--- title: Tools of the Trade date: 2022-12-06T05:30:00-05:00 author: Sean Smith canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-1/tools-of-the-trade/" section: Podcast --- <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)Season 06 Episode 1 – Dec 06, 2022 39:36 [Show Notes](#show-notes) ## Tools of the Trade  0:00 0:00 1.0x 0.75x1.0x1.25x1.5x2x [](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-06/S06-E01-Tools-of-the-Trade.mp3) We talk about tools of the trade that we use in our day to day work life. ### Show Notes We talk about the following topics - Project Management Tools - Web Development Tools - Set Up Aliases for your terminal ([github gist](https://gist.github.com/CreateSean/057df35c49eba9e2a1401530f797d19a)) - Design Tools - Business Tools - Password Managers - Screen Recorders ### Show Links - [Basecamp](https://basecamp.com/) - [Trello](https://trello.com/) - [Jira](https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira) - [Wrike](https://www.wrike.com/) - [Monday](https://monday.com/) - [Airtable](https://airtable.com/) - [gQueues](https://www.gqueues.com/) - [Visual Studio Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/) - [Sequel Ace](https://sequel-ace.com/) - [Navicat](https://www.navicat.com/) - [Database Beaver](https://dbeaver.io/) - [Table Plus](https://tableplus.com/) - [cmder (terminal)](https://cmder.app/) - [iTerm](https://iterm2.com/) - [Github Desktop](https://desktop.github.com/) - [Source Tree](https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/) - [DDev](https://ddev.com/) - [Figma](https://www.figma.com) - [PhotoPea](https://www.photopea.com/) - [Gimp](https://www.gimp.org/) - [Invision App](https://www.invisionapp.com/) - [Affinity Photo, Designer, Publish](https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/) - [Hiveage](https://www.hiveage.com/) - [Timemator](https://timemator.com/) - [Harvest](https://www.getharvest.com/) - [Zoho](https://invoice.zoho.com/) - [Stripe](https://stripe.com/) - [One Password](https://1password.com/) - [Last Pass](https://www.lastpass.com/) - [Keepass X](https://www.keepassx.org/) - [Screenflow](https://www.telestream.net/screenflow/) - [Wonder Share Demo Creator](https://democreator.wondershare.com/) - [Neat](https://www.neat.com/) Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology. **\[00:00\]** **Amanda:** Welcome to the first episode of season six of the website 101 podcast. This is the podcast for people who want to learn more about building and managing websites. I am Amanda Lutz, hello, welcome. With me, as always, are my co-host. We have Sean, hi, Sean. **\[00:19\]** **Sean:** Hey Amanda. And Mike. Hey guys, good to be back. I'm so excited to be doing season six. How about you guys? **\[00:27\]** **Mike:** Yes, I'm very excited. Oh, looking forward to it. **\[00:30\]** **Sean:** Nice. So what are we talking about today? And it's just the three of us here. There's no guest for the inaugural episode of season six. But Sean, do you want to tell us what we're discussing today with each other? **\[00:43\]** **Mike:** Today, we're going to be talking about tools of the trade, the tools that we use in our day-to-day life, our work life. And if we have time, we might pull in some personal stuff as well. **\[00:56\]** **Sean:** All right. This is awesome. And we're going to talk about various categories of different tools you could use. Tools like software and apps and that kind of thing that help us get along in our job and in our personal lives, right? **\[01:11\]** **Mike:** Yes. And so our first topic to talk about is project management tools. So let's first give a definition. Your project management tool is things like listing tasks, signing items, bug tracking, client communication, checklists, things of that nature. Amanda, could you tell us what you typically use for project management? What your preferred one is? **\[01:40\]** **Amanda:** Oh, well, those are two very different things. What typically happens is whatever the client is already using and wants me to use. Design agencies will already have their whole system setup. worked with other contractors before they've they've I've worked with everything from base camp and Trello and Jira and even the last time I worked in an office they had this internal bug tracking system and whenever we would go out and and have like a liquid lunch we would put quips like whenever anybody said something stupid and so the goal during these liquid lunches was to be equipable so that the next time you're fixing bugs you could see just how stupid you **\[02:20\]** **Sean:** actually were. That's hilarious. Oh, that sounds fun. That sounds awesome. That's much more fun than project management tools usually are. Yes. Well, it was back in the day when you could still drink out work. I remember those, hey, wait, I worked from home now, so technically those days are today. These days are today, I like that. But not every day. Let me go to the fridge and I'll make that day today. Right. So, Sean, what kind Do you actually amend it before we move on when you're not being told what to use by a client? Do you have a preferred any kind of tools you like to use for a project management? **\[03:03\]** **Amanda:** It depends on the client and it depends on the project, how complicated it is, how often they like to talk, and even individual clients that I work with, they will even still have