This post is part of ReadyTalk’s ongoing series on teleworking.

My telework day started without Internet. The cable technician had come to troubleshoot the connection, and when he saw the downed line, his shoulders slumped.

“I’ll have to run a new drop to your house. It will probably take me between 2 and 3 hours.”

I made a pot of coffee, and let my supervisor know my status and that I probably would not be available until later in the day. I had considered just biking in to the office, but I had other work scheduled on the house and needed to be home. They technician told me that my cable line had been purposefully cut from the alley along with two of my neighbors’. Meanwhile, a few guys show up to do unrelated work on the house and I am shuffling cars around so they can get a truck and a Bobcat in to my driveway.

I’m watching the technician run a new cable while the contractors jackhammer a strip of concrete next to the house. Finally, after many cups of coffee and a case of the jitters, the cable comes back on line, and I begin working at my desk to the sound of jackhammering.

Many of my coworkers use our technology to work from home during inclement weather and to watch over sick kids. Some even work from the ski slopes. I don’t have kids and am lucky enough to have weather-proof transportation, so when I work from home it’s usually so I can concentrate on what I’m doing for ReadyTalk or to supervise house work.

While the possibility of connection problems might make teleworking seem like a risky choice, it would have been easy for me to work from the local coffee shop had the cable company not been so responsive. It’s hard anymore to go anywhere urban and not find an available wireless connection.

While this day was filled with stress, noise and distraction, I’m looking forward to future days of teleworking with warm weather, a hammock and the sound of the backyard waterfall keeping me peacefully productive.

What are your teleworking horror stories? What steps have you taken to prevent them from happening again?

Daniel has been managing ReadyTalk’s website since 2008 and helps make marketing collateral easy on the eye. When he’s not hacking away at VIM or tweaking the website, he’s busy improving his Denver Victorian, making/enjoying good brew and offering expertise to local non-profits.

In ReadyTalk’s new website design, we’ll provide up-to-date, dynamic information to our customers in a number of ways. One of those will be a carousel on the front page of the website. We want to load data asynchronously on to the front page to reduce loading times and we want it to load from Drupal nodes for easy maintenance. We originally went to find a Drupal carousel plugin, but none existed that met our needs.

We decided to use jQuery Tabs since Drupal comes with jQuery installed. It was easy to integrate in to our theme files using the great documentation provided by jQuery Tools. We also installed the jQuery Update module for Drupal to bring jQuery up to speed.

jQuery tabs offers a slideshow plugin for Tabs that makes for a great carousel with some useful features, such as navigation elements, smooth transitions and pause on mouse hover. The only hurdle we encountered with this setup was pulling nodes cleanly in to the carousel.

Loading a node would also pull all the page layout data with it – any associated blocks or theme data would be pulled in to the carousel – not what we want. This solution is simple and works great for loading the content of a node and nothing else. Appending any address with ?ajax=1 will automatically grab the node content by itself, exactly what we want for loading via jQuery. This solution is also applicable to any circumstance where node data might be pulled asynchronously.

So, long story short:

1. Install jQuery Update
2. Install jQuery Tabs with slideshow plugin in to Drupal theme
3. Add the accepted solution on this page to Drupal
4. Point jQuery Tabs to the nodes you want to load, appending the address with ajax=1

All done!

Have you done something similar? How did it work? What are other ways to do this?

This is the third post in the “Creating a New Website” series. See posts one and two for other web site ideas.

ReadyTalk first started looking at our ongoing web redesign about a year ago as a way to increase the organization of, and access to, an increasing number of resources provided to our customers. At first we were looking at minor updates and a visual refresh, but as more requests for features and content changes came from across the company, it became apparent that we would need a major overhaul. We decided that a Content Management System (CMS) would be ideal and allow for quick content creation and publishing by the entire marketing team.

What is Drupal?
Drupal is a free and open-source CMS with a huge community of developers making sure it is always up to date and secure. Upon learning about how many high-profile sites run Drupal (www.whitehouse.gov, www.ubuntu.com, and research.yahoo.com to name a few), it was easy to get excited about the possibilities. With the thousands of modules available for everything from automated search engine optimization to automated image resizing, Drupal fits nearly every use case. Using modules, we can quickly add à la carte site functionality and create a site specifically tailored to our users’ needs. Anything that is not already available can be created as a custom module.

Why Drupal?
ReadyTalk uses WordPress for our blog and newsroom, our own CMS for the Webinar Series, and hand coding for most other pages. To unify our site maintenance practices and to reduce the overhead involved in making changes and updates, we began looking to unify the site under a single CMS. We evaluated a number of CMS options, and Drupal came out on top because of its great extensibility and ability to accept custom code, as well as modules that will help us automate search engine optimization (SEO) and improve organic search rankings.

Our dependence upon PHP was a major factor for choosing Drupal. Drupal is written in PHP and handles user-submitted PHP code wonderfully, making it easy to port scripts from our current site. If, down the road, we decide to rewrite these scripts as Drupal modules, this will greatly increase the possibilities for adding additional functionality to our site.

Drupal’s theming possibilities are also extensive. In most cases, all that is needed to make a theme is a few images and some CSS. There is little difference between theming Drupal and theming a hand-coded site. In our case, we’ll also be making a few changes to how Drupal structures pages. One of the more exciting features will be a front page carousel that uses jQuery to asynchronously load nodes into a slideshow. This will keep load times down on the front page and will make updating the carousel’s content amazingly easy.

Major Features

1. Relevant information and documents can be dynamically displayed on any page
2. WYSIWYG editor enables ReadyTalk’s marketing team to quickly change and publish new data without the need for a web developer
3. Automated editorial process for new content ensures it is reviewed by stakeholders before it goes live
4. Front page will have more dynamic content, including a carousel that loads slides asynchronously via jQuery and caches them.
5. Resource Center and Webinar Series will be sort-able, searchable and easily updated
6. New, updated look and UI

Future improvements

• We will continue enhancing the website by introducing new features.
• Simplified forms
• Asynchronous loading and submission of forms
• Conversion of several scripts to modules to improve functionality and integration
• HTML 5 and CSS3 support
• Eventual upgrade to Drupal 7

As a part of our web development process, we will be featuring articles written by our website team on topics such as usability, user testing, design and web development. Stay tuned!