filled with your tweets organized by category and displayed with rich media. It makes it very easy for your followers to understand what you are Tweeting about the most and whether you are a good fit to follow them. It automatically “promotes” you to new people!

So, at a glance you or anyone can quickly review your past Tweets. Try putting your Twylah page in your Twitter bio, in your email signature or on your blog..

Cool Feature: All of your Tweets are also indexed in Google via Twylah, which is a great way to get more exposure from your Twitter efforts!

9. See How You’re Doing On Twitter With The TwitSprout Easy Analytics Dashboard

Once you really get going on Twitter, you’ll want to track how you’re doing. TwitSprout makes it easy. See your follower growth, total retweets and mentions over time and more on a single page. The app interestingly even overlays them for you to make it easier to understand whether your growth is happening organically.

Cool Feature: TwitSprout lets you export charts of your data to use in presentations or reports.

10. Hide Spam and View Rich Media Tweets From Anywhere With Smartr

Once you’re an experienced Twitter user, you’ll want to try more ways of finding great tweets from the people you follow. Smartris a beautifully designed way to do that.

It pulls in news from your Twitter feed and displays it in a new and much easier way to consume. And it also filters out spam, so you only see top news from your Smartr stream.

Smartr can be easily read on your iPhone, in your browser, and soon on your desktop. All Tweets are displayed with pictures and preview so you can save time deciding whether to read a post or not.

Cool Feature: Smartr is also a community in itself and you can follow others that are interested in the same topics right inside the app.

So, those are my top 10 Tools to get you tweeting. Have you tried any of these? What did you think? Add your comment in the box below!

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If you haven’t heard, HTML5 is taking the web by storm! It is currently being enhanced by experts to provide us Web Designers & Developers with awesome new revolutionary web page features!

HTML5 Background Information

For those of you who are new to HTML5, here is some quick background information to get you up to speed.

• HTML5 is the new language for presenting content on the Internet (at the time of writing this article it is still in beta but soon to be released in 2012).
• HTML5 brings new features making it easy to incorporate video, audio, fonts, drag & drop, web graphics & animations into your web pages.
• HTML5 is backwards compatible to don’t worry about your old designs in HTML 4 or XHML1 they will work just the same!
• jQuery has started killing Flash, HTML5 will finish it off for sure.

HTML5 Online Tools & Resources

Not known to many web designers, there are some really good online tools & resources which web designers should definitely take advantage of to help create those new innovative designs and stay ahead of the field! We have collected 10 of the best Online HTML 5 Tools & Resources for Web Designers. Enjoy!

Online Sprite Box Tool

Compressing images is all the rage these days and putting all your images in a “sprite” will both increase the speed of your image transitions and loading times. This Online Sprite Box Tool can help you design your images into sprites using this awesome jQuery, CSS3 and HTML5 tool.

Online 3D Sketch Tool

This is no ordinary sketch tool, it uses the power of HTML Canvas to create 3D drawing. To rotate the canvas in 3D, you need to hold down SPACE and then DRAG horizontally with your cursor. You can also make the drawing vibrate and draw in dashed lines too. Pretty Cool.

Online Font Testing Tool

As a designer, choosing a decent font can be a tough process! Use this awesome font bookmark to instantly view any web page in a new font without changing any HTML or CSS! Harness the power of HTML5 and @font-face by dragging the font.ttf files into the top toolbar and they will appear in a list for quick view. There are hundreds of free websites just type in “Free Fonts” into Google.

Online Velocity Sketch Tool

Velocity sketch is a unique online HTML5 canvas drawing tool which you can create strange looking web like things. I did a quick one (in the screenshot) but I’m sure you web designers can be creative with such a tool and create something quite awesome.

Online Pattern Generator Tool

This online tool coule be pretty useful for web designers when it comes to creating page and header backgrounds or even heading backgrounds. I uses the power of HTML canvas to provide you with the pattern your looking for in seconds! It has heaps of options and is really easy to use! Great stuff.

Online XRay Tool

With Online XRay Tool can quickly view details of page elements on any webpage at the click of a button! Simply drag the bookmarklet on their website into your bookmarks, visit the webpage you want to analyse, click Xray bookmar then click any element on the page. It also can handle HTML5 elements such as canvas and provide you with the design information you need.

