New Developer Hub & Upgrades

We are excited to announce the New Developer Hub for those who are interested in seeing how we developed and are developing the BlueHead site, Author's Dashboard, and Fan Club Site. We use Github (of course) to manage it all and have chosen to make the repository a public repository so anyone can participate as a developer and contribute (we will credit them in the "CONTRIBUTORS" file of the source code).

New Dev Updates:

• Upgraded system to Rails 3.0.1
• Moved hosting to Heroku
• Created sandbox branch for new feature adds

BlueHead switches to Highrise

After spending a little time working in Highrise, a Customer Relationship Management tool by 37Signals, it was clear that their "Goodbye to bloat" tagline was inherently obvious.

Our initial concerns in dropping SugarCRM (our current CRM tool):

• Would we miss all of the cool feature sets: detailed tracking for the entire customer pipeline from target to contact/deal, and crazy detailed reporting?
• Frankly, we never used any of the functionality. In point of fact we found ourselves constantly going back and forth about how to enter a contact... "Are they a target...or a lead...oh wait!...do we enter them here...or here...what's our procedure again?...oh crap! where did I put that note about my phone call yesterday?...wait, what's the contact's name again?"
• Would we miss the cool looking eye-candy of charts?
• NEVER USED THEM ONCE
• Sugar has been around forever and Highrise is relatively new
• Translation: Highrise is built for today's web without complicated retrofits
• Sugar charges an arm and a leg for all the web 2.0 stuff (that's right I said 2.0 as in 2.yesterday)

Anywho...

So it came down to one word: simplicity. As an independent, constantly-morphing publishing house living in a wonderfully evolving market, keeping it simple matters and we avoid the word "procedure" like the plague. If you need to wrap a procedure around complicated administrivia, it is just too complicated. At least, we try to keep that in mind.

AND, for all you tech-head types out there, they are a Ruby/onRails shop, so you know they are relevant!