preferences. Some of them like to tell me what to do on Slack. some of them like to send emails. Some of them I can convince to use Trello because you can set up the cards and then within the cards you can do like the individual tasks. So it's I mean you got to be kind of light and easy and flowy and just go with it I find. Okay so Sean what kind of **\[03:37\]** **Sean:** project management tools do you tend to use on your client work? Okay so like Amanda I work with **\[03:44\]** **Mike:** agencies and a lot of the time I just worked with whatever they're using and I've ran the gamut. I've used almost every project management tool out there, things like Reich and Monday and a couple others that I can't remember. Monday was okay. Reich was, I hated it. I hated it with a passion but I had a long-term relationship with this agency and I just sucked that up and used it, hated it, hated it, hated it. I can't remember why, but I can't say hate enough. Now, however, so now I'm basically using only two different ones, Basecamp, which I'm not a fan of, but I don't hate it. I just don't like it. It is what it is. And then Trello, which I kind of like, I think it could be improved, but I haven't found something better that I like. So, Charles might go to if I have a client that doesn't already have a system and that's what I use. So, it's Conbon board, it's exactly what Amanda mentioned. **\[04:56\]** **Sean:** So, when you guys do use these tools, whatever it is, if your client is not dictating it to you, do you try to get your clients to use the one at the beginning of a project? Do you say, look, I use Basecamp. or I use Trello. So, hey, client, can you sign up for this so that we can do this? Do you do that kind of thing? Or, how does that go? **\[05:16\]** **Mike:** Yeah. **\[05:16\]** **Sean:** I'll try to. **\[05:18\]** **Mike:** Okay. With a couple of clients, I insisted that we needed project management because there was a lot of stuff going on and it was easy to lose track of stuff in my email. And personally, I get a little bit of anxiety if I have more than one or two unread in my email. So I like to just keep everything project management in Trello or Basecamp or whatever. **\[05:44\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I use a tool called AirTable for which we actually use to manage some of this broadcast, like upcoming episodes and that. It's like a spreadsheet combined with a database, I guess, for people who don't know. And I'm a big fan of that. I have had clients like I've told them, look, let's let's go through that and use use that to manage this project and, you know, with varying levels of success. But very often, I just use it for myself for managing my own side of the project, the work that I do. And the other tool I use frequently is GQs, which is a little-known task, Sean, as you mentioned earlier. It's like a task manager, I guess, task list thing that connects with all of Google's services so it connects to Google Calendar and stuff like that. And I really like the two of them as a combination. **\[06:35\]** **Mike:** Cool. Yeah, I also use jikus, but in a very limited fashion. Basically, I use it to schedule **\[06:43\]** **Amanda:** automatic reminders and stuff. Yeah. So here's my question. Would you ever pay for a project **\[06:52\]** **Mike:** management tool? I would pay if it was worth it if I saw the value in it, but currently, I don't have a need for it, or I haven't found one that I would be willing to pay for, which is why **\[07:04\]** **Sean:** I use Trello. The free board works for me. Yeah, I would. GQs, yeah, I pay, it's like $25 a year. I pay that happily because I really like it. I use the free version of AirTable because it's good enough for what I do. It has plenty of space and all that. I would, yeah, I'm the same. If I thought it was, you know, really valuable for my business, I probably would, but haven't really needed to, as yet. By the way, we should add, none of these products were mentioned, mentioning have sponsored this show. We have no affiliations with any of these products with any of the makers. Yeah. But yeah, we're not against it. Yeah, you want to, if you're a developer of one of these tools, feel free to reach out. We'll talk about it ad nauseam on the next one. There you go. We're very happy to take sponsorship. Yes. Okay, what are we moving on to next? I think next, what would be **\[07:55\]** **Amanda:** interesting is we should talk about what kind of tools we use for web development. I mean, we're all web developers. I'm sure we could do a whole episode about our local development environments and things that we use, but just quickly, high level, Mike, what do you use when you're **\[08:13\]** **Sean:** writing code? Well, I use what I guess is operating system too, because I think that's interesting. Oh, that's right. So I am the only Mac user here. I use a Mac computer and have for several years now used to be Windows, now a Mac. Not a fanboy, if you don't want to use a Mac, don't use a Mac, I really don't care. That's just what I like. In terms of web development, in terms of the coding side, I use what's, I guess, the industry standard visual studio code, which is a Microsoft product, speaking of Windows, and I think it's fantastic. They updated all the time with new features, which is really cool. **\[08:53\]** **Amanda:** But you guys Amanda visual I used to use I used Adam