(March 2011 Update: I’ve added 11 more to the raw list of possible tools to use for time tracking. These tools range from barebones time tracking to also including tons of other features including invoicing. Some are apps that you install, some are web based. This is merely a raw list and not a review of the tools.)

(April 2011 Update: A few more tools have been added that can track time, however these are more project management tools that also allow for time tracking. They’re not strict time tracking tools.)

Doing more independent contracting has caused me to need an elegant way of tracking my time usage for various clients and projects. I sent out a tweet requesting to learn how other independent contractors track their time for clients and received quite a bit of feedback. One of them included just using a simple Excel spreadsheet. That was actually encouraging to know that clients can be accepting of a simple spreadsheet and that I don’t necessarily have to “wow” them with pretty graphs and charts as well as offering 14 different ways to analyze my time.

Nonetheless, I think that it would be useful to have a range of metrics that can be analyzed as well as the opportunity to present the aforementioned pretty graphs. I’m not against eye candy if there’s at least some legitimate meaning to it. Making it easier for a client to see just what I’m doing for the money they pay me is certainly an added value.

I’ve collated the list of web based time tracking tools (some also have fat clients for PCs and phones) that many of my Twitter followers graciously suggested to me. I was hoping to write a full article about some of my findings on them, but I noticed that many of my online colleagues are also stepping out on their own into the indie contracting realm and were looking for these kinds of tools. As a result, I’m expediting things by simply dumping my current list of possibilities out for the benefit of those who may be looking for similar resources. A more thorough dissertation on one or more tools may be forthcoming.

• Let’s Freckle (Seriously, what’s up with that name? Suggested by @weareanalog)
• Fresh Books (As suggested and used by @rayners)
• Market Circle’s Billings Pro for the iPhone (Suggested and used by @Xuff)
• Get Harvest (Time tracking and invoicing tool. Suggested by @danielwanja)
• 1 Day Later (Suggested by @martiell)
• Toggl (Suggested by @coachproellen)
• Yanomo (Suggested by @YanomoApp)
• Liquid Planner (Suggested by @bdha)
• Mr. Tick Tock (Updated March 18 2011: Suggested by Jack in the comments below)
• FreedCamp (Updated March 18 2011: Suggested by Tadd in the comments below)
• Teamlab (Updated March 18 2011: Suggested by Tadd again)
• Clocking IT (Updated March 18 2011: Tadd again!)
• Project Hamster (Updated March 23, 2011)
• Invoicera (Updated March 23, 2011)
• Time Doctor (Updated March 23, 2011)
• TickSpot (Updated March 23, 2011 – Recommended by @kit_plummer)
• Paymo (Updated March 23, 2011)
• kTimeTracker (Updated March 23, 2011)
• Slife (Updated March 23, 2011)
• My Client Spot (Updated April 18, 2011)
• Desk Away (Updated April 18, 2011)
• Base Camp (Updated April 18, 2011)
• Time Camp (Updated April 28, 2011)

Did I overlook any other services worth mentioning? Let me know in the comments.

Recently Microsoft Learning sent out an email to its certified professionals notifying us of an upcoming price change in certification exams. You can check out the FAQ for this news item. As of July 1, 2011 non-educational prices for Microsoft exams will go up in the following increments:

• USD $125 to $150
• GBP £88 to £99
• EUR €140 to €150
• AUD $180 to $206

For more information, see the FAQ page, however be warned that the price calculator requires Microsoft Silverlight. If you don’t have it installed, the page that your sent to to install it is actually an older version than is necessary for the calculator (3.0 instead of 4.0). Seriously Microsoft. It’s a drop down list and a yes/no button. You couldn’t just use JavaScript?

The price hike is supposedly to reflect the value that Microsoft certifications bring with them. Personally, I’m relieve that they’re till as inexpensive as they are. Not many certification exams are under USD $200 these days. If anyone wants to save $25 then they’d better schedule and take the exam before July 1. I wonder if I can cram for my 70-643 in time…

Way back in March, I asked some of my Tweeps for advice on how they kept track of their time to be able to bill clients. From that and some of my own research I was able to make a decent list of potential time tracking tools to use as I forge ahead with independent contracting.

