I’ve been a big fan of Google Voice since… Well, since before it was even Google Voice.

In fact, I’ve been using it since it was first launched as GrandCentral.

If you’re not familiar with Google Voice, it simply gives you a (new) phone number (for free), and let’s you forward it to another phone (or, phones).

Why is that so cool?

Here’s where the magic begins… You can have a separate number for your business, for example, and have it ring both your home and cell numbers. If nobody answers either, the caller will go to a separate (Google Voice) voicemail, which you can customize for your business.

And I’m just beginning to scratch the surface. You can set Google Voice to not ring certain phones at certain times, have it screen your calls… Oh, and you can have it email you a transcript of missed calls.

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When does “a penny saved” become “a buck & a half lost?”

I was scanning some local classifieds the other day, and came across an ad from someone looking for some pretty solid web development skills for a “simple project.”

The ad clearly stated that he would pay exactly $10/hr., because everyone who works for him “makes $10/hr. NO EXCEPTIONS!”

Seeing that made me chuckle, and recall a story from a few years ago, when someone asked me to do a “simple project” for $10/hr.

I (naturally) declined, thinking to myself that was less than my Dad paid me to mow the lawn when I was a kid, and that was longer ago than I’d care to remember.

Some time later, I ran into the guy again, and asked him how it worked-out. He said, “Well, it doesn’t look as good as your samples, and there are some bugs, but at least I didn’t have to pay a king’s ransom.”

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The Google Enterprise blog just announced some new ways to share your docs in Google Apps, which provide for more flexibility.

With more and more client companies using Google Docs sharing to collaborate, this more granular control should come in handy.

A lot of the sites I’ve built for clients are based on WordPress, which in my opinion, is one of the better content management platforms available.

Nearly 220 contributors worked for more than six months to ready this latest major milestone, and it’s got plenty of good stuff to make the upgrade worthwhile.

Not familiar with WordPress? Well, odds are that you’re familiar with some of the sites that use it, such as CNN, Yahoo, Martha Stewart, Forbes, Network Solutions, and more.

Nearly every WordPress site I’ve developed and deployed for clients has included custom themes and plugins that made me a little nervous about using the “upgrade automatically” feature in WordPress.

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