for a little while I used notepad++ but yes, I am I am a diehard visual studio code user now I tell my students to you know you don't have to use visual studio code But every so often when it's like hey look at this cool thing that I found it shortcuts It's extensions. It's plugins. It's you know all of all of the things that you can do with visual studio code **\[09:21\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I used to use notepad++ just like Amanda and I also was a big fan of sublime text editor for a long time. Yeah, that's what I came from. Four or five years ago, I switched to Visual Studio Code and haven't looked back. I just love it. It has the extensions are great. Like Mike said, it's updated regularly and the integrated terminal that you can set up with tabs and then I could talk for like an hour about everything that I like about Visual Studio Code. Sorry, yeah, get on it. If you haven't tried it, that's the one I would strongly recommend. Also, I'm on Windows, I forgot to mention that. **\[10:10\]** **Amanda:** Yes, I'm also Windows, but what I should have done when Mike asked me, what text editor I I used, I should have, like, nerdily pushed up my glasses and said, uh, Vi, thank you, indicating that I was on a Linux operating system. **\[10:24\]** **Mike:** Right. **\[10:25\]** **Amanda:** Ha-ha-ha. **\[10:27\]** **Mike:** While speaking of Linux, I do have a dual boot, so I occasionally switch into pop OS. **\[10:34\]** **Amanda:** Good Lord. Well, I have the WSL installed, so. **\[10:39\]** **Mike:** Ah, I don't use that on Windows. **\[10:41\]** **Sean:** I don't like it. All right, well, okay, what? nerds. Moving on, you guys are out nerding me here. I don't fit in here at all. Let's talk about database management stuff like that. I used to use something called SQL Pro and then it started to get buggy for some reason. Now I use a tool called SQL Ace, which is just this interface that fires up a database to see all the tables and all that kind thing, and you can connect remotely to server-based databases, that kind of thing. How about you guys, Sean, what's your database management tool? **\[11:23\]** **Mike:** I use NaviCat, so I was turned on to NaviCat about 10 years ago, and that's just what I use. It works great for me. Remote connecting to the server locally does everything I need. **\[11:38\]** **Amanda:** Nice, Amanda. I also use NaviCat, but I also have no problem just using like the PHP Myadmin that usually comes with shared hosting. It works just fine, and there have been a couple of times when I've been like dealing with databases that were so big or records and tables that were so long that I actually had to Google the terminal command to do a database dump from the MySQL database. **\[12:04\]** **Mike:** Actually, I had to do something similar, at least once, where I had to import a database, And I couldn't do it with a, I had to be done on the terminal. Speaking of terminal, oh, one thing I want to go back, NaviCut is a paid program. There are lots of free programs, such as table plus, I believe, is a popular one or a database beaver. I haven't used either of them, but they are free. So if you need a database thing, that's what I would go with. Terminal. Windows and you want more features on your terminal. Look at Commander, CMNDR, okay? You'll install it and it gives you tabs and color schemes and all kinds of really good stuff. I heard about Commander several years ago from a YouTube channel. Traverse media did a little intro on it And I've been using it ever since. So I'll link to that stuff in the show notes. **\[13:07\]** **Sean:** There's a version of that something similar for a Mac called I-Term, I-T-E-R-M. I think that's what it's called. And yeah, it sounds very similar. So that is pretty cool. **\[13:18\]** **Mike:** Amanda, what do you use for managing your Git repo and doing commits and things to do it on the terminal or using a GUI of some sort? **\[13:27\]** **Amanda:** I live in buy by my GitHub desktop. **\[13:30\]** **Mike:** OK. **\[13:31\]** **Amanda:** or a source tree, if it's a bit bucket instead. **\[13:35\]** **Mike:** I use source tree. **\[13:36\]** **Amanda:** Yeah. **\[13:37\]** **Sean:** I've never used the desktop GitHub desktop, but either of why I was thinking about that is you like it then, eh? **\[13:45\]** **Amanda:** I like it a lot. I have, I mean, even still Git is a little bit intimidating to me because more often than not, I'm working on projects by myself. And so you don't necessarily need like the repo in the collaboration and everything else. So then when I do get pulled into a project where I need to do that, it's like, obviously, I don't like not being good at things. So I don't want these team members to know that Amanda screwed up the Git command again. So I would rather just have the nice, clicky, gooey, done. **\[14:23\]** **Mike:** I do use the terminal for basic commands, but if I need to do anything more than cloning making a commit or you know simple stuff then I pull up the source tree and if I need to find a stash and apply it or cherry pick something from another branch yeah I'm similar **\[14:41\]** **Sean:** that I usually work on my own and I know like a handful of git commands and they seem to get me by so I just have been using those in the terminal and it's worked out so far but I should remember that if I ever get pulled in maybe I'll pull