For my own business, I use QuickBooks 2010 Professional to keep track of finances. I’d like to keep as much financial information within that system as possible. I shudder to think of a sprawling web of financial information strung across multiple local and “cloud” systems. That means I want to keep invoicing within QuickBooks unless there are some very compelling reasons to use another service. And by “very compelling reasons” I mean “using QuickBooks invoicing will cause non-trivial regions of my body to burst into flames before rocketing off and shattering into tiny pieces against the wall.” Nothing less than that seems to be convincing enough. As a result, any tool that I use needs to make it easy for time sheets to be translated into invoices in QuickBooks.

Also coming into play with my decision is the fact that I’m something of a task management wonk. I like to have neat task lists, wikis and document stores for each of my projects and clients (whether or not I actually keep those task lists up-to-date is another blog post entirely). It would be very advantageous if the time tracking tool had some kind of a relationship with a project management tool. It’s one thing to say “I worked on your stuff for four hours today. Here’s my time sheet, see?” and another thing to say “Here’s a task-based breakdown of what I accomplished in these four hours I’m billing you for.” I tend to send customers a monthly or weekly update email with all of the things that I’ve done for them in that time period and I loathe to think I’ll need to knit together information from two separate systems (task management and time tracking) to make an appealing account of my time.

Of course, the time tracking needs to be attractive too. I’m something of a visual person and can definitely appreciate a tool that’s been designed with aesthetics in mind. As a business owner, I also appreciate that my business’s image is affected by every interaction with customers. For this reason I strive to make my business cards, pens, invoices and even time tracking statements look as neat and appealing as possible. That doesn’t mean things need to look like an army of Pratt Institute graduates worked on it. The function of a thing must come first, but comeliness cannot be lightly treated. Which brings me to my next point.

Utility. The time tracker must be able to easily handle multiple clients, projects within those clients, contacts within those clients and projects as well as make granular breakdowns of how time is spent. This is closely related to the desire for close project management integration above as many of these features could be blended with a PM tool. I need to be able to make different hourly rates for different clients and projects as well as being able to easily handle retainer time. I’d like the ability for clients to log in and see what progress has been made on certain projects or how much my time is being spent on which things. Being new to the realm of contracting, I’m not even sure what features to look for, but I’m sure I’ll get some good ideas as I go. I’m also hoping that a clear front runner will show itself as I ask it do to more and it magically rises to the demand.

Furthermore, it would be great if the service itself could actually track the time. I don’t just mean me typing in how many hours I’ve worked. I’d like the ability to actually click “start” and “stop” on a timer, or select some kind of alarm or have other features that actually help me track the time.

Let me collect the above wishes into a list and add a few other little things:

• Some form of integration with QuickBooks to make invoices from time sheets, even if it’s well formed CSV exports of time tracking data. (non-negotiable)
• Integration with some task management tool like BaseCamp or LiquidPlanner (non-negotiable)
• Attractive presentation of time with at least some level of reporting possible (non-negotiable, although I understand that this is a subjective category that I’ve intentionally left broad and undefined)
• An option for clients to log into their projects and see the time that I’m spending on them. (Optional. I’m not sure I like the idea of giving clients the ability to look over my shoulder like that, but it might be nice to at least have that option present.)
• Web based (Optional, but strongly preferred. This is something I didn’t touch on in the body of the post, but it would be preferable if this was done via a web application since I work on many different PCs and phones across different OSs)
• Mobile application support. (Optional. I’d like to be able to interact with the time tracking tool including starting to track my time via my iPhone and perhaps a future Android. Heck, at that point I’d start tracking my personal time to see how much is consumed by Team Fortress 2 and how little I spend on reading these days.)
• An actual time clock to track time an not just a tool to help me collate my time data. (Optional, but strongly preferred. I can always use my iPhone’s timer for this.)

