The problem is maintenance as well. A couple of times I have done sites for friends for small or no fee, and then they expect you to constantly make 'a tiny change' which always turns out to actually be something quite big....

Yeah. The one time I did it, I made it very clear that the fee was for the initial design. After delivery was accepted, anything else would require a new agreement of costs. Turned out they never actually did anything with it, so there were no additional requests.

"nah i dont do it anymore. i havent kept up with the technology and now i dont know how"

and its great cause youre not lying. if you ever have to look at the docs, well essentially that means you 'dont know how'. and wheres the biggest drain on your time? on the stuff you dont know. when they request the "top bar" look different, and you think to yourself, "fvck i don't know how to change the header template in wordpress. you gave me $50 which is my half hourly rate, and now i'm a week of work into this while i teach you how to add a blog post." at first its fun to learn new things, then you realize is all just a matter of time reading docs, so the 'new things' just become 'things i havent read about yet'

Defining a sign off time is so so important from my experience. Or it drags on, and on. An initial checklist of, "The job is done when all these are checked" works best, if they want to change something you can say, "well it's not on the checklist for the original quote but we can add it on for $xx". When all the checkboxes are checked, present it to the client, "look it's all done see!" and get paid maney.

Friends and family are tricky. I tend to give massive discounts and then work off a barter system for updates. Instead of charging them for 1 or 2 hours of maintenance they'll pay for a round of golf or do some favors for me in their line of work.

In the end though, I'm pretty sure that if I really needed a favor from them in their line of work they probably wouldn't charge me or hesitate to help so I try to keep the same mind set.

I think the biggest problem is the work we do is not tangible and people not in the business have absolutely no clue what's needed to make their site work. They don't really relate that time == money so they feel ripped off if we charge them for time.

Friend of a friend, I'd likely charge normal rates unless it was a specific circumstance (really tight friend of the family, could lead into future business, etc.).

This is not really dev related, but a great article nonetheless that might apply to people here:

http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/05/...w-you-can-too/

It's probably easier for me since I actively freelance, though a lot less than I used to. So people know that this is something I do.

I also put everybody on Wordpress, and teach them how to do things themselves, so I don't have to.

Zurvan is right.

"i want a website herp derp"

They get one word for free: WordPress. Everything else costs money.

The thought of teaching some of my family members how to use WP is frightening. Most of them are just people with ideas and have no idea how to meld their ideas into a "good" web site and think the internet is AOL.

If I gave them free reigns on their site with WP it would be riddled with terribad grammar, typos, 100pt font sizes in random colors sprinkled about the site and the site as a whole would be a wreck.

This is generally what people want when they say "i want a website buhhhh."

So what? It's their website.

My blind grandmother recently self published a book on painting (she was an artist before she went blind) using Amazons self publishing features.

Depends on what the site is used for. I haven't had any "personal herp derp I can haz web site?" requests yet.

The requests I've gotten were to assist them in creating an online business. It's beneficial to them and myself that it succeeds. The reason they come to you is because they have no idea how to make it work.

When it's their website so what, yeah sort of, but I can't help but cringe when I add a website to my portfolio for a job when they request a recent example that has been bastardised by the client.

Guess I'm lucky. My friends and family would never think of expecting me to work at insanely low rates, let alone free.

Have any of you flashed a router with dd-wrt before? About to do it and don't want to brick it
Read through the wiki and found the brand specific file and all so I should be ok.

I have done openwrt a few times. I even recovered from a bricking once. That was tricky.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/25/abs...at-tc-disrupt/

Pretty interesting video. It gives an insider view of what goes on inside Y Combinator and what questions you should ask yourself or try to solve for any ideas you might have

wow this really is great. its easy to put yourself in the questioners shoes. i've only watched the first two interviews, but i know whos gonna succeed and who isnt

Is there an easy way to mass-download youtube videos?
Like, for example from this page, how would I do that?
I can do it manually, but I'd rather not, you know

yep, I have ddwrt on a linksys, i use it in my basement to connect as a bridge to my main router upstairs. that way i can hard wire connect my xbox, stereo, etc. without buying individual wireless pieces for each device. works great.

Exactly what I want to do, awesome. Will flash it tonight

Edit: startup thingy was interesting. The dude with the video application seemed well prepared and his idea seems pretty good. Might go meta-strategy that :P Unfortunately the cheap-labor market works very differently here though

Luckily for me, no. But if, I would just pay 50$ for an offshore wordpress page and let them buy me dinner for 200$ in revenge. Triple win situation.

Job ad:

We need a superstar in [18 different web languages].

There is no pay, but we can offer free massages at our spas. It'll be a win-win for both of us!

let me know if you have trouble, I remember getting the right bridge settings to be kind of finicky and kind of a pita since the instructions weren't very good at the time. If you have problems I'll pull up my config and let you know the settings i'm using.

I do know I remembered having more luck with the setting that did NOT allow the ddwrt bridge to serve wireless clients too. I make all wireless clients (laptops, etc) connect to the main router upstairs.