it into another project **\[14:55\]** **Mike:** with someone else maybe I'll fire that thing up I got a tip for you guys and for our listeners set up aliases for your terminal. And I have a whole bunch of aliases set up so I don't need to remember the whole command. And I have them on a bit bucket. It's like a snippet. So I'll share the snippet in the show notes and you can just follow the instructions and you'll have these new commands that you can just type and it'll do what you need to do. **\[15:23\]** **Amanda:** Yeah, it'll like shortcuts, right? But if I can't remember the commands, the official commands, where all of the Google documentation exists. How am I supposed to remember the clever commands that I set up in the moment and then I'm gonna forget a month later? **\[15:35\]** **Mike:** No, that's why I made it into like a gist so that I can reference it. And I do, I use a lot of these all the time. So if you wanna do git status to check what's checked in or not, I just type gst. So it saves me a bunch of keyboard things or git commit minus a, minus m, and then you put your message message my just enough of you and I do all of your commands verbally. **\[16:01\]** **Amanda:** Yeah, so that makes for a difficult podcast episode. **\[16:06\]** **Mike:** My point is instead of typing all of that out, I type three letters and my message. Boom. And there's a whole bunch of other commands that I'm not going to go into. I was just giving an example. **\[16:15\]** **Sean:** There was a show, I can't remember what it was, but someone was programming a phone in old school, like whatever phone, and they told someone, okay, I've got 9-1-1. I've got a speed dial for it. It's star five, too. **\[16:31\]** **Mike:** Oh, that's pretty good. Yeah, that's hilarious. **\[16:37\]** **Sean:** Okay, should we talk about local hosting and how we handle projects locally? **\[16:41\]** **Mike:** Mando? **\[16:42\]** **Sean:** Because we're all the same. Yeah, we are all the same. For example. **\[16:46\]** **Amanda:** And I think that maybe this would serve to go more in depth in a different podcast episode, talk about what we've used in the past and why we changed and etc but yeah I think we're just **\[16:56\]** **Mike:** we're all on D-Dev now. D-Dev for the win. D-Dev. I was on D-Dev a couple years ago but you guys came on board and it's now officially a craft thing so they said that's their recommended one so we're all on **\[17:11\]** **Amanda:** that. I agree. Amanda let's do another episode all about local hosting. Yeah Amanda here hi If you're enjoying the Website 101 podcast, we'd love it if you could give us a positive review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Reviews help listeners find out about us and allow us to keep doing the show. **\[17:33\]** **Sean:** Okay. What do you want to talk about next? **\[17:36\]** **Mike:** Well, Mike, you're the designer. Let's hear about design tools. **\[17:40\]** **Sean:** All right. Well, there's lots of options for design tools. Personally, I use Figma a lot, which is sort of a web page designing tool, I guess you call it. It's not quite as robust as something like Photoshop, but again, it's intended for web stuff that I was understanding. **\[17:58\]** **Amanda:** Not yet. It's recently been acquired by Adobe. We'll see what happens. **\[18:01\]** **Sean:** Oh, that's right. I forgot. Oh, yeah. You can get him embraced into the Adobe suite and I'll pay $500 bucks in one or something because currently I don't pay a cent. Yeah. Anyway, Figma so far is really great. I also, speaking of Photoshop, I used to be a Photoshop guy, and then again, the subscription model sort of chased me away. But there's a thing you can use online, a website called, I don't know if it's photopia or photopie, but it's photopie.com. I think that's the address. and it's a mimicked, like it's a mock Photoshop interface and it has exactly the same functionality and even the same keyboard shortcuts and it's brilliant and I use that a lot. **\[18:50\]** **Mike:** A similar tool which is installable on your computer would be GIMP but I haven't actually used it myself I'm just aware of it. **\[18:58\]** **Sean:** What do you use when you use design tools? Sean, you do a bit of a photographer on the side. **\[19:03\]** **Mike:** What do you use for design? Well, for design, mostly I work with designers or agencies, so they provide the design and I use whatever tool that they're using. Typically it's Figma these days, but I do work with an agency that uses Invision App, which is another similar thing. It predates Figma, but it's all online. I had the unfortunate experience of dealing with a design provided to me an illustrator, which not fun at all. Which do you prefer? Rike or Illustrator? Actually, it might be about equal. I also used to have a Photoshop subscription with Adobe and like Mike I don't like renting my software so I've got I bought licenses for Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. Coincidentally, today, as we're recording, Affinity released version 2.0 of their entire suite. It's on sale. If we get this out quick enough, go check it out. It's worth watching or using. **\[20:12\]** **Sean:** And, again, we get no kickback from that, unfortunately. **\[20:15\]** **Mike:** No, but if Affinity by Serif wants to sponsor us, they can. **\[20:23\]** **Sean:** Amanda, do you ever encounter design tools