The Five Most Influential Home Business Bloggers

Martin Neumann who runs the always readable Home Office Voice blog has picked his five most influential home business bloggers. Regular Shedworking readers will be very familiar with at least three of his selection and maybe indeed all five but they're certainly all very good and I think it's worth repeating his list in full:
1. Naomi Dunford from IttyBiz (whose posts run from a riff on Shakespeare's seven ages of man to advice on 'What to do when you're scared shitless')
2. Wendy Piersall from Sparkplugging (which you may have come across in its former incarnation as eMoms at Home)
3. Jeff Zbar from ChiefHomeOfficer.com (he's on the road again, as you know)
4. Grant Griffiths from Home Office Warrior (maybe the most prolific Tweeter in town)
5. Emma Jones from Enterprise Nation (whose Spare Room Start Up book is topping the Amazon charts)

Build a den in Eden

The marvellous Eden Project is running its marvellous den building programme again this year (pictured above is an example from last year's) starting today when the project's Den Challenge Team and local scout and guide groups will build the biggest den possible in just two hours using old sails, tyre inner tubes, bamboo, sheets, poles, rope, rugs, clothes horses and scraps of fabric and washing lines . Look out for a timelapse of the whole thing on the site soon. The den building runs until September 4 and is a major part of Eden's Mud Between Your Toes programme which aims to get children playing outside. Eden launched the Den Challenge last year, encouraging families to team up and build their fantasy shelters and more than 35,000 took part.
Thanks to Emma 'Timelapse' Townshend for the alert

The Shedworker's Bookshelf - Cabin Fever by Marie-France Boyer

Subtitled Sheds And Shelters, Huts and Hidewaways, this is one of the nicest coffee table books (130 colour illustrations in 110 pages) about shedlike atmospheres which includes some intelligent (if sometimes verging on the purplish side of prose) commentary inside, as befits the Paris editor of World of Interiors. The book is broken down into themed chapters (On the farm, No place like home, Deep in the woods, By the water, Garden refuge, Nature calls) including Cabins that work including a photo of Virginia Woolf's wooden hut at Rodmell, Sussex, which I've not seen anywhere else. One to savour with a glass of red wine and your feet up on a Friday night. Copies available via Abebooks from around £6.

Around the shedworld

Emma Townshend enjoys a rather special pool pavilion...Chief Home Officer is now very much on the Home Office Highway (pictured above)... Shedworld is on the hunt for a shed full of insects... The Daily Telegraph reports on what looks increasingly like a credit crunch in the beach hut market... The New York Times takes an intelligent and detailed look at the MOMA prefab exhibition which includes Wes Jones' Primitive Hut (below)The Birmingham Mail suggests you rush out and buy a garden office right now... Gardener's World blogger James Alexander-Sinclair picks out his favourite gardening-related blogs including Shedworking... Friend of Shedworking Chief Home Officer interviews Friend of Shedworking Neal Zimmerman as a home office pioneer... Kits and Mortar is getting excited about the prospect of hemp and lime infill...Weburbanist picks seven tip top beach houses including this stone shedworking construct at Castel Meur... please help to support Shedworking - which is closing in on its 1,000th subscriber - by clicking on the button below and making a small pledge

Broadband: the homeworker's dilemma

Following today's earlier post, Shedworking reader Martin Doyle (see his guide to making yours a solar powered shed here) has written in with his - unhappy - experiences of broadband as a homeworker:

One thing about working from home/shed that people might not be aware of is the 'need' to tell your broadband supplier that you are using the connection to do real work.

I was caught out last year - I have a home phone/broadband package deal with Virgin (formerly Telewest), plus a dedicated business phone line. I got one of the regular 'we're just reviewing your account' calls on the business line and the guy was checking all was OK and asked me if I used the internet. Yes, I said - I have broadband with my home phone and use that connection - "Oh dear" he said, "that puts me in a difficult position - you are not allowed to use the home broadband for business use, except for checking the odd email perhaps, but if you work from home most of the time, you are supposed to have business broadband".

They put me into a corner and in a nice way forced me to have business broadband, otherwise with the knowledge that I was using a domestic connection for business use, may be forced to terminate my contract for mis-use.The moral of the tale is either get a business broadband line (you get better response times to problems) or make sure you never tell anyone from your broadband provider that it's being used for business!

The other big issue I had was that they charged me £60 to install the business broadband, despite me insisting they would use the existing connection - I had two visits from engineers who looked at the connection and agreed that nothing needed doing - all the changes were 'virtual' ones.

Have other readers had similar experiences? Please do comment below.

Shedworkers beat the credit crunch

According to Broadband comparison site Top 10 Broadband, UK homeworkers who use broadband (that's quite a lot of us) will be pleased to hear that Broadband is the only household utility bill to buck the trend of rising household bills."Broadband bills have plummeted by over 60% in the past 18 months while gas and electricity have risen by 15% and are set to rise further by the end of the year” said spokesperson for Top 10 Broadband Jessica McArdle. She points out that if you signed an 18 month contract in January 2007, the average deal would have cost £13.73 a month but if you were to switch from this package now you would be looking at offers starting at just £3.25 a month. She continues:

“As well as cheap home broadband, another alternative and potential cost saving for some households is mobile broadband which despite being more expensive per Gb of download, may work out cheaper than home broadband as it removes the need to have BT line rental at home. Starting at just £10 a month it ticks all the boxes during this credit crunch. The saving of £131 a year in landline charges makes this a particularly enticing prospect as belts tighten. Mobile broadband was once considered a luxury to supplement one’s broadband use outside of the house. However, like home broadband, mobile broadband prices have dropped dramatically in 2008, its speeds have risen and its download allowances have become more encompassing."

San Sharma has a good piece on this subject at Enterprise Nation.

Prone shedworking

If you work from home, chances are you sit in a chair for a large part of the day. But it doesn't have to be this way. Here is the Lazy Geek's Cushion, an adjustable floor cushion from Geekstuff4U with five level settings. Look how happy she looks. That could be you.