I’d like to announce that Social Gallery – the Ultimate Social Lightbox plugin for WordPress has been acquired by Epic Plugins.com (announcement here.) It’s been fantastic to build Social Gallery up as a product and a useful tool, having sold over 1500 copies and many, many add-ons it’s been very well received and helping it grow has been a ball.

Thanks to each and every one of you who has used and promoted Social Gallery – you’re all awesome.

Epic Plugins is a great home for Social Gallery, it fits nicely into their growing suite of fantastic plugins, I thoroughly recommend checking them out – each and every one is hand crafted by Mike – the chief of Epic Plugins and a top dude.

The post Social Gallery Acquired by Epic Plugins.com first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Freelancing is hitting new heights. More people than ever are leaving traditional employment in search of self-directed consulting. Whether you freelance or hire this can have profound effects on the way you do business.

Freelancing can open up new markets, change prices and costs. Freelancing can develop much more talent, talent which can be easily accessed and verified through growing marketplaces.

I’ve spent time on both ends of the client-freelancer relationship. I’ve hired freelancers and I’ve freelanced, I still freelance at StormGate for a portion of my time.

Freelancing is becoming a career choice; lots of people are breaking off and setting up shop, but whether you’re a veteran consultant or you’re just starting out, if you approach freelance work with a youthful exploration you will uncover fruitful connections. Likewise as clients, freelancers can be more than just hires; they are often hard working entrepreneurs and can offer other business value.

As a freelancer you have decided to offer a boutique service. What you are producing may be boring business logic or beautiful branding; whatever it is there is a very distinct value beyond its delivery.

Your customers have come to you for an exceptional reason. They like what you’ve done before. They have chosen you over others. Winning freelance jobs has become like battling through an interview process and successful freelancers must win jobs week after week.

In a way freelancers are employees of multiple companies, but far from the traditional, 9-5 sense. The bond between freelancer and client is tenable, once established it’s often as strong as any employment contract. Freelancers can feel an affinity with a company; arguably they represent a new form of stakeholder. As freelancers and as clients we are a lot more connected than we think.

My piece ends with a call for freelancers to play their position, the word Free in Freelance is integral!

As clients self-starting freelancers are invaluable, what’s more they could become employees, partners or students.

As freelancers we can be flexible where big companies can’t, we can care more about progress than profit, we can invest in ourselves and we can freelance for happiness.

There is flexibility in freelance.

Follow me on Twitter @woodyhayday to read more stuff like this in future, I’ll also refresh this blog soon so it might move to a new home

The post The Flexibility of Freelance: Web Designer Magazine first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Just a quick post to say that yesterday evening I released the free version of Social Gallery. As Social Gallery has been so popular (now over 700 copies sold on CodeCanyon) it seemed only fair to share some of the awesome out to the WordPress.org family (and to the non-profit’s and such that asked me for assistance.) This “Lite” free version of the premium Social Gallery gives the major functions of Social Gallery but just has all the frill chopped out – it’s still a great way to get more engagement out of your blog images and will no doubt help lots of WordPress fledgling bloggers get more likes & comments on their content. I’m glad to release this free version so as it can be used by all!

If you want to try out Social Gallery Lite you can get a copy over at WordPress.org:

Or read more about this free version release on the Social Gallery Plugin.com blogpost.

Happy Social-Lightboxing to all!

The post Free “Lite” Version of Social Gallery released! first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Owing to the fact that I just wanted to get everything down and perhaps because it was my first ever, my 2012/2013 review ended up a pretty mammoth document. I’ve published bits I would like to share here, the actual review though covers as many angles of my life as I can compute

If you haven’t ever done a personal annual review I urge you to give it a try – it doesn’t even matter if it’s later in the year – it’s a great way to take stock and remember your big-picture intentions.

I hope to get around to a project this year which will delve into such human “systems” in far more detail (I want to write a book on it) – but from this first year alone I can tell you there’s a lot of value in this process, give it a try!

I’m Woody Hayday and here’s my 2012 Annual Review:

(Stolen from my very own facebook)

Books

I didn’t read a whole lot in the first half of 2012 but endeavoured to catch up with myself by the end of the year – in my eagerness to absorb M.Scott Peck’s fantastic “Further along the road less travelled” and the Dalai Lama’s “The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality” at the same time I blew my own mind out of the back of my head in January. This was totally unhelpful to my overall flow of reading (this year I’m avoiding heavy stuff when I need to keep motivated.)

Here’s my pick of my 2012 reading – some fantastic books here, I can hardly give them enough praise:

• Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charles T Munger – This coffee table sized book has more value in it than 80% of business book’s I’ve read, combined. Phenomenal wit  and fantastic, rational truth’s. Learn: Margin’s of Safety & Framework of Models.
• Seeking wisdom – From Darwin to Munger – A more consise edited version of Poor Charlie’s Almanack – you can read one or the other but you might miss 20% of the good stuff overall. This is incredibly dry until about half way through, but persevere!
• Letters From a Stoic by Seneca – Phenominal wisdom from 2000 years ago, shame most of humanity is too preoccupied to absorb it! Absolute imperative read.
• Winning Concepts by Dave Gannaway – Simple, positive, 80’s businessman attitude building
• The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine – American & French Revolution commentary never had such retort, fantastic example of a semi-modern genius rationale, highlighted to me the vacuum of non-correction which seems to exist around societies, specifically Great Britain.
• Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place by Malcolm Lowry – Fantastic, mad literature that’ll catch you off guard.
• The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde – A classic, bored me until it won me over in it’s penultimate pages.
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho – Storified advice on following your dreams. Well written and enjoyable, a great, stealthy way to get positive drive on a big project.
• The Universe in a Single Atom by The Dalai Lama – The Dalai Lama is responsible for several great books – this one is a step heavier than some since and covers the convergence of eastern spirituality and wisdom with modern science, quantum physics and such. Immense but heavy!
• Further Along the Road Less Travelled by M.Scott Peck – If you haven’t read “The Road Less Travelled” read that and come back to this a year later. It’s dense with reality, wisdom and psychology in the best way possible, but in being so I also found it overwhelming (perhaps I read it too fast.) This is one I’ll re-read for sure.