that you need to use through your work? **\[20:27\]** **Amanda:** Yeah. I'm not a designer. I don't create anything. And even just this week, with the Seneca classes that I teach, where I'm teaching them Figma. And one of them was like, oh my god, you know, because I'm always going on about how I only write code, and they're like, oh, Amanda, developer, why are you showing us this design tool? And it was literally because designers will give me the file. I'm not going to show you how to create anything with it, just to get stuff from it. I've been given Figma. I've been given Photoshop, I've been given illustrator, I've been given XD. One time, I've been given InVision. One time I think I was given a PDF, which was not fun at all. Because you can't extract anything from a PDF. Or try to figure out spacing, which was. Yeah. **\[21:18\]** **Sean:** Copying and pasting, you ever copied from a PDF and they pasted it and it's like, the text is half the width of what you've, there's like line breaks. Yeah, line breaks that are added where they shouldn't be. **\[21:30\]** **Mike:** Hidden characters and stuff that do things. **\[21:33\]** **Amanda:** Yeah, well it's, I even, even I've encountered that with Photoshop. So yeah, yeah, yeah, if it's not work around it. **\[21:41\]** **Sean:** Yeah, some of them are not designed for text. **\[21:44\]** **Amanda:** OK, I think what we should talk about is what we use for business tools. Like as individual contract developers, Like what are we using to send invoices to track our time, to write up Mike's beloved RFPs, everything? What are we using? They're not that beloved. Okay. Sorry, slash S, that was my sarcasm. **\[22:10\]** **Sean:** Right, got it. **\[22:12\]** **Mike:** Mike, how about you go first. Tell us about what you use for invoicing and time tracking. **\[22:17\]** **Sean:** Okay, so I, for my invoicing software, I use something called Hivege, which it's probably not that popular. Used to be called Kurd B. You can see why they changed their day. Anyway, it's your typical, you know, invoicing thing and whatever, that's, I don't have anything particularly. I've used it for a long time and it seems to work and that's what I use. As far as time tracking, I've started recently using something called TimeMater, M-A-T-E-O-R. Again, I don't know where these people come up with the names. The idea about that one, though, is I can tell it that whenever I start up this app, like, say, Visual Studio Code, and, say, Figma, and this term is in the title of one of the windows I have opened, something like that, any kind of combination like that, then start tracking for this client, start tracking this time. Oh, that's very time-y-all client. Yeah, so as soon as I start out my workflow, it already knows what I'm working on kind of thing. I'm testing it out so far, so good. And yeah, I like the automated time tracking thing where I don't have to remember to start and stop stuff, so. **\[23:32\]** **Mike:** So I'm curious, let's say you work on a project for 23 minutes. Does it record it as 23 minutes or does it round it up or round it down to say 15 or 30 or an hour or is this a setting that you can configure? **\[23:49\]** **Sean:** I have a configured to round up to the minute. So if it's a minute in some seconds, it'll round up one minute. **\[23:57\]** **Mike:** That's it. So if you're building your clients $100 an hour, and then you're... **\[24:02\]** **Sean:** Or $60 an hour, you're charging them per minute, a dollar a minute. No, no, no, I'm not saying I do that. At the end of the, when it's invoicing time, I look at my hours and I do some mental math at that point, to be honest with you, it's not like I have it telling me every single send I have to charge for. I don't do that. So my clients would not be too happy if I say, you know, you owe me another 33 cents. **\[24:27\]** **Amanda:** Hey, you know what? They might like it if you charge them per second instead of rounding up. **\[24:34\]** **Mike:** Could you imagine getting a list of tasks that you worked on as like, I worked on this one for three minutes and 45 seconds and this one for 12 minutes. I could not imagine. Yeah, I wound up **\[24:44\]** **Sean:** up the seconds to a minute and round up every minute to the nearest hour and then the nearest hour to a day. That's pretty much how I charge. End up building people hundreds **\[24:54\]** **Mike:** of dollars more per day. I answered your email, that's $500. One day, that's the dream. **\[25:02\]** **Sean:** That's right. Okay, Amanda, what have you got for business tools? **\[25:07\]** **Amanda:** So for time tracking and invoicing, I use this app called Harvest. It's at getharvest.com. I've been using it for a very long time and I pay for it every year because I like it and I've got so much data in it. With the free account, you can only have or with the free level, you can only have like five projects or something like that. I'm using a lot more than five at any given time. But so with this one app, I'm tracking my time. I can put it in different, I can create different tasks for each project. I can do reports for how long things are taking. I can put in some basic budgeting and it will like send me notifications when it's getting close to that. I can make invoices. I can do automated invoices. I can do deposits. I can, and then it's also what I've started using with it now. Recently is I can