Blogs

Pardon the stream of thought post. I'm getting ideas out of my head on a project. Some of these ideas will be used later.

Tom and I have been working hard for the last couple of months on creating a distribution of Drupal. We put the initial alpha release for download on our site this weekend.

In these tough economic times it's getting harder and harder to earn new business as the marketplace for work grows increasingly competitive. No matter what your industry; most likely your starting to feel the pennies, and probably whole dollars, that everyone is pinching.

I often contemplate: Is their a difference between an artist and a designer?

In my experience with strategizing and managing online communities, the goal of getting users to register proves much easier to obtain than getting people to come back to the site and participate. I think a slick site design and promising benefits can easily pull a user in to register because there is no commitment for them to get involved. So how do we get registered users to participate in online communities without forcing a commitment? I don’t think there is a magic formula.

If you are stumped for ideas and wondering how to revive that creative energy you once felt…look no further. I have compiled a list of ways to never run out of ways to be original and inspired!

Here are a few extremely useful modules that seem to fly under the radar among Drupal developers.

pngFix Module

This module includes the jQuery pngFix plugin, which uses the Twin Helix method of providing PNG transparency support to the IE 6 browser. The module provides an administrative interface where you provide a list of jQuery selectors to target for pngFix.

Here at LevelTen we have a few book clubs going on. Right now, one of the books we are reading is Agile Estimation and Planning. LevelTen is in the process of implementing an iterative development process which seems to make great sense for small to mid-level Web projects.

Web projects are strange beasts. There are out-of-the-box tools that provide a ton of value. Still small firms with small budgets often have need for custom development that is often prohibitively expensive. The tools to do great things cheaply and quickly just aren't there yet (but progress is being made rapidly).

Leveltens' latest monthly event took place at The Dallas Scaregrounds, a spooktacular event to say the least. Upon entering the Scaregrounds Leveltenies were surrounded by a festival of lights, food, games and all sorts of Halloween themed entertainment.

Help A Reporter Out (HARO) is a service created by Peter Shankman (follow his Twitter account) as a resource for public relations professionals and reporters to find each other when they have common needs. The service originally began as a Facebook group, but needed to be expanded when they exceeded the 1200 person e-mail cap.

Earlier this week, Stephanie put together a really cool design for our portfolio section on the LevelTenDesign.com Web site. It was based off of a jQuery snippet she found that emulates the Coda slider (http://www.panic.com/coda/).