My hubby and I started Geocaching through our local state park system. We’re hooked! The downfall has been trying to explain our adventures to friends and families, so I came up with this nifty Gliffy Flowchart to explain the process:

We’ve found that Geocaching is an active way to explore our community and places we travel.
I shared this Gliffy Flowchart using the Gliffy Collaboration features. This made it easy for people with computers of all types to easily see the diagram. I’m hoping I can get my family, friends and neighbors hooked too!

As the election season ramps up here in the United States, let’s take a moment to ponder the question: does your vote count?

Here at Gliffy, we implemented the JIRA public issue tracking system. This system logs all the feature requests, reminds us of the typos found on our website and tracks our progress on fixing any bugs. At Gliffy, the more votes an issue in JIRA receives, the more likely we are to prioritize that as a topic to address. Here, the issue with the most votes wins.

This chart shows the comparison between the two voting systems.

In the United States election for the President and Vice President, the winner is not determined by the popular vote. Rather the winner is chosen through a process known as the Electoral College. The process:
- Each state (and the District of Columbia), is granted a certain number of Electoral Votes
- The popular-vote-winner of each state determines how ALL of the Electoral Votes of each state will be cast (two states do not follow this winner-take-all approach)
- The candidate to receive 270 Electoral votes is declared the President and Vice President of the United States

As experienced in the 2004 election, the popular vote does not determine the winner.

I would venture that your vote counts in both places. At Gliffy, we work on all issues, those with 1 vote and those with many votes. However, we ruse the vote to help us stay connected to users and ensure we are listening to the direction our users want us to take our product. By comparison, in the United States election process, each vote builds to a greater meaning. The Electoral College process ensures the votes of the residents in small population states does not get lost in the grand election. For some election night fun, try this simulator.

Ultimately, I encourage you to create a login and vote readily on your favorite Gliffy topics, and if you happen to be eligible to vote in the United States, then Get Out and Vote!

Whenever I find myself using Gliffy for my own personal use, and discover again how cool it is, I like to share. Earlier this year, I used our Floorplan shapes to create the layout of our wedding and shared it with our photographer, videographer, and musicians. This was to give them a good idea of specific locations at the site and what they looked like. Recently, I’ve been planning a golfing road trip to western Oregon with some friends. I wanted to show them we could hit 7 varying courses in a 6 to 7 day trip.

I decided to use Gliffy to overlay proposed golf course locations on a map of western Oregon. I first uploaded an image of a map, then pointed out the courses on the map by their city locales, and adding where they would fall in line in order of days. To help get everyone fired up, I also included images of the courses next to their information. Below is a snippet of the complete map available here:

As I shared this with some of my friends, a few of them added some alternate courses on the map with images. One of the courses that a friend found looked spectacular, so it took place of one I had picked. True collaboration at work!

The other information I’ve added are website links, prices, and contact information. I’ll also be adding hotel information and places to eat. A bonus is that once we take our trip, I can just print out this one document and bring it on the road. I won’t need to shuffle around a lot of papers and maps to find the information we need. And we can continue to drool over the images of these amazing golf courses while driving (Gliffy does not promote drooling and driving). The challenge now is finding time to all take a week off, but until then, we can continue to update this diagram.

So the next time your planning a trip with family or friends, try using Gliffy.

For those of you using Twitter, we’re now hooked up and available here. Follow us for updates and tidbits in between blog posts!

My initial task at Gliffy was to develop the integration API (which is almost ready!). That quickly morphed into me taking primary ownership of the back-end code (this is the part of Gliffy that you don’t see; the part the stores diagrams, manages users, creates JPGs of your drawings, etc.). After some initial planning and exploration of the code base, I suggested a few under-the-hood changes that might make the task a bit smoother, at a slightly longer delivery time. Clint, Chris and I discussed some options and we agreed to replace the SQL-based database layer with an object/relational mapping system (this is the cool thing about working for a small organization; decisions can be made quickly and easily, and there’s no paperwork

Feeling pretty good about the changes, I was suddenly hit with the Fear of Breaking Something. This is why we had to have COBOL programmers come out of hibernation to fix the Y2K problem in 20 year old code; 15 years prior, The Fear had kept that code alive.