have it email the invoices automatically to the client with a PDF attached because it's got connection, connectivity with Stripe. So now that's email that goes to the clients also has a link so that you can, the client can just pay online through Stripe. After so many days, the money comes to me, chef's kiss, everything is wonderful and automated and just comes together. **\[26:38\]** **Sean:** Yes. I've got the Stripe hook up online too. It's pretty sweet when that happens. Despite the cut that Stripe takes on future, for the convenience sometimes you. **\[26:47\]** **Amanda:** It's okay. Oh, and then I'm still taking pictures with my banking app of checks when I come in. **\[26:53\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I do that too. So I'm using Zoho invoice which similar to what is it harvest has all of the features that Amanda mentioned including you know integration with Stripe and PayPal or any other payment gateway that you want blah blah blah. I was on a paid plan but they recently made the paid plan free. So I no longer pay and I have all of the old features that I needed to pay for. So I'm very happy about that, you know, emailing clients with the invoice. If they're late, I set up a payment reminder schedule. So after seven days, after 14 days, after 30 days, after 60 days, it just automatically goes. **\[27:50\]** **Amanda:** Okay, no, I thought it was like after seven days from sending. **\[27:53\]** **Sean:** Yeah, yeah. **\[27:54\]** **Mike:** No, no, it's overdue. Yeah, my bad. I heard wrong. No, no, no. They have 30 days to pay. And then if they're late, seven days, they get a notice. So I have two clients that always pay within 12 hours of getting that seven-day notice, only a couple of times. Only a couple of times that they paid before. They just wait for the second. Oh, that's like, I never mention it to them because I know it's coming, the regulars. And you know, I've had other clients where they're really late on payments and I like the automatic sending because it's not me, it's clearly a machine that's sending the email. And if it goes too long, I'm going to get on the phone and call them. But the first two or three, I don't have to do that, I just like, I let it go and the machine does it for me. **\[28:43\]** **Sean:** Yeah, that is convenient. The one that we use, that I use, a high-vage. My wife and I both use it. We both sort of work for the same company, but she does different work. And one of the things I like about it is you can, on a per invoice basis, you can change the, when it's due, basically. Yeah, like some mine, I usually say due on receipt or due within whatever. And I expect to get paid pretty soon. But for her, sometimes she works for clients where it's like 30 days or whatever. And you can change it on a per invoice basis, which is nice. I don't know how common that is in these tools, but. **\[29:17\]** **Mike:** Well, my tool, Zohorin Voice, does the same thing. So my default is set to net 30, but if I create... Sorry. Sorry, that's all. **\[29:27\]** **Amanda:** I'm like a 12 year old boy. My tool, well my tool. My tool's bigger. My tool's better. **\[29:34\]** **Sean:** Mine is bigger. Supplies this hasn't come up in the discussion yet until this point. The juvenile humor. We did well. **\[29:42\]** **Mike:** So, okay, the default setting on Soho invoice, I've got it set to 30 days, but I can override it. So when I get a new client, and I'm gonna start work with them, I need the initial deposit. It's what Mike does, do on receipt. And then I have recurring invoices for things like maintenance. Those are also do on receipt, because they're prepaid, you're paying ahead of time. **\[30:07\]** **Sean:** Okay, so, some of these categories that we're going through business tools and whatnot are gonna have a lot of overlap. And the next one I guess would as well. Password managers, I wanna talk about this because I think if three of us use different ones, I'll guess I'll start. I use one password, which is pretty popular, I guess. It's definitely not foolproof. It can be a little finicky and not the most user friendly thing, but anyway, I use it. What do you guys use, Amanda? **\[30:37\]** **Amanda:** We use last pass and we pay for a family account. and so then Andrew and I can share passwords between us and I've actually even had clients send me shared passwords through last pass. **\[30:49\]** **Sean:** Oh, cool, nice. Sean? **\[30:51\]** **Mike:** I use an open source program, keep pass X, and I don't like having some company having access to my passwords even though they're hashed and salted and all that stuff. So I just keep the database in Dropbox. I guess technically Dropbox has it, but they're not going to. They wouldn't know how the hash of the salt is set up or whatever. My wife doesn't, we don't share like Amanda does, but yeah, I've got all my stuff. And when I set it up, at that time, I don't believe there were password managers for Windows available. So I've been using key pass X for like 14 or 15 years, like forever. **\[31:31\]** **Sean:** Wow, cool. I don't think I've been using any password manager for that long before that. I was just having a little password formula that generated new passwords. **\[31:41\]** **Mike:** Well, before that, I had posted some on my computer. **\[31:44\]** **Sean:** Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. **\[31:45\]** **Amanda:** Passwords.txt. For