Online Automatoon (animation) Tool

Automatoon is pure HTML5. Since no Flash is used, your animations will play just fine on iPhones, iPads, Android devices, and all common web browsers. Awesome-atoon!

Online HTML5 Audio Maker Tool

I think with the introduction of the the audio tag in HTML5 we will start seeing more and more websites utilize the power of audio. This is an online audio maker tool which can help introduce you to the new audio features HTML5 has to offer. There is also a online HTML5 video maker tool which does a similar thing.

Online SVG to HTML5 Canvas Tool

Most vector art packages (Illustrator, Inkscape etc) can export as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and with this tool you can convert your SVG file into it’s HTML5 canvas equivalent.

Chrome Ajax Animator Tool

A HTML5 powered web-based animation suite (that has evolved from it’s Flash IDE alternative). It is now a cross-platform/cross-format animation tool that works both online and offline! You’ll need to have Google Chrome installed, see a quick video tutorial to get you started. Great tool for HTML5 animation beginners.

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At Theme Trust, we recently launched our first responsive WordPress theme. Since it was also my first time building a responsive website, I had to do some learning and research. Along the way, I discovered some interesting techniques, useful resources, and handy tools to help with the task. So in this article, I’m sharing some of those tools and scripts I came across that make developing a responsive website a whole lot easier.

FitText

FitText makes font-sizes flexible. Use this plugin on your fluid or responsive layout to achieve scalable headlines that fill the width of a parent element.

Respond

A fast & lightweight polyfill for min/max-width CSS3 Media Queries (for IE 6-8, and more)

Adobe Device Central CS5.5

Adobe® Device Central CS5.5 software simplifies the production of innovative and compelling content for mobile phones, tablets, and consumer electronic devices.

Responsive Web Design Sketch Sheets

During Denise Jacobs’ workshop on CSS3 at ConvergeSE 2011, I was inspired to make these responsive web design sketch sheets to help think through layouts for various devices.

Golden Grid System

Columns, gutters, a baseline and a script.

Hardboiled CSS3 Media Queries

Making layouts responsive using CSS3 Media Queries are a big part of the work that I’m doing for the Hardboiled Web Design site in the run up to the book’s launch.

Skeleton

Skeleton is a small collection of CSS & JS files that can help you rapidly develop sites that look beautiful at any size, be it a 17″ laptop screen or an iPhone.

Responsive Design Testing

Test your own site… type the url and hit enter.

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With Google’s recent launch of another promising Social Network, the things that could potentially distract us aren’t really decreasing. As the overall buzz increases online, I found that our workflows become more complex too.

Organizing our lives in a smooth and hassle free way is therefore key I believe. So here are 8 of my favorite tools to handle everything efficiently online:

Buffer – Tweet without creating noise 

Have you ever come across 3 or 4 great articles that you felt like Tweeting? Doing so in a short space of time can often overwhelm our followers. By Buffering your tweets instead, they will be spaced out over the whole day. You can Buffer tweets from any website with one of the browser extensions (Chrome, Safari or Firefox) and never again worry about flooding your followers.

Best bit: For every Tweet sent via Buffer, you will receive detailed analytics about the number of Clicks, Retweets and Reach.

Let’s Crate – File sharing at its simplest

Although Apps like Dropbox make filesharing very simple, Let’s Crate takes it again to a new level. All you do is arrive at the website and drop a file you wish to share into the box. By doing so the App will generate a link for you containing the file and you can conveniently share it across your Social Networks. The beautiful design makes doing this easy on the eyes too.

Best bit: If you wish to sign up for an account, you can easily create different folders to put order into the Chaos you have cr(e)ated.

WooRank – How well is your website doing?

Woorank is something like a Klout score for your website. By dropping in any URL you will receive interesting insights about how well your site is performing. You can see various measures on in-site and off-site SEO as well as traffic analytics from Alexa and Compete in one spot. After all analytics taken you will be presented with a score that you can compare with other sites.

Best bit: What I like most is that you are also presented with competitor sites, so you can check on the performance of related sites with just one click.

Simplenote – Take notes from anywhere you go

The need to jot down notes is one of these things that happen at the most inconvenient times I found. This is where SimpleNote comes in and helps you out. With the Apps browser extension you can easily take notes of things that pop up. The App offers you to publish these notes and collaborate on them with others. I also suggest you try the tagging feature to find your notes quickly again.

