A day in the life... of a web developer!

Thought it was about time we wrote a blog about something personal... after not a lot of thought we decided to pick on our New Media Director Graham Cartwright and task him to record a typical day for him here at GeekyCreative.

6:30am Alarm goes off and before I am able to come round the kids are awake and bouncing on the bed.

7:30am Kids are dressed and fed and ready for school. I turn on the laptop, check my emails and catch up on Twitter. First coffee of the day while I browse a few sites and generally potter around.

8:30am Emails sent and Tweets replied to it's time to walk the eldest to school. The return walk is valuable time to think and re-adjust my planning for the day. I juggle a few things in my head as I take in the fresh air. I grab another coffee on the way to my desk.

9:00am Back in front of the screen and it's time to fire up 6music and zip through any amends from the previous day. Doing them now means I can keep a project moving with the right momentum.

10:06am Coffee.

10:30am First conference call of the week, This ones an update on a HUGE social networking development that we have on the go. Client seems happy enough, pushing for completion which is encouraging.

11:30am Conference call finished, time for a cofeee while I type up my notes up for an email response. I feel as if I haven't got time but I know that I need to stay on top of the paperwork on a development of this size.

12.00noon Need to spend an hour or two designing some new page layouts for new client pitch. I tend not to spend too much time on designs in pitches as clients like to change them once we get the go ahead and a full brief. However, I do like to give a little bit of creative input at the pitch stage to help balance all the technical stuff in the proposal. I sketch first on pen and paper and then transfer to a sketchy illustrator template to send to client... I've got a colour pallet down and some typefaces at this point so client has a good idea of what's in store. I'll work up the designs in Photoshop if we get the order.

12:26am Coffee.

2:00pm Ploughing through some amends to our bespoke C# admin section that allows clients a lot of control over their websites. I've added in some jQuery code which allows clients to re-order items such as news articles and products.

2:01pm Coffee.

4:00pm Taking a break from all that code with a spot of research and development on the new iPhone SDK. Looking into what's possible for a long standing client. Fair bit of reading involved and nearly an hour on Google.

4:54pm Coffee.

5:30pm Home time for some, but I'm setting up some back ups to run on a new development machine. Don't want to lose all that new code, let alone the new Access and MySQL databases that are running on there. I use Tortoise SVN and some free software from BackUp4All.

5:31pm Coffee.

6:04pm About time I got something to eat. Haven't had any lunch today and drunk far too much coffee (again) but up-to-date with all my scheduled tasks. There's no excuse when working from home but sometimes I get too distracted to eat. Anyway dinner smells nice, time to leave work behind for a bit and grab some family time.

8:00pm Kids in bed, time to crack on with GeekyCreatives new website. Needs to be ready for our official re-launch next week. Need to nail this Google Blogger API and then get the Twitter API on multiple pages. More Visual Studio and C# for me tonight.

10:30pm Shattered and starting to get all coded out... going to see whats on BCC iPlayer and then call it a night. Zip through some Tweets, replying to some SEO and API questions before finally thinking enough is enough. Toodlepip.

Tweet stuff...

It seems that everyone is at it.... Tweeting that is.

www.Twitter.com is *the* latest social web phenomenon and here at GeekyCreative we are being asked the usual questions about integration and 'can I show my Tweets on my website?'

Well 10mins research is all it took to find an answer, and it's the kind of answer we like here at GeekyCreative especially when it comes to API's and Web 2.0 application integration. The answer is... Yes.

Yes you can get your Twitter feed on your website, want to know how?

Well... it involves some coding but for us geeks is very easy to implement.

Email us at info@geekycreative.com or subscribe to this Blog as we'll be explaining how in the next few days and maybe even giving away the C# code for displaying your Twitter public timeline on your website.

Even better follow us on http://twitter.com/geekycreative for more Twitter goodies and updates.

We'll be looking at Facebook next and the fact that you can set up your Blog to automatically update your status on over 60 social networking websites. Take advantage of this low cost and easy way to market your business and improve your SEO... follow us!

Social Networking for Lazy People

What with Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace etc; Social Networking can suddenly start to drain your valuable time and resources.

If you are constantly loggin in and out, cutting and pasting for hours on end just to get one update across all your online accounts then don't worry, help is now at hand.

Here at GeekyCreative we've found a lazy way to network online. That doesn't mean that we're taking shortcuts when it comes to engaging with others in our networks in fact just the opposite.

We've developed a way to share general updates across multiple networks in one push of a button... for example this blog post will re-appear as a Tweet, LinkedIn status update and Facebook microblog without us doing any cutting or pasting while trying to stay logged into several sites at once.

How do we do it? Well we don't want to give away any secrets for free but rest assured this is a sure fire way for you to improve your Social Networking and increase your SEO for very little investment.

We literally have 50+ Social Network sites that we can use to achieve maximum coverage for those all important product and service updates.

Contact info@geekycreative.com to find out more.