[None of these are affiliate links.]

Projects

Mixing client web development consultancy via StormGate with my own projects, 2012 was still a less fractured year to those before it. I committed to a few major projects which I will mention here but I also didn’t manage to get round to a few I hoped to (finishing off that novel) – C’est la vie!

ChooseFest – The largest project I took on in 2012, ChooseFest is “A festival search engine that matches your music tastes to a better festival” and was fairly successful, closing the year with 600+ users and some really great feedback. Long-tail search engine rankings and a viral nature have carried it well into 2013, where it should continue to grow. Unfortunately work on this one was cut short early in 2012 due to other things getting in the way, I hope to work more on it this year.

Social Gallery – A side project founded from a client’s request, Social Gallery is a WordPress plugin which adds a “facebook style” social lightbox to your blog images – it’s pretty kick ass as you can see. Though this started out as a small experiment it’s been fantastically recieved and is now on it’s second version. It continues to sell well on CodeCanyon. (Branding on this one was done by the fantastic MRK Designs.)

Other noteworthy side projects: Remote backup & health monitoring system for shared hosts (I can now get insane value by using the best of the shared hosts coupled with this setup.) Sales Rocket Pro – this client project had some nice gamifaction intentions! Easy Envato Assistant (tiny project but useful.) Base CRM Contact Form plugin. Seedr’s listing for ChooseFest (temporarily postponed). Lots more including several innovative facebook integrations, a Facebook HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery animated game, a handful of mobile related WordPress plugins and lots of other alpha release’s that I can’t reveal yet

Travel & Health

Compared to previous years I only took a fraction of time away from work this year – I was back and forth between Belgium (Gent) and the UK fairly regularly, with trips to Romania and Denmark. I also got a great week of strategising in a log cabin in the Ardenne. I was glad to see lots of my friends and family visit in Gent, but otherwise had wanted to maintain focus on work. I also hit Wilderness Festival which was cool.

I started out the year averagely healthy and ended it about the same – my intention had been to pursue the slow carb diet and continue to do MED workouts at the gym, alas I let work get the better of me and did not maintain this. I did manage to run my first 10k (the Gent Staad Loop) though, which was exciting.

2012 Summary

It was a full on year of development, I probably produced more lines of more elegant code, drank more coffee and blogged less than any other recent year. Overall I am happy with the outcomes achieved, what else is there to be, after all ChooseFest turned out to seal the end of a fantastically large learning curve, Social Gallery a surprise hit and I managed to find 3 or so books which have utterly transformed my outlook. I should hope to remember that any future successes should be proportionally devoted to Charles Munger, Seneca and my special way of learning: the practical art of digging yourself holes you then have to climb out of.

I hope to realise enough success in coming years to confidently share the hell of a ride it’s been so far.

Have a phenomenal 2013!

P.S. You may get a 2012: Looking Forward post too, if your lucky!

P.P.S. I borrowed this post title from Chris Guillebeau’s 2012 Looking Forward (hope that’s OK Chris), if you haven’t read anything of his stuff check out his latest book $100 Startup, it kicks ass.

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Its official, we have opened up ChooseFest.com, so go check it out, now, what are you waiting for? Click Here!

ChooseFest is all about festivals, music festivals. In short it takes your music tastes (from facebook, last.fm scrobble history, a list you type) goes through all of the line-ups (kept up to date daily!) and then spits out a convenient, summarised list of all the festivals which have the bands (and singers) you particularly like at. It’s kind of a festival search engine, its kind of a music to festival matching site, but it will be a whole lot more in months to come.

What problem does it solve?

Ever tried to find the festival which has the most bands you like at? It’s a nightmare. Each festival has its own “arty” site, each festival has different dates, prices, availability, not to mention they have their bands and artists in obscure orders over several web pages. All that data collating is not easy or fun. ChooseFest.com Makes it easy (and hopefully fun), you just stick in who you want to see and up pops your best options.

Where’s the project at?

ChooseFest is a StormGate production and you can find it on facebook and have a go with the prototype (alpha app) @ ChooseFest.com. We have a few hundred users and are now soliciting feedback, it would be great to hear what you think, and at such an early stage your comments could really make a difference to us.

Want to help out?

Please help us Spread the word, share us with your friends, give us feedback! – the more people we can tell about ChooseFest the more chance there is we can make this a really, really useful tool for us all.

The post Finding Your Perfect Festival – ChooseFest.com first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

“One extends one’s limits only by exceeding them”

M. Scott Peck, who wrote amazing things.

The post StormGate Ltd & 2012’s Major Project first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.