Best bit: What is really great is that the App ties in with a lot of other Apps, so you can easily take notes from inside them or on the go.

StrawberryJ.am – Read only the most relevant news

One of my favorite recent discoveries is a Twitter powered news reader called Strawberryj.am. The App takes in all your Tweets and generates a new stream based on most mentioned tweets. This means you will be presented with only the most hotly discussed topics from your followers. It is very handy that you can create these new Strawberryj.am streams from any hashtag searches or Twitter lists too.

Best bit: To make reading these top news even easier you are able to get a digest update sent straight to your inbox.

Mockflow – Wireframe your projects

Although the idea of creating wireframes and mockups for websites and infographics isnít new, Mockflow delivers a particularly good job. All features work both if you are online or offline and you are able to easily collaborate with others on the job. The amount of different templates and pictures you can use to create Mock-ups is plentiful and allows you to do a very detailed job without any coding.

Best bit: To make even better use of your Mockups you are able to export them in html and continue building out real sites with them.

SocialMention – Where and what do people talk about you?

Another fantastic tool I have started to use is one called SocialMention. You can type in any keyword, brand name or username and search for it from across the web. It then displays different mentions alongside some great statistics. You can track sentiment, number of authors, related keywords and of course the content itself.

Best bit: The amount of different places you can search for is amazing, covering anything from blogs, comments, events, video or Q&A sites.

Skinnyo – Staying in shape made easy

This is a fantastic productivity tool as it allows me to stay in shape very easily. With Skinnyo you can easily track your weight changes over time. What makes the App very attractive is that you can enter into competitions with others and make being healthy a fun challenge. Challenges can range from simply doing sports regularly, building up certain muscles or losing weight.

Best bit: What I have found interesting is that you are able to create and manage teams in order to stay motivated with a few likeminded people you want to collaborate with.

These are my top 8 tools helping stay on top of things in a simple and intuitive way. All have paid great attention to design, which makes using these Apps a delightful experience.

Over to you now. Do you think some of these could be useful for you too?

About the author: Leo Widrich is Co-Founder of a Twitter App called Buffer. Whilst getting Buffer off the ground he writes about Twitter Tips and Tools on the Buffer Blog. Hit him up @leowid anytime, he is a very nice guy.

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Writing better CSS is something all web designers and developers should strive for, and thankfully there are some useful tools out there to help do just that. For this post, we’ve rounded up a collection of new tools to help you with your CSS. From learning new CSS3 properties, to making your code more efficient, there’s bound to be a few tools here you will find useful.

CSS3 Patterns Gallery

CSS3 Patterns Gallery lets you browse various CSS3 patterns as thumbnails or fullscreen and grab the code so you can use them on your own site.

PrefixMyCSS

PrefixMyCSS helps you save time by letting you write your properties one way. Paste in your code, pres the Prefix button and it adds all of the necessary vendor prefixes for you.

Layer Styles

Layer Styles is a HTML5 app for creating CSS3 in a intuitive way. The interface will remind you a lot of Photoshop.

Sencha Animator

Sencha Animator is a desktop app to create CSS3 animations for WebKit browsers and touchscreen mobile devices. Create rich experiences for today’s most popular devices.

The Web Font Combinator

The Web Font Combinator was created in order to preview web font combinations. There have been various printed collections of font examples that the reader can combine in order to see how a header and body font work together.

CSS Pivot

CSS Pivot lets you add CSS styles to any website, and share the result with a short link. You can also invite others to submit improvements for your website.

CSS Lint

CSS Lint is a tool to help point out problems with your CSS code. It does basic syntax checking as well as applying a set of rules to the code that look for problematic patterns or signs of inefficiency.

CSS Prism

CSS Prism lets you enter the URL of any site so you can view an modify its color spectrum.

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Work as a freelancer can be challenging, there’s no doubt about that. Not just physically, but spending so much of your day coding projects and writing e-mail conversations can take its toll on your mental capabilities. Task management is a huge part of running a successful freelance business.

In previous articles we have discussed freelance management tools to help you even out workflow. Although there are many tools openly available to designers, they can be slightly cryptic and won’t work as full solutions for everybody. Below I’ve outlined some basic strategies for task management and handling client project work. If you can loosely fit a schedule around your daily lifestyle then time will seem to fall neatly into place.

