I overheard someone talking about not being able to find a designer to help them with a web project for less than a certain hourly rate. It’s not the hourly rate that matters, it’s the overall cost.

Here are some tips for getting a good designer to help you out regardless of cost:

• It’s who you know. You need to get out and meet with designers. In the Dallas area, Refresh Dallas is a good venue for this. Sometimes designers need development work, too, so maybe you can sync up on something. Especially if you’re around a big city, there will be a similar group.
• Better yet, work with good designers. If you do good work, they’ll remember and want to work with you more and give you some slack on price when you need it. They’ll recommend you to others, too.
• Tell them what you’ve got to spend up front. They’ll tell you what they can do. It’s possible all you need is a one page template and if you ask them to simply design a site, that typically entails much more effort. Some of the better designers I know ask for a budget outright so they know what they can offer within the constraints.
• If they can’t be of service, ask if they know anyone who could. Designers often know other designers.

I’ve decided to setup a Tumblr page where I currently plan to post frequent, short things both professional and personal. Visit https://wadewinningham.tumblr.com.

Inevitably, today on my Windows XP notebook, the automatic update finally told me that it wanted to install IE7. Since I still need IE6 to test with and have IE7 working quite nicely on my MacBookPro in Parallels, I’m not going there.

https://highscalability.com has loads of useful information for creating very highly scalable sites. Includes a look behind the scenes of both Google and YouTube.

Over on Err The Blog is an article on placing your gems into the vendor directory rather than relying on them being in the environment.

I’ve run into the issue before where a Rails app doesn’t run on a server due to a gem not being installed. Adding them to your application seems like a perfect solution and deals with other computers possibly having various versions of gems installed.