The Irish government spends lots of money trying to support people who want to start their own business. For example, there are enterprise boards that run subsidised courses, organise networking events and offer financial and mentoring assistance etc. Even before I started freelancing, I was used to seeing adverts for “start your own business” talks and small business networking groups. Such resources are extremely valuable and most welcome, but if the government is so keen on fostering start-ups, why does the Irish tax system make self-employed people pay considerably more tax than a PAYE worker with equivalent income?

When I first looked into doing some freelance web development work, I rang Revenue to find out what the tax implications would be for a PAYE worker earning some self-employed income. It would be no big deal, I was told. I would just have to make a tax return each October, and pay the tax on my self-employed income. The lady I spoke with kept stating that Revenue were really only concerned with what my overall income was, rather than how I earned it. That made sense to me and all seemed right with the world.

However, Revenue does care about how you earn your money. If you have a normal PAYE job and earn some self employed income, you are treated much the same as a standard PAYE employee. However, once you leave the safer, more predictable world of PAYE employment behind, and fully commit to running your own business, you lose your PAYE tax credit. Single people in Ireland are currently entitled to a personal tax credit of 1760 euro, but PAYE workers get an additional credit of 1760 euro. This means that while a lowly paid PAYE worker earning 17,600 euro per annum gets off tax free, a sole trader with the same income (assuming no expenses) has to pay 1,760 tax.

It is not all bad news for sole traders. Unlike PAYE workers, they only have to pay tax once a year, and new businesses do not have to settle up until year 2. You can also claim some tax relief on business related expenses. However, these minor perks are not any justification for why PAYE workers are treated far more favourably than sole traders by the Irish tax system. I’m not arguing for tax breaks for the self-employed; merely for equal treatment. Given the increased time and effort sole traders must put into managing their tax affairs alone, surely that’s not too much to ask. Such an initiative would be of significant help to the many start-ups that struggle with cash flow problems. Last year’s budget made things more unfair by increasing the PAYE credit far more than the personal tax credit. With the tightening of belts this year and far bigger fish to fry, I doubt that the Minister for Finance, Brian Cowen, will remedy this in December. I’ll just be keeping my fingers crossed that it won’t get any worse.

I have not bought much furniture for my apartment yet. I am still recovering from the trauma of searching Dublin furniture shops for the bare essentials! However, I have got my priorities right. While I don’t have a dining table, I have sorted out a home for our computer book collection. I parted with about half of my collection, much of which was obsolete, when I moved out. I thought I had kicked the habit, but in recent months I’ve been buying the odd computer book again. As a freelancer, I have to keep up on industry trends after all, right?

Finding somewhere to store our library was not as easy as I thought. I turned the larger bedroom into a home office, but the proper office desks occupy a fair bit of space. If I put tall bookcases along the opposite wall, it would take away the feeling of space in the room. So, I looked for low level storage, but apart from a contender in habitat, drew a blank.

Then I came across shopdekko.com, a furniture store in Northern Ireland that delivers small orders over £20 free of charge to Ireland and the UK. They stock a range of children’s furniture called circus that includes individual colourful cubes useful for storing all sorts of things, including computer books. I was a bit wary at first. While I have embraced online shopping, I had never bought furniture online. There was not a proper picture of the cubes on the Dekko site either, more of an artist’s impression, so it was hard to judge colours. The fact that the cubes were self-assembly put me off further, as we can’t do DIY! But at €44 a go, it was worth a shot.

Then I noticed that the cubes were not included in the free delivery offer. Delivery was working out at €60, more than the cost of a cube. I e-mailed Dekko to check the cost, and to see what quantity I would need to order to make the delivery more reasonable. I was pleasantly surprised when they wrote back and said that the cubes were small enough to be included in the free delivery offer and they would update their site - impressive! So, I ordered a pink cube, and we (well, mainly Alan!) put it together easily enough. It looked fab, so when other colours were back in stock, I ordered some more. I now have 4 altogether, which is just enough storage space for our current computer book collection.

Unfortunately, the last cube I ordered had minor flaws. Nothing too major, but the imperfections would take away from the overall look. I contacted Dekko to find out if it would be possible to get a replacement one instead, and they asked for photos showing the problems. They sent a new perfect cube out the following week. It seems I can hang on to the flawed cube too, which I certainly did not expect. I’m not sure why that happened in my case, but I think the relatively low cost of the item and my distance from the store were factors. It is refreshing to find a furniture company offering such good customer service. Many shops are fine to deal with until there is a fault with something, and then a long, complicated process ensues.

I would never buy a major furniture item online without seeing it in a shop first, but I’m very glad I took a chance on this. I’m thrilled with my funky, colourful cubes. At this rate, I may end up with a whole wall full of them!