every project, I make a password.txt file. **\[31:51\]** **Mike:** Mine is notes.txt, and it's got other info, but yeah, it has credentials that I need to access further, quaint, nice. I wanna bring up one that Mike has brought up, put on our notes here, ScreenFlow. What is ScreenFlow, and what do you use that for? **\[32:09\]** **Sean:** Yeah, so Screenflow is a Mac application and it's basically a tool for creating screencasts. At least that's what I use it for. It's like a video creation tool where you could get it to record your screen, watch your mouse move around, you can have your picture in a little circle in the corner or whatever you want. And I use it for creating screencasts for clients. A lot of the way that I generate documentation on how to manage the sites that I build for them is I record these little short videos where it says hey you want to add a new category do this and it's like a two-minute video of me doing it walking them through in a video format and I send it to them so I've been recording those videos in ScreenFlow for several years now. **\[32:54\]** **Mike:** it's pretty cool. Nice I used a different program which is not available anymore but I recently started at a YouTube channel. And I bought the new version of the program which was renamed for screen recordings. This is my YouTube channel. I do screen recordings there. So I do the same kind of thing that Mike does make videos for my clients on how to do stuff. And I use Wondershare **\[33:20\]** **Sean:** demo creator and it's a paid program. Yeah, Screenflow is also paid. Amanda, do you use any **\[33:27\]** **Amanda:** screen recordings? No, I think that I had to use one when lockdown first happened with COVID to do some stuff for Seneca but through Seneca I get like the whole Adobe Creative Suite and other things. So I remember using something but it must have been through that. **\[33:45\]** **Mike:** It was just one time. I don't remember it. Cool. Oh, I don't know what about Screenflow but a Wondershare Democrat it's like a screen recorder and video editor all in one and it's got **\[34:00\]** **Sean:** all kinds of little effects and stuff that you can use. Yeah yeah this one when I do the my little recordings that there's like a timeline at the bottom and I can cut things out. Yeah exactly. **\[34:10\]** **Mike:** Yeah yeah yeah okay dissolve things into each other and all that. Amanda yeah I see a tool here listed called Meet, but I don't know what that is. Can you tell us? **\[34:22\]** **Amanda:** I love Meet so much. It is also paid and it's kind of pricey, but I keep paying for it. It's an app and a website. And what I can do is with the app is I can take a picture of receipts, and it has OCR, that optical character recognition. So it helps me organize all of my receipts, and it does like reports with all of the totals and stuff so that at the end of the year I just need to like generate this report and send it to my accountant and so I can take pictures of receipts. I can forward email it has like a special email address for me so I can forward invoices that come to my inbox and I just need to set up a couple categories and and send it to my accountant. **\[35:09\]** **Mike:** So when you go to the when you go to these stores and they say do you want to get an email receipt you you can just type in that special one and they don't get your personal email. **\[35:16\]** **Amanda:** You know what? I've never even thought of that because I don't off the top of my head. I don't know what the special email is. It's just in my, it's in my, my when, my when the contact list here on this machine. And that's it. **\[35:29\]** **Mike:** I always say no, because I know that they're just gonna add me to their mailing list and I don't want to be on that list. Yeah. **\[35:35\]** **Sean:** Amanda, I have a question for you. Yeah. Have you been using neat long enough that you remember the physical scanning bar that they used to have? That's when I used it. **\[35:46\]** **Amanda:** No, I've heard about it, yeah. Yeah. **\[35:50\]** **Sean:** Back in the day they used to, this was before, I guess it was before, maybe before smartphones, cause it wouldn't make much sense when you could take a picture easily. They had a bar that was like 10 inches long, and it was basically a portable scanner, and you fed the receipt into it, and it sort of went, and like eight the receipt, and it's like appears on your computer, you plug it into your computer or something. Anyway, back when I used Neat, I think it was, yeah, that was a Neat product by then. **\[36:19\]** **Amanda:** Yeah, I think that I've seen it as an option that you could buy it, or they were like talking about how far they've advanced or something like that. Yeah, yeah. **\[36:29\]** **Sean:** It makes no sense now, because it's just take a picture of the thing, and that's much, much better and faster and easier and everything else, yeah. **\[36:35\]** **Mike:** Abanda, you're all right. It is an expensive app. I just Googled it now. $200 bucks a year. Presumably US dollars. **\[36:42\]** **Amanda:** I didn't think it was that much. Maybe because I've had it for a while. Maybe I've got like a grandfathered in. But it might be on a legacy plan. Maybe. But it's thank you for airing my personal business everywhere, Sean. But it's a... I'm gonna be putting the links in the show in I don't know