Recognizing your Work Times

As quoted from the infamous Benjamin Franklin in 1746 “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of”. Although a lot easier said than done, time is not going to wait for you to get yourself in gear.

Time is always flowing and follows the same rules as any stream of water. Therefore, strategies involving task management heavily depend on how well you can manage time. And time management is simply the recognition of time itself. You cannot complete all of your work in one sitting. It’s crucial not to work against time, recognize that you are limited and work in unison. Don’t beat yourself up for not completing tasks; instead reward yourself with each new goal.

A strong approach is to consider your daily schedule objectively. Begin from the moment you wake up and study how you go about working on each task throughout the day. Even catalog your habits if you need to. Then at the end of the day take a step back and see what isn’t working for you.

Rearranging Priorities

Everybody has their own tools to help them manage tasks. I personally enjoy using Google’s Task App which comes default with any Google Mail account. Directly in the bottom-right of the screen you can add new tasks, set completion dates, rearrange priorities, and so much more.

I’m not suggesting you hop onto using Google’s task management, flow with whatever works for you. But I am suggesting you check out a few alternatives and see if anything is up to par with your needs. Remember the Milk and Flow App are currently my two favorite web apps for task management.

Flow isn’t completely free as RTM, but they do offer a 14 day trial account just for signing up. If you have the budget I highly recommend joining if you need a detailed, intricate task management solution. Of course some freelancers would be more comfortable with a simple pad of paper. There’s nothing wrong with this option, either!

If you can find a system that works well for your needs then stick to it. Our end goal is to balance work and personal time in an elegant equation to reduce stress on your end. Ultimately you’ll reach this nirvanic state by keeping some form of to-do list and sticking by it! If you’re a mobile iPhone or Android user check on their app stores for any popular time management apps as well.

Keep Meetings Strict and Brief

If you’ve worked freelance for any given time then you’ll know clients can either become a chore or wonderful blessing. For repeat clients it’s only proper to offer them extra care and attention – after all, they are choosing to continually offer you money for their projects.

But when you’re contacting any new clients try to keep the meeting agenda strict. reduce idle chit-chat and dillydallying to a minimum. Spend a few minutes writing up a quick meeting summary beforehand, including the major talking points you wish to address. This technique works best in meeting spaces or phone conversations, but web chats tend to veer off course.

Free Up your Planner

Contrary to what many believe, calculating your tasks for every minute of every day for the whole week/month/year isn’t going to help you get much done. Minimalist time management is a newer concept that holds a lot of power behind its ideas. If you can structure your days loosely on a schedule then small interruptions won’t throw you off so much.

These do occur a lot more often than we would like to admit. Unfortunately there’s not much you can do to stop them aside from acceptance and flowing with your daily agenda. The work and e-mails will still be waiting for you later on. I promise!

This type of task management also leaves you open for appointment scheduling. Whether you’re living alone or with your spouse and kids, odds are you’ll need to set appointment dates some time. With the freelancer’s lifestyle you’re able to work any time from morning until evening. Keep yourself prepared and on-task at all times! In this way you won’t fall behind in work, and you won’t stress over missing a few hours to run out midday.

Focus on the End Results

When you are going to sit down and work on a task, make sure you are working and don’t lose sight of the end game! It’s very simple to grab a 5 minute detour onto Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, or any of the countless distractions via constant Internet connection. This just comes part of the freelancer’s job code.

Try pacing yourself when building on newer tasks. Take out big tasks in the early hours of your day so you’ll feel accomplished come the afternoon and later evening. This also gives you the satisfaction of crossing off and rearranging your list for tomorrow’s priority tasks.

While working you’ll often have spurts of creative ideas and look to jump over to them immediately. Instead try writing these ideas down or adding them onto your daily tasks list. If you’d rather separate these, create a new list or document where you note ideas for later. It’s important to keep yourself focused on project work, but you will eventually become angry at yourself forgetting an idea later on. Thus if you can generate such a brilliant stroke of genius I recommend jotting down clear notes for later and jumping right back into your work.

Conclusion

If you’ve come this far you’re probably a very dedicated and passionate freelancer. The job comes with many benefits and degrees of control over your lifestyle akin to owning a personal business. Yet with this control it’s easy to veer off course and damage yourself with heavy procrastination.

I find holding your tasks list sacred and keeping your work time focused are the two over-arching key points. If you can manage to complete even one(1) priority task daily then you’ll do just fine in the long run. If you’ve got similar task management tips or questions, please share them in the comments section below.