The good news is that this Fear can be alleviated with an army of automated tests. The bad news was that we didn’t have such an army. We did, however, have some marching orders: Clint had created a detailed set of test scripts that testers had used for previous releases. While these weren’t code, but more like “recipes” for using Gliffy, they were a huge help in creating some automated test cases.

Adapting a technique I’d used on a previous project, I figured I could record myself executing Clint’s tests and then play them back via a script. Using those recorded tests, I could rid myself of the Fear (or, at the very least, turn it into the Shame of Test Failure, which is much better than the Disgrace of Bringing Down the Website).

It turns out, Gliffy’s layered architecture made it really easy to insert some code to record the tests. I just needed a small bit of code to record the requests that the Flash application was making, as well as the information the server was sending back.

The second part was to write another piece of code that would essentially pretend to be a web browser; it would read my recorded tests and send the same information to the server that the Flash application did. If my pseudo-browser got back the same data that Gliffy did when I recorded the test, I knew I hadn’t broken anything.

It didn’t go quite that smoothly, as I had to make my tests a bit smarter, so they could ignore things like timestamps and database keys, but ultimately, it worked out great. I was able to get rid of almost all usage of SQL and replace it with the calls to the Java Persistence Architecture (JPA) API, which should serve us well for the foreseeable future. As a bonus, Chris was able to use these tests to remove Struts almost entirely, which not only simplifies our deployment, but significantly reduces the size of the plugin for Confluence.

Interested in the long technical details? They are all on my personal blog.

In a small business, efficiency is critical. Each task that needs doing ends up distracting us from other tasks that need doing too. One way we’ve saved a bunch of time is by using Freshbooks for billing.

What’s Freshbooks?

Freshbooks is a nifty little service that makes online invoicing simple, fast, and easy.

How do we use it?

• When customers select a product to purchase on our Confluence Plugin licensing page, we automatically generate an invoice for the customer using the Freshbooks API. We save time here because we don’t have to generate an invoice manually.
• Freshbooks handles credit card orders for us. We saved more time here because we didn’t have to write single line of code to implement a checkout process…. Freshbooks handles it for us.
• Freshbooks keeps track of our monthly revenue totals. Nobody has to plug numbers into a spreadsheet to generate a report. At midnight on August 31st I knew exactly how much we billed in August by reading these reports. Again, a huge time saver.
• Best of all, Freshbooks is all online. This means it’s easy for me and the rest of the Gliffy team to collaborate on invoices, and stay on top of things.

I’ve met the guys from Freshbooks a few times now, and they are great people to boot. If you’re doing manual invoicing now, definitely consider taking a look at Freshbooks… it could be a huge time saver for you and your business.

My family ability to garden was not passed to me. I got plenty of passion between watching my father expertly set up the automatic watering systems and following my grandfather down the rows of vegetables he nurtured across the street from his house. These memories excite me for the potential of growing my own food each spring. Unfortunately, I have a rather mighty obstacle: I lack the skill to bring vegetables into the world. I plan using Gliffy’s floor plan software, but rare is a vegetable to grow.
Honestly, I am lucky to produce one zucchini.
Never fear, a solution is near. This summer I decide to embrace my passion and forgo the growing: I joined our local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Farm, Gullywash Gardens. If the concept of a CSA is new to you, here is a simple process flow explanation:
As you can see, the process has plenty of choices along the way. Using Gliffy not only helped our family to make a decision, but it helped to explain the process to our friends.
The end result is that I am enjoying locally, lovingly grown food, I’m not buying food shipped from across the country (or world!) and I can relax as my lackluster garden doesn’t produce because I’m enjoying plenty of food my expert farmers are growