January 2019 - LunarLincoln

Jan

A new look

Oh hi! You miiiight have noticed that things are looking a bit different at the online mooncabin. We decided that we were long overdue for a facelift, since we’ve been rocking the same look since 2014. The outside was workable but the inside was a bit of a time warp. Plus in the past few years we’ve been itching to add some new content but couldn’t figure out how to cleanly implement it with the old template.

The old template

Our old website was a wordpress template implemented before the invention of “page builders”. The inside was a scary land of stacked shortcodes. We didn’t like touching it because each time it required diving back into learning the mystery pseudo-code that stitched everything together. The template ceased being supported a few years ago but at that time we were mid-mobile-dev-mania and didn’t have time to look into alternatives.

What next?

So here we are: 2019. Web development has totally evolved, search engines are now super fancy/picky, responsiveness is key. Even WordPress, itself, decided to undergo a bit of a renovation this year. We’ve built a few other websites in the meantime and it’s helped me have a better idea of what we want and don’t want. We still recognize that we are better mobile devs than web devs, so we weren’t looking to build anything too custom. I’ve test driven several different page builders in the past: Avada’s Fusion Builder, WP Bakery’s Visual Composer, and this newcomer Tatsu run by Brand Exponents. I really dig the interface for Tatsu – it marries flexibility with simplicity and since it’s relatively new, it isn’t saddled with a ton of baggage/backwards compatibility like the industry leaders so we went ahead and dug in. Several iterations later – I think we have our final result.

What’s new?

EVERYTHING! Just kidding. Some stuff is really familiar, because its true and it works, but we did want to revisit how we talk about our work. We added a huge section on our Process. Building mobile apps is still a new concept to many people and “how does all this work” is the #1 question we get from leads. Dumping an entire load of process on someone in an initial meeting can be somewhat overwhelming, so it’s nice to have a place that potential clients can check out at their own leisure. We have a new area that focuses on our internal projects, which will grow in the new year as we add new ideas and ship more.

In the meantime, keep checking in. We’ll keep adding and polishing in the upcoming months, but I wanted to go ahead and kick off 2019 with some fresh code. Hope you like what we’ve built thus far.

As a side note: There’s really only one ongoing debate to settle – ARE THERE ENOUGH SPACE PUNS ON THE SITE? (Wiley always thinks there should be more.)

Jan

Hourglass for Jira

Over here in LunarLincoln land we’ve been working on a few things….client work, mentoring, getting Little Doors in the dang App Store (I’ll cover that more in another post). While all of this has been happening, we have a little internal project that’s been chugging along making some background profits.

Oh hey there…

What is Hourglass?

It’s a tool we built a year ago when an extremely popular time tracking plugin we used in Jira basically blew up for a few days. Those were busy and important days where we didn’t want to have to track time manually, so Wiley spent the weekend hacking together a little tool we could use ourselves in the meantime. Goodbye expensive plugin behemoth with a shaky support record – hello Hourglass – our own simple but scrappy time tracker.

We used it for a few weeks, made some improvements, and thought, “Why not share this with others?” Maybe there are other people out there who also just want something simple and straightforward. Start your clock, stop your clock, that’s it. So, we put it in the Atlassian Marketplace, threw up a website and that was it….for a while.

Then we started getting sales checks. Not massive amounts, but a little something nice from Atlassian each month. We decided to show our little time tracker some love, so we made a few updates: new Atlassian UI, a dashboard and some more analytics.

To date, users of Hourglass have logged almost 3 million minutes of billable time. They’ve created 25,000 worklogs. They are based in 50 countries and a surprising number of different industries.

Which brings us to the present day. While we are still on our epic search for the best business idea ever, we thought we’d make a short pitstop in Atlassian plugin-land and build a few more nuggets of code that don’t require long term marketing. A few more monthly sales checks wouldn’t be too bad too. We’re pretty intimate with the ins and outs of Jira. We have some gripes that could use a plugin and there are probably some people out there with the very same complaints. Do you have any Jira complaints? “It’s so annoying when….” ‘s ? Send them on over! (jennifer@lunarlincoln.com or twitter @lunarlincoln). It’s not the next Facebook, but it’ll certainly make your day to day a bit more pleasant – one tiny tool at a time.