what's anyways, Amanda's got money. No, it's a, and the thing is, I procrastinated things I don't want to do, and taxes is definitely one of them, and it drives Andrew crazy, now that we file together, and even though it's okay for his taxes to come in a bit later at the contractor and the work for yourself cut off time, it actually is like, it has negative effects on our household when I put it off. So, having anything that's going to help me get that done on time, I think is worth. **\[37:38\]** **Sean:** it. Sure. For our piece of mind, yeah. That's what this list is all about is being more productive **\[37:44\]** **Mike:** and stuff, right? Yeah. So, we've been rambling on for a long time here and we've talked about several different tools that we use. There's lots more that we could talk about. We'll do another episode, but if there's tools that you would like us to talk about or you think that we should know about, please email us with our contact form and we'll do a second episode sometime in the future. **\[38:09\]** **Sean:** Yeah. Website101podcast.com slash contact. **\[38:12\]** **Mike:** Right. Link will be in the show notes. Thank you for listening. Bye everybody. Bye everybody. **\[38:20\]** **Sean:** Hey, thanks for listening today. This is Mike Mella. find me online at BeLikeWater.ca or on socials at Mike Mellon. **\[38:32\]** **Mike:** Posted in part today by me, Sean Smith, you can find me at my website caffeinecreations.ca or on LinkedIn at caffeinecreations. **\[38:43\]** **Amanda:** One third of the website 101 podcast talent is provided by me, Amanda Loots. You can find me online at my website, AmandaLoots.com. I also hang out on Twitter sometimes, you can find me at Amanda Loots Tio. **\[38:57\]** **Mike:** Thank you for listening to their website 101 Podcasts. **\[39:04\]** **Amanda:** Wait, hold on. I think you should do that again. This is what we've talked about. This is what we use. I think then we open it up and it's like, hey, listener, what do you use? Okay. **\[39:15\]** **Mike:** Yeah. I don't remember what I said. **\[39:17\]** **Amanda:** Sorry, neither do I. Try it again. **\[39:20\]** **Sean:** It was good. **\[39:21\]** **Amanda:** Improvise. **\[39:22\]** **Sean:** Be good again. Okay. Okay. **\[39:25\]** **Mike:** How hard could that be? **\[39:28\]** **Amanda:** Lightning strikes twice all the time. **\[39:31\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I'm not good to begin normally, so I mean, that was Lightning. Close Transcript Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact). [![Listen on Google Play Music](/assets/images/google_podcasts_badge@2x.png)](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWJzaXRlMTAxcG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC5yc3M%3D)[![itunes badge](/assets/images/itunes-badge.png)](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/website-101-podcast/id1449510012)[![itunes badge](/assets/images/spotify-logo.png)](https://open.spotify.com/show/3rmSM1R9t6q1U8DmYWJRSO?si=NrYPMgDaRV6Dd56PjEaPow)### Season 06 - 1 [ Tools of the Trade](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-1/tools-of-the-trade/) - 2 [ Website Contract Advice From an Actual Lawyer](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-2/website-contract-advice-from-an-actual-lawyer/) - 3 [ Choosing a CMS](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-3/choosing-a-cms/) - 4 [ Tips for Website Maintenance](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-4/tips-for-website-maintenance/) - 5 [ Working with Conflicting Personalities](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-5/working-with-conflicting-personalities/) - 6 [ Building an Online Course with Jane Atkinson](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-6/building-an-online-course-with-jane-atkinson/) - 7 [ PodCamp Toronto 2023 Recap](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-7/podcamp-toronto-2023-recap/) - 8 [ The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly about RFPs](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-8/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-about-rfps/) - 9 [ Here's how to work from paradise](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-9/heres-how-to-work-from-paradise/) - 10 [ Rebroadcast: Pimp Your Typography](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-10/rebroadcast-pimp-your-typography/) - 11 [ Internet Privacy with Michael Geist](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-11/internet-privacy/) - 12 [ Lessons from a plugin developer with Ben Croker](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-12/lessons-from-a-plugin-developer-with-ben-croker/) - 13 [ Stand Out on Social Media with Jessica Perreault](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-13/social-media-with-jessica-perreault/) ### All Seasons - [Season 01](https://website101podcast.com/season/01/) - [Season 02](https://website101podcast.com/season/02/) - [Season 03](https://website101podcast.com/season/03/) - [Season 04](https://website101podcast.com/season/04/) - [Season 05](https://website101podcast.com/season/05/) - [Season 06](https://website101podcast.com/season/06/) - [Season 07](https://website101podcast.com/season/07/) - [Season 08](https://website101podcast.com/season/08/) - [Season 09](https://website101podcast.com/season/09/) <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-END\]\]>