Raised Eyebrow Blog

DrupalCon 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:

Manage your Web Studio using Drupal
Using Drupal to train clients on how to use Drupal

The closing date for voting for Voting is March 1st, so get voting. See you in San Fran.

I’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.

Spilling out onto sun drenched Hastings Street, I wonder what will become of us? Like lemmings, we march forward into the centre of a hornets’ nest–the downtown east side on a hot Thursday. How many obstacles will we encounter as we type and walk? I squint and strain to the read the tiny print on my Blackberry’s browser while walking under Woodward’s scaffolding, oblivious to cement being poured above. I stop and open a text message—poised in the middle of an active construction site–to read the message my sweetie has no doubt composed on his iPhone while driving 110 kilometres per hour on the highway.

I flip back to my browser window and type “ban reading email while crossing the street.”

If you want to cross a street in New York City or Buffalo, a New York state senator says, you should be fined $100 if you do so while in a state of “iPod oblivion.” (A Ban on iPods While Crossing)

I’m fascinated by regulations against Darwinian self-elimination.  Helmet laws, seatbelt laws, no talking on cell phone laws—all these regulations enacted to prevent us from doing something stupid.  Or hurting other people while doing stupid things.

Part of me wonders whether these laws are just the result of poor manners?  We’ve developed these technologies and adopted them like beloved children, adored with a sudden fierceness.  We haven’t had much time to establish etiquette for their use.  Our passion interferes with our judgement.  Wouldn’t it be polite if people put their toys away and walked smiling down the street, tipping their hats to each other and marveling about the lovely June weather instead?

An old colleague of mine once took me aside and pleaded,  “It’s imperative that you share your ideas about what is appropriate use of the Blackberry with your co-workers.  We can’t have people checking their emails absentmindedly while we are in meetings.”  Where is our iPhone Miss Manners?  Who will save us from being decapitated while walking down the street or giving all our friends the impression we aren’t interested in what they have to say because we are texting instead of listening?

Sent from my BlackBerry device on the Rogers Wireless Network

So 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.

Install Profile

We have our own custom install profile that configures things like TinyMCE and CCK settings as well as setting up an admin user etc.

Coding tools

We are primarily a Mac/Adobe shop, so we have been using Dreamweaver up to now, however we sometimes use TextMate for new projects or projects that don’t require a check-in/check-out capability. With the prospect of version control tools coming in the future we will be reviewing and reassessing. I know there are some hardcode VIM and Emacs users out there, we promise we’ll consider both :)

Version Control

Historically we have been a single developer shop with no need for a version control system as most sites were developed and then rolled out without need to many updates. However with the addition of more custom modules, working on much larger sites and the expansion of our team we now feel it necessary to implement some sort of version control system. Having seen some of these in action at DrupalCon, we will be working to have something running in a few months.

Modules

We use the standard modules such as CCK, Views etc. but also have the following custom modules:

Mobile Detection Module

I’ve recently finished a rough beta version of a mobile redirection module which uses this code to detect the user agent and then redirects to a specified URL. In most case we use a sub-domain folder like /sites/m.example.com and configure the settings.php to use a separate theme. We’ll release this at some point also when it meets drupal’s code and module development standards, not that it doesn’t already but we need to make it less site specific.

Block Class extension

I wrote an extension to the block class module that allows the user to choose from a specified list of block class options, rather than typing one in.

Node title length

In some cases, to stop the design from breaking, we need to ensure that the node title lengths are restricted to a certain maximum. This module allows you to choose the content types to apply the restriction to and does the necessary validation.

CSS Image Replacement

Chris wrote a totally awesome tool that we then roughly ported to a module that uses CSS to do image replacement. For now that’s all I can say, we’ll be working on releasing it in the wild at some point but it rocks and relies on GD libraries and CSS definitions to create images to replace text.

Advanced Menus

Chris built this module to allow us to place any of the available drupal menus in a block and position this anywhere on the site.

We’re constantly working to improve on our workflow, and having recently become a 2 person development team, soon to be 3, we are conscious that improvements need to be made in preparation for future growth. If you have any tips of suggestions for a team the size of ours I’d love to hear them.

I’m the project manager at Raised Eyebrow so it’s part of my job to keep our projects organized. Organizing a team of people, multiple project schedules, budgets and clients probably seems like a daunting task. I’m hoping that through this blog, I’ll be able to share with you some of my organizational tricks but today I want to tell you about My Rainbow Inbox and how I love to colour code things.

Over the years I have developed my own formula for colour coding and I’ve found it especially helpful to colour code my inbox. My inbox is sort of like my communications command centre. I use Apple’s Mail program and I’ve installed a plugin called Mail Tags which allows me to add a project name and colour to each email message. (As an aside, Mail Tags also comes with a few extra features for people who follow the Getting Things Done approach, but I mainly use the project tags.)

My system is this:
- Larger projects are coded in the warm end of the colour wheel – reds, yellows and oranges;
- Smaller projects are cooler colours – blues, greens and purples;
- And everything related to Raised Eyebrow is pink, ofcourse.

I’ve also set up Mail filters to automatically colour code messages as I receive them, so if you work for Terrific Clients R Us and your email address is you@terrificclientsrus.com my email program will set all of the emails you send to me with your project name and colour. Easy peasy.

My other trick to inbox organization is keeping it under control. I like to keep my entire inbox viewable on one screen, and I don’t use the preview pane, so there’s no scrolling up or down. Once I’ve dealt with an email I delete it or file it into a project folder if I think it might be useful in the future. That’s not to say I don’t have to do a purge every now and then, but when I do it’s easy for me to sort my messages by projects/colours and quickly see which messages can stay and which ones should go.

What I like about colour coding is that at a glance I can see what the priorities are right away. Plus, it’s fun and makes my inbox look a little more interesting. It’s a fairly simple system but I’ve found that less complex organizational systems are often the most helpful and easiest to implement and use.