I think that about covers my wish list so far. Ironically being a bit pressed for time, I decided to use the above criterion to briefly evaluate the first five time tracking tools on the list I made rather than go through all of them. If any of them stood out, I’d trial it. If none did, I’d move on to evaluate the next five. Here’s what I discovered:

Whittling the List of Tools Down

Let’s Freckle

• QuickBooks Integration: No, but it does export to CSV and other formats.
• Project Management Integration: No, except for basic importation of information from BaseCamp.
• Attractive Time Sheets and Reports: Yes, it’s attractive and has some reporting features.
• Third-Party Time Review: No, I didn’t see an apparent ability for people to log in and inspect my work
• Web Based: Yes.
• Mobile Apps: No.
• Time Clock Features: Yes

FreshBooks

• QuickBooks Integration: No QuickBooks Integration to any significant degree.
• Project Management Integration: Yes, there is integration with task management tools such as BaseCamp and DeskAway)
• Attractive Time Sheets and Reports: Yes, the time sheets are attractive there is some level of reporting that can be done
• Third-Party Time Review: Yes, people can log in and see my work
• Web Based: Yes
• Mobile Apps: Yes
• Time Clock Features: Yes there are time clock features including integration with other dedicated clocking tools in case you need more features than FreshBooks offers.
• Other cons: Freshbooks tries to be a lightweight accounting package. It time tracks, invoices, keeps track of cash flows and more. It does a ton of stuff. I think it’s targeted at a different audience than me. It’s quote expensive as well, but that’s likely because it’s a very large package intended for being used as a QuickBooks alternative for small businesses.

Market Circle’s Billings Pro for the iPhone

• QuickBooks Integration: No
• Project Management Integration: No
• Attractive Time Sheets and Reports: It’s attractive enough and there are some reporting features.
• Third-Party Time Review: No apparent way to share time sheets with others.
• Web Based: Yes
• Mobile Apps: Yes
• Time Clock Features: Yes
• Cons: Heavily focused on the mac platform and the iPhone. That’s rather apparent based on it’s title. It needs one Mac to have the server software installed on it as well. No big deal, but I don’t have a Mac – and it doesn’t have much of anything else that I wanted. It’s just not for me.

Get Harvest

• QuickBooks Integration: Yes. Apparently it directly imports time info into QuickBooks! Woot!
• Project Management Integration: Yes, it integrates with task management tools like BaseCamp and RedMine! Redmine!! Did you hear me? I said REDMINE!!
• Attractive Time Sheets and Reports: Meh. The time tracking doesn’t seem to have much visual appeal, however the reporting features seem to be nice.
• Third-Party Time Review: There does not seem to be a way to share time tracking info with others.
• Web Based: Yes
• Mobile Apps: Yes
• Time Clock Features: Yes, the time clock is both online and a fat app for Windows and Mac. I wish one for Linux, since I’m now a Fedora user! =( However, I may just use the iPhone app and lay my phone on my desk next to me as I work. I used to do that in times past just to time myself to make sure I was staying focused on work.

1 Day Later

• QuickBooks Integration: No
• Project Management Integration: No
• Attractive Time Sheets and Reports: Time tracking seems visually appealing, but it’s hard to tell since so little of the application is shown on the site. There doesn’t appear to be much in the way of reporting.
• Third-Party Time Review: No apparent way to share time with others.
• Web Based: Yes
• Mobile Apps: Yes
• Time Clock Features: Not sure
• Other cons: The website is very sparse on information. Very small, skewed screenshots of the app are shown. No videos, no walk-throughs. nothing. Very poor form for any place trying to sell a product.

At the end of my five service preliminary review, one has certainly stood out amongst the others. Is it obvious? Get Harvest! The other four seem to be lacking in some crucial elements that I need and will be scratched off my list permanently. I’ll be evaluating Get Harvest over the next month and report back with my findings. I’ll similarly sift through the remaining time tracking tools at a later date and possibly perform a more in-depth trial once Get Harvest has been sufficiently tire-kicked. In the mean time, if you see any new time tracking tools that aren’t on my list here, comment over there with your suggestions and I’ll add them.

Do you have any experience with any of the time tracking tools listed above? Any opinions you’d like to share? Go right ahead in the comments below.

I have a Twitter account. It’s right here. I was supremely skeptical of Twitter for quite a while. In fact, the only reason I signed up was because I had trouble with a game I bought and the only way that I could get in touch with the developer was through his Twitter account. He was not active on the official forum for the game nor did he respond to either of the email addresses that I had for him. Sadly, that was not the only time that I could not contact a developer except through Twitter.