I was at the opening day of the 3 day Mashup Camp event at the Guinness Storehouse yesterday. It was a very late decision to go, because I was late finding out about it and we were only confident of being able to attend for one day. Somehow, I managed to sacrifice my precious Saturday morning lie in and make it there almost on time!

Mashups are basically about taking data from 2 or more different sources, and making something new from it. Similarly to how you can mash 2 songs together and come up with a surprising result, lots of people take information available from multiple websites and make something interesting. There are lots of great examples at Programmable Web. I have never made a mashup myself, but I think it’s a cool idea and it was always something I meant to find out more about when I had time. So it was a good opportunity to get up to speed yesterday.

IBM spoke about their QED Wiki application and other software that facilitates non-programmers in making business mashups. You can download the IBM mashup starter kit with all the software. Martha Rotter from Microsoft spoke about Popfly which is aimed at the social end of the spectrum. You can easily display your Flickr photos, Twitter updates etc in novel ways and then easily share that info with other Popflyers or on Facebook etc. I find the mashups in between the hardcore business and social extremes to be most interesting - ones that have interest to consumers, but have a purpose beyond eye candy. For example, I love JustRoutes, which maps public transport routes for Dublin. Unfortunately, I missed the talk on OpenKapow, but I’ll defnitely be checking that out. While more and more sites are developing APIs, screen scraping is still the only way to get data from so many more. Scraping can be a major pain, and OpenKapow makes that much easier - good stuff!

The key point I learned from Mashup Camp was that there are lots of free user-friendly tools around now for making mashups quickly and easily. From the little I knew about Mashups before, I thought that it would take specialist knowledge, and often substantial time, to get a worthwhile mashup up and running. The opposite is true. I heard the term “situational apps” again and again yesterday. Whenever a situation arises where it would be helpful to have certain information to hand that is not currently available from one source, you can knock up a mashup in a matter of hours to meet this need. The only time consuming bit is finding the data that meets your need. Once you have the information in a suitable format, assembling a mashup takes minutes.

There are general and business mashup contests on as part of Mashup Camp. Before I went, I never considered entering as it’s an area I knew next to nothing about. But I left thinking that if only I had a decent idea for a mashup, I would give it a lash. Far from being sole the preserve of developers, mashups are open to anyone with an idea.

When I took a break from blogging last New Year’s Eve, I did not think I would be gone this long. But you never really know how things will turn out. I have wanted to start blogging again so many times lately, but something kept holding me back. If I was not too busy with household stuff or work, I would just sit here not knowing what to write. After so long away, it would need to be something ground breaking. Or, I would at least have to be sure that I would stick at blogging a while to justify breaking my silence. Oh, and I would need a new streamlined blog design too. Even I’m getting tired of that pink flower…

To hell with all of that for now. If I keep thinking about all that stuff, I will never blog again! The irony is that I have had far more to blog about in the last year than I ever had before. Mostly fairly mundane stuff to do with the longest apartment renovation in history, but outsiders may well have found parts of the saga quite amusing. Plus, it may have been better all round if I had ranted here occasionally instead of constantly moaning about it all to my poor family! On the other hand, I may well have been sued after telling tales about the countless tradesmen and home furnishing outfits that shafted me, so maybe my blogging break was for the best.

But all’s well that ends well. I finally moved into my apartment in mid June, and apart from the occasional mishap such as a leaky water pump flooding brand new carpet, everything has gone swimmingly. I have already been freelancing as a web developer for a year now too. I never saw myself running my own business, but touch wood, it is going really well and it’s easily the best job I have ever had. I work from home along with my boyfriend, coding websites. So, I have been setting up home and a business simultaneously, and we are still having fun balancing the two!

These major changes are why I’ve given my blog a new name, “Homespun”. I only picked the name “wysiwyg” initially because I thought my blog was going to be technical, but it descended into personal waffle rather quickly! My life is now completely different from when I used to blog before. I’ve gone from living at home trekking in on the 39 bus to work in the city every day, to working for myself from my own home. While my blog will still be pretty light and personal, I’m now writing from a different viewpoint.

I was going to just start a completely new (anonymous!) blog instead, but I’d probably never get around to actually doing that. I’m not sure how long I will be back blogging, or how often I’ll post. I was never very good at blogging regularly, even when I had far less to do! I have not even had time in the last year to read other blogs. I’d like to start doing that again too. If I read other ones, I might remember how to write one. Here’s hoping some of my old favourites are still on the go. I’m sure there are some new kids on the blogosphere well worth checking out as well.

It’s good to be back, even if I lost this post when I finally clicked save and had to start all over again! Damn Gmail for getting me so used to automatic saving. Poor Wordpress - after a year hibernating, it probably did not know what had hit it.