Recent posts about Productivity
What we’re thinking about here at Raised Eyebrow these days. You can subscribe to our blog by RSS, or sign up for email updates.
-
Ultra productivity and The Micro-sprint
January, 27 2014 Comments10 months ago my wife had a baby. Everything changed as you can imagine. Now I have precious little time for doing those things I took for granted a year ago, like a little home coding, or playing with XBMC, or doing whatever I like on a Tuesday evening at home, while sipping a brew and lounging on the sofa after dinner!
I've spent the last few months working at becoming ultra productive both at home and at work to help me get stuff done while also having more time with my family. At Raised Eyebrow we adopt some agile processes and work in Sprints. We define a bunch of tasks that need to get done and sprint on them over the course of a week or two weeks. They have proven to be very productive.
-
Why we created a new Drupal distribution
April, 4 2012 CommentsSince we pushed the DataPublic distribution to Drupal.org a few weeks ago, a number people have asked the question, "Why did you not use the OpenPublic Drupal distribution as a base?".
There are many reasons we followed the path that we did. I hope to outline a few of them here:
-
Prevent client frustration by reducing downtime
September, 26 2011 CommentsWe've all been there, the phone rings and suddenly it's panic stations. A client site is down, they're panicing and are very upset, and we have to drop everything to find out what's happening. This doesn't happen often, but when it does it puts the client and the whole dev team in a spin. It certainly not predictable, it's somewhat preventable, and it's completely frustrating.
-
Using Droptor to better serve our Drupal clients
May, 10 2011 CommentsWe work hard to streamline our processes here at Raised Eyebrow. We've come a long way since I was the sole developer and using FTP to install Drupal 4.x sites. One thing that's always been difficult to manage is ensuring that all of our Drupal sites have the most recent security updates installed. Given that fact that last year alone we launched over 30 websites and so far this year we've had 20 launches, keeping track of which sites need updates can quickly become difficult to manage. I recently posted a question to the Drupal groups site in a effort to garner some advice from the wider Drupal community on how best to keep track of what's happening with security releases on all of these websites. I received some great responses and one in particular which pointed me to the Droptor service.
-
Password Overload and CRMs
June, 4 2010 CommentsWhen I used a PC, I found this utility that I used to keep track of my passwords. Roboform
is this happy will green dude who sits in your utility tray and keeps a list of all of your login accounts, their URLs, usernames, passwords and notes. Launching an account is as easy as clicking on Roboform and selecting the account you'd like to launch and voila the site launches and Roboform fills your username and password and automatically logs you in. Roboform works with a master password, so when you login to your computer to launch Roboform you need to enter a master password. You can set how often you want to be prompted for the password. -
Inexpensive Image Editing Tools: Format your photos on a budget
May, 18 2010 CommentsWe're often asked for recommendations on image editing software that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Photoshop is fantastic, but the price tag is steep, and in fact, its strengths can also be weaknesses in that it's actually such a powerful program that it can overwhelm the novice or intermediate user.
So, where do you turn if your needs are relatively straightforward and your budget is limited? I would recommend one of the following tools:
-
DrupalCon Sessions to help you manage your business
February, 26 2010 CommentsDrupalCon San Francisco 2010 is just around the corner and Raised Eyebrow hopes to "own the podium", sorry I couldn't resist. Chris and I have been to 2 Drupalcon's so far in our Drupal lifetime, and have decided it is time to give something back. We've come up with 2 Session Proposals that are overviews about how we used Drupal to create two killer applications for managing a small Web Business.
One stores all kinds of client information; FTP connection info., Drupal logins, client contact info., newsletter provider and vendor info. The other is an online training manual for our clients, enabling us to train them remotely, give them access to it wherever they can find a browser and reduces the need to print large binders that end up getting lost or in the landfill/recycling.
So if you're interested in hearing more about these the please go cast your vote by following the links below:
-
Deaths Due to Reading Email while Crossing the Street are on the Rise
June, 12 2009 CommentsI'm walking down the stairs, leaving our office at Tides Renewal Centre and I'm behind this other dude in a suit and we are both shuffling along because we are checking our Blackberries while walking downstairs. This strikes me as stupid, but forms the basis of a polite exchange of Crackberry jokes.
-
Our Theme Toolkit
March, 5 2009 CommentsSo we (Christopher and I) are at DrupalCon, and one of the questions to the floor at The Themer's Toolkit was "What theme toolkit do you use?". I thought I'd give a quick overview of our toolkit:
Theme
We've been using a custom three column layout that Christopher developed way back when, but recently we've been tweaking it considerably, to include new features such as video support, stylesheet switching, custom search form and IE support. It's now similar to Zen in many ways and provides context/content specific classes and ids for ease of styling. We have plans for the future to create a more flexible theme based on CSS frameworks.