I recall those days two years ago when I was attempting to understand the concepts of mentioning, direct messages and re-tweets. Now, 2,400 tweets later, I understand it well enough to be helping others use it, including one of my clients (a non profit that uses it to drive traffic to their blog). Here are the top ten reasons why I succumbed to joining Twitter:

1. My narcicism is inconceivable.
2. I want you to tweet “I do not think it means, what you think it means” at me after reading the first point.
3. I am a freebie-hound and retweets are cheap ways to enter giveaways.
4. I must be popular because all these girls I don’t know follow me and give me secret passwords to their sites!
5. I’m making it at least a little more likely that Lisa Nova will make a video about me. (see point 1)
6. I want to make up for being voted “most likely to not be voted most likely for anything in the high school yearbook because we thought you dropped out or got hit by a train at least two years ago”
7. I’ve always wanted minions.
8. I get to follow famous people without having any more restraining orders filed against me.
9. My concentration was getting too honed so I needed to break it into less efficient pieces.
10. Oh yeah, and I actually found useful people to follow as pertains to my profession such as
    • @StandAloneSA
    • @obfuscurity
    • @j_angliss
    • @Philiph
    • @voretaq7
    • @AFreshOne
    • @ClonedMilkmen
    • @JReypo
    • @Magurski
    • @rootwyrn
    • And many, many more. I hope to someday put together a Twitter list of the best tech tweeps that I follow, and by no means are the ones I listed above the my only favorites.

Who are some of your favorite Twitter users in the technology realm? List them in the comments below, and yes you can self-promote your own account if you feel like it. =)

Last week I sent out a cry for help concerning the 2011 10K ServerFault challenge. Several people responded offering their skills and ideas and as I dreaded, I had to make a difficult decision. Before I tell a bit more about the final decision, let me say thank you to those who offered their help. One of those was Ben Pilbrow who offered up some scripts to be able to pinpoint a user’s reputation on January 1st. If you need some PHP done keep him on your short list.

Another possibility I had to choose from was developed by GeorgeEdison on StackExchange of Quick Media Solutions with some help from Jack of All Trades Jacob Jernigan. You can see the application here as well as seeing the Stack Apps page for it over yonder. It certainly looks good! In fact, this link will be the temporary means of keeping track of participants. Check to see if your name is on there (newer entrants might not be) and see how you’ve been doing!

But what of the final decision for a ServerFault Challenge app? Dan Seaver of RubyOverflow fame had some great ideas for an app based on Ruby on Rails. After some discussion, we worked out that perhaps coupling it closely with my blog or even my domain might not be the best idea. In fact, restricting the use of the app to just ServerFault or even just a single challenge from this blog was really limiting the possibilities.

Here’s the plan thus far. Instead of “The ServerFault Challenge” the website will be StackExchangeChallenge.com and will eventually be a self-service style website where anyone can sign up, set goals and time limits, look at pretty graphs, crunch numbers and generally keep themselves on task for any goals they may have that involve any website that is part of the larger Stack Exchange family of sites.

Thanks to the people at Stack Exchange Inc. for helping us out by purchasing the domain StackExchangeChallenge.com and allowing us to use the term “Stack Exchange” in our site title. All of this is with the knowledge that Stack Exchange Inc. is not affiliated with the Stack Exchange Challenge website and wholly owns the Stack Exchange trademark.

I’ll keep everyone up to date on the website’s progress. Of course, if you have any feature ideas you can send them to me at [email protected], contact me with the “Contact Me!” link at the top of my blog or leave comments below. However, we don’t quite have everything that we’d like yet. “What remains?” you might ask. Well…

Stack Exchange Challenge Needs teh Pretties!

It’s such an old saw, but it’s nearly universally true. Developers aren’t the best designers (I personally only know of one exception to that rule). The question that I have for anyone reading this is: Are you a web designer and would you grace the project with your skills? Of course, any design work will be fully credited and we’d love to give link juice from the Stack Exchange Challenge site to a place where people can hire your awesome self. This site has the potential to be seen by hundreds of thousands of users with backgrounds as diverse as the entire Stack Exchange family of sites. There’s no design goals other than make it awesome. You would have complete control over the entire visual appeal of the site.

If you’re interested in heading up the design of this site, send me an email at [email protected] and we’ll discuss things further. I’d love to see some of your previous work. And of course, since I suspect that at least a few folks will volunteer, that means I’ll have to make a tough decision. Showing that you can take “ownership” of a project and at the same time remain open to suggestions will go a long way to swaying me in your direction. =)

I’ll keep everyone up to date on the progress of the project. With any luck, it should be done by the time Phil Hollenback hits 10K.

My Problem:

Attempting to install security update KB948109 on a Windows Server 2003 SP2 machine with SQL Server 2005 SP2 fails with error code 0×7342 from the Microsoft Update web site. Downloading the update and attempting to install it manually results in this error message:

SQL Server Setup failed to modify security permissions on file Drive:Program FilesMicrosoft SQL ServerMSSQL.xMSSQLData for user %user%

My Solution:

Make sure that the account that you are running the installation under has appropriate permissions on the “Drive:Program FilesMicrosoft SQL ServerMSSQL.xMSSQLData” folder and all of the files within that folder. Read this KB article.

The Long Story:

I’m beginning to dread patching and updating my Windows machines. It’s not a matter of if something will fail, but how many failures await me and how long will it take to fix them. Maybe it’s common to all platforms, but I digress. After this latest Windows update installation failure, I Googled around to find out what the deal was. The “Known Issues” portion of the security bulletin did not make me feel warm and fuzzy. Apparently uninstalling the security update removes the Windows Internal Database (WYukon)?! After looking into it a bit more, it sounded like removing WYukon was not a can of worms I wanted to open up.

My first attempt at fixing the situation was (as usual) to download the update straight from Microsoft and attempt a manual installation of the update. Launching the freshly downloaded update installer offered me several choices. First, it wanted to know which SQL Server 2005 features I wanted to update. Hmmm… only the “SQL Server Databases Services 2005″ option was checked by default. Shouldn’t all features be updated if possible? Google offered no guidance. After furrowing my brow for a few moments I decided to go all in.

Next I was alerted to a process that was locking a file that needed to be updated. Ah ha! Maybe that was the problem all along. I recall reading in the known issues section of the security bulletin that for this update to work the SQL VSS (Volume Shadow copy Service) had to be running. Maybe it wasn’t and that was what tangled the original update up. (NOTE: After this saga ended, I realized that the bulletin mentioned the SQL VSS Writer service and NOT simply the VSS service. Here’s a huge article about it written for backup application vendors. The following flailing around with the VSS service was probably completely useless, especially considering it didn’t work. =) )

I checked the service and indeed the VSS was not on and was set to manual startup type. Shouldn’t this be set to automatic startup? After thinking about the benefits of using VSS on this server, I decided to cancel the manual installation of the security update, start the VSS and then retry the installation of the security patch from within Windows’s automatic updates control panel. It still didn’t work. Maybe I needed to set the service to automatic and then reboot? Unlikely, but fine. The office is closed so I can reboot to my heart’s desire! However, after a reboot with the VSS set to auto the update still would not work. Maybe the VSS thing was a dead-end. I stopped the service just to be cautious and remove any new and uncertain changes from the equation.

My next step was to try the manual installation and stop any locking processes. To my surprise the installer said that there were no locking process! The reboot must have taken care of that. The installation of the patch started.

I nervously watched the installation progress and noticed one of the status messages said “Rolling back changes”. That doesn’t sound good. Soon thereafter I was met with another lovely failure message:

Strangely enough the installation continued. The check boxes that designated which product had been updated continued to be systematically checked off. I looked again at the failure message and noted that it didn’t actually say that the installation itself was a failure, but that a recently applied update failed to install. Maybe it simply detected one of my other failed attempts but this one currently under way was fine. Could my fears have been premature? The first installation completion message looked good. The completion message that I saw after clicking ‘next’ did not look so good.

After the installation finished, I clicked the ‘View Summary” button. Each database component had a separate section in the summary file. Each component was successfully updated except for the “SQL Server Database Services 2005″ portion:

I noticed the location of a log file in the Details portion of the hotfix’s installation summary. Checking it out, I found the following error:

SQL Server Database Services 2005; Status: Failure; Error number: 29506; Error description: MSP Error: 29506 SQL Server Setup failed to modify security permissions on file C:Program FilesMicrosoft SQL ServerMSSQL.1MSSQLData for user Administrator. To proceed, verify that the account and domain running SQL Server Setup exists, that the account running SQL Server Setup has administrator privileges, and that exists on the destination drive.

