if you are already working as a freelancer and need a cool way of tracking your time, expenses , and billing people, try Freshbooks, I use it myself and it is amazing. It’s free for a few clients, then its a few pounds a month for up to 25 clients, and its hosted so no software, accessible anywhere, and it even chunks out basic accounts for you at the end of the year. It really is amazing.

At the moment an affiliate posting tweets using your brand name and linking direct to your site could do very well for themselves without you really even noticing, unless you check out the performance of your own Twitter campaign and find it lost amongst affiliate posts..

This is a very “merchant” orientated post as, whilst affiliates generally behave correctly, there are always some who, like my pet polecats, are always looking for a way around things, or whom, to be fair, perhaps just think of stuff before we do.

So, to protect yourselves correctly, clearly define in your affiliate campaign Ts & Cs in what way your brand can be used in social media by your affiliates.

Like most online tools, services, and apps, its in USD$ as most of the cutting edge stuff is in the USA. And anyway, $87!? not a lot for a solid foundation for your website is it?

We’re starting a trial of Thesis for a client, so will do progress reports. Looks good so far though.

For more info click visit diythemes.com

What about other buttons that aren’t available – how about a “dumped” button? An “object” button?

Ideas on a postcard please

We’re trialling Magento Store Manager – a windows desktop application to manage key Magento functions remotely to greatly speed up the process – main functions that interested us were add, delete, modify, clone, or copy products, categories, manufacturers, attributes, but it also handles import and export to excel, so we’ll see what that is like too. Watch this space, product review to follow!

There are thousands of free wordpress themes out there but for a small amount of money – less than a hundred quid or so, you can get more exclusive, sophisticated and evolved WordPress themes. They tend to be be more specifically focussed on purpose – like for selling an iphone app or an ebook, or a magazine site for instance, and look more polished.

We’re compiling a list of our favourites, and this is the first;  Templatic, they have a fantastic collection of themes for different uses and they are not expensive.

On the day I complain that signing in to accounts with Google can be a pain in the **** I hear they have released a multiple login feature. There are a few restrictions but it saves bouncing between browsers – read more here in this blog post, or to set it up read the guide in Google help

Well there is a surprise – after so much hope for Wave, take up has been underwhelming and its been dumped by Google. We found it pretty useful to share and monitor jobs between ourselves and clients, but the one problem that i found, and this may have something to do with it, was registering and buggering around with emails. Google can get pretty irritating at times when registering for stuff.

Anyway, shame – but its still around in its present form – and still pretty useful.