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Nowadays successful blogging definitely depends on effective social media usage. Twitter is one of the most popular social networks and you must consider its benefits if you want to be a successful blogger. Since WordPress is one of the best blogging platforms for its possibility to extend it functions with tons of plugins, I would like to show you some useful plugins related to Twitter. In this post you will find 15 useful Twitter plugins for your WordPress blog.

Tweet Old Post

Tweet Old Posts randomly picks your older post based on the interval specified by you. The primary function of this plugin is to promote older blog posts by tweeting about them and getting more traffic.

TwitPic

Displays your latest pictures from TwitPic in the sidebar of your blog. The plugin is widget ready and comes with many configuration options such as customizable css file.

WP to Twitter

The WP-to-Twitter plugin posts a Twitter status update from your WordPress blog using your selected URL shortening service to provide a link back to your post from Twitter.

TwitterCounter

Integrate TwitterCounter.com badges on your blog to display the number of followers you have on Twitter

TwitterLink Comments

This plugin will add an extra field to your comment form so a user can add their Twitter username. A user configured ‘follow me’ link is then displayed along with their details on all their comments.

Twitter Feed for WordPres

The WordPress Twitter Feed Plugin lets you simply output any user’s tweets into your WordPress page, template or sidebar. You can customise the username, number of tweets, and style of output.

Tweetable

Tweetable is intended to help integrate Twitter into your blog. It can automatically tweet links to your blog posts as they are published. It can display your latest tweet in your sidebar and add a tweetmeme widget after your posts. You can even use it to share a Twitter account among a blog’s author’s if you wish.

Topsy Retweet Button

Provides a Twitter retweet button for your posts that shows all tweets, enables retweeting, and adds tweets as comments.

Twitter Friendly Links

Your very own TinyURL within your own domain. If you do promote your blog posts in Twitter, then you must make your links look cool.

Tweet Blender

Provides several Twitter widgets: show your own tweets, show tweets relevant to post’s tags, show tweets for Twitter lists, show tweets for hashtags and more.

Twitter Fans

Twitter Fans lets you display your twitter followers in the sidebar as a widget just like Facebook’s fan widget in appearance.

Simple Twitter Connect

Simple Twitter Connect is a series of plugins that let you add any sort of Twitter functionality you like to a WordPress blog. This lets you have an integrated site without a lot of coding, and still letting you customize it exactly the way you’d like.

Twitter Comments – Twitoaster

Twitter Comments system. Automatically retrieve Twitter Replies and/or Twitter Retweets to your Blog’s Posts using WP built-in comment system.

TweetMeme Button

Easily allows your blog post or page to be retweeted. It provides a live count of how many times your post/page has been retweeted throughout Twitter.

Twitter Avatars In Comments WordPress Plugin

Twittar WordPress plugin main objective is to create a plug-in that uses Twitter to show avatars in comments in WordPress blogs.

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To say that Twitter is popular and lots of people use it, would be a massive understatement. But the more popular a web service becomes, the more people you have wishing it could do more. Thankfully, there are some of these people that are willing to act on their wishes and build tools to enable this “missing” functionality and help make a service like Twitter even better. Here are 7 of these tools that will help you do more with Twitter.

TwileShare

TwileShare is a free service that allows you to share files on Twitter. Supported file types include: PNG, GIF, JPG, DOC or PDF.

dlvr.it

dlvr.it provides bloggers, publishers and brands a way to instantly syndicate content directly to twitter.

Nurph

Nurph gives users an easy way to extend conversations by chatting in real-time with your Twitter friends and giving followers the ability to watch.

The Archivist

The Archivist is a service that uses the Twitter Search API to find and archive tweets, and displays visualizations to help you understand trends such as the number of Tweets over time, top users and words, sentiment, and more.

Qwerly

Qwerly is a whois for Twitter. For every Twitter user that is looked up , it generates a simple profile with links to that person’s other profiles on sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Last.fm, Delicious and many, many more. This helps people discover where their friends and other interesting people hang out online.

Twoolr

Twoolr provides Twitter users with loads of statistics about their account.

Buffer

Buffer makes your life easier with a smarter way to schedule tweets. Work out all your tweets at one point in time during the day. Then fill up your Buffer with your tweets and Buffer schedules them for you.