I pondered the advice in the Error Description portion of the summary. The account/domain that I’m using does exist, the account that I’m launching the setup program under does have admin rights to the folder (verified through effective permissions), and the folder does exist. However, after finding and reading Microsoft KB916766 I found that it was not enough to have admin permissions on the folder. You also need admin rights on each file in the folder. I hunted through the data folder for files that did not include the local administrators group in its permissions. (Incidentally, I’m sure there is a command line / programmatic way of searching through a directory looking to see if a certain user is on the ACL, but alas I’m woefully unaware of it. CACLS maybe?) Sure enough, two of the databases only included the creating user’s credentials but not the administrators group or the local administrator user account. After adding the administrators group to the permissions (and making sure to select ‘Full Control’ as the privilege level) I reran the update, except this time I only selected to update the database services portion.

Success at last! At least until the next Patch Tuesday…

I’ve noticed something strange while using RDP. Actually, I’m not sure if it’s the RDP protocol or Microsoft’s RDP client. When you use Windows Remote Desktop and view a folder’s contents using Windows Explorer, some of the text may display oddly in the various columns. This seems to happen mostly when the view is selected as “Details”. Sometimes filenames are turned into garbled gibberish. Here’s an example that I experienced while simply browsing files in Explorer.

In another example, I remoted into a Windows XP Professional machine using Terminals 1.7. While looking at some scheduled tasks with the ‘details’ view I noticed an unusual entry under the “Last Run Time” column. The text was garbled and looked like some new character set was being used. I refreshed the screen by hitting ‘F5′ and closed and reopened the window. Nothing changed. For some reason I decided to resize the column. Oddly enough, when the column was resized small enough to where the text had to be truncated with an ellipsis, the text appeared normal. However, when I resized the column to be wider, as soon as it was wide enough to where the normal text wouldn’t require any ellipses, it reverted back to the strange text. I noticed that it seemed to only affect the tasks that had not run yet. All other columns appeared to have normal text. I manually started a new job. Now the information in the ‘Last Run’ column seems to be formatting correctly:

Here is where it really begins to get strange. When I took screenshots of this whole phenomena from the host machine (the computer running the remote desktop client) the garbled text didn’t appear in the pictures! What gives? Take a look at these screenshots. As I viewed them with my own eyes, they were garbled similar to the first picture and yet using Windows’ built in screen capture on the host machine, the garbled text was somehow “decoded”. In the picture below, the top line was garbled but the bottom line was not as I looked at it. Adding yet more to the weirdness, the top highlighted line makes no sense. Why would the words “Add or” be in the “Last Run Time”column?!

A temporary fix to the issues was stumbled upon by accident. I tried changing the view from ‘details’ to ‘Icon’. No artifacts were seen in the icon view. When I switched back to the details view, there were no more artifacts. I never figured out why this happened, why taking screenshots of the remote connection from the host machine “decoded” the characters or why the words “Add or” were in the Last Run Time column after “decoding”.

No answers. No clues. Just weird.

In January of this year, I organized a 10,000 point challenge for ServerFault (or whatever your StackExchange preference is). The general idea is to commit to adding 10,000 points to your ServerFault account. (Note: that doesn’t mean that you need to reach 10,000 points. You need to add 10,000 points to your Jan 1, 2011 total.)

After a few tweets from Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky twenty-eight people have already signed up! That’s twenty-seven more than I expected. The current leader of the challenge appears to be Phil Hollenback who has already garnered just over 5,000 points at the time of this writing. It only appears that Phil is the current leader because I have no easy way of tracking the progress of each user. Some very generous individuals, including Ben Pilbrow, Jonathon Angliss and Scott Pack, have individually whipped up some quick scripts in various languages to cull the information and display it. However, it was up to me to actually implement the scripts and… well… I suck, so that didn’t happen. I am very appreciative that they thought the cause was worthy enough to spend their time making something for it and ashamed at myself for letting their efforts lay by the wayside.

I’ll be a bit more open about what has been keeping me away from being more active in this challenge as well as my blog. There are three things that have hammered me lately.

1. Health. For the last four years I have struggled with what I can most simply call vertigo that was the result of a singularly nasty flu. Two months ago I had a relapse. It’s getting better, but not getting enough sleep causes me to relapse. Being dizzy consumes a surprising amount of the body’s energy and also brings productivity to a screeching halt. Relapses take weeks to recover from and only repair with sleep.
2. Work. In the two blog posts on my failure as a SysAdmin “A Tale of Laziness, Good Fortune and Self Loathing” and “Continued Self Loathing and Why You Should RTFineM” I chronicled how I have come to the conclusion that I am spread too thin and the risking catastrophic failures of several projects. I’ve stopped taking on new responsibilities and am working out a plan to remove myself from several things so that I can more responsibly focus on more profitable tasks. That’s doesn’t mean I’ll stop blogging or even curating the ServerFault challenge. I think those things are rewarding and help my professional life. However, in the time between when I saw the error of my ways and the time when I can step back from my over-commitment, I’m still working from morning until nighttime. I haven’t been able to justify departing from putting out fires and preventing other conflagrations long enough to look into the ServerFault Challenge.
3. Friends. I’ve had a number of friends who have had some troubled or confusing times in life and I’ve had to stop and succor them. I have no problem doing that at all and I’m not complaining. In fact, the time that it’s taken up is probably inconsequential compared to the above two bullet points. I’d much rather talk all night to a troubled friend than eat, sleep or restore a web server. It is what it is and it’s at least part of why I haven’t been able to give time to side projects like the ServerFault challenge.

What I’m Asking For

Phil’s milestone of reaching the halfway mark hilighted to me that I need to reach out for some help and ask “do you haz teh codes?” I’m not in a position to do much of anything on this project, so I’m asking for pure grace here: Would anyone like to create and own a simple web application to keep track of each of the challenges, its participants and their individual goals?

I’m not asking for a total freebie. I will gladly provide link juice to you if you’re a freelancer or employed at a development house of some kind. My blog isn’t exactly the next Daring Fireball as far as traffic is concerned, but I have a reach of about 600 to 2000 viewers (depending on how you do the math) in the SysAdmin world as of this post. We can work out the specifics in more detail if you contact me. Here are some of my thoughts on what I’d like to see:

• I’d prefer the application to be hosted on my domain. Ideally I thought it would be cool to have a “ServerFault Challenge” link at the top of my blog, next to the Blog List and perhaps the web app be a WordPress plugin. That’s just a fancy of mine though.
• It has to have at least a teeny bit of visual attractiveness. We’re not talking a Webby Award candidate, but more than just an HTML table with thick borders.
• A pretty line graph showing the progress of all participants participant over time
• Same way of showing who is close to their relative challenge goals and who has already achieved them.
• Perhaps make it easy for people to sign up for the contest? currently people simply drop links in the comments section of the original blog post and I manually find their StackExchange flair graphic and figure out their approximate Jan 1 reputation score.
• Reusable would be nice. The likelihood is high that the challenge will become an annual thing. Perhaps with different challenges and rules, but the same general concept of reputation goals.
• Anything else cool that you’d like to see. Really, I’d love for someone to be as creative as they want to be.

You must keep in mind, though, that I am in no way affiliated with ServerFault or StackExchange and cannot necessarily use their logos or trademarks in anything. While I doubt my calling this little challenge ”The 10K ServerFault Challenge!” will result in a cease and desist order, placing their logos all over the challenge page might test the boundaries.

How I’ll Choose the “Winner”

I imagine that there will be at least a few people interested in getting involved, so I’ll have to make a tough decision between candidates. It would be helpful if I had some samples of your work to look at. Also, if you wanted to integrate the application into my WordPress blog, it would be helpful to see that you’ve worked with WordPress development before. I’m sure you’re the hottest Django developer on the planet, but I’d be a bit nervous if you decided to learn PHP and WordPress development on my blog. If you wanted to make a Django based app, no problem! That’s what subdirectories are for. =)

Finally, it would be good if you knew a bit about the ServerFault API and what the rules are concerning it’s usage. Existing StackExchange enthusiasts will be favored, although not necessarily a shoe-in.

How to Apply

Simply email me at [email protected] or use the contact form linked at the top of my blog and tell me who you are and what you’d like to do. We’ll talk from there and, depending on the number of people interested, I’ll make a decision in a few days to a few weeks.

To all of those who have already signed up, thanks and keep plugging away! To anyone else interested in the challenge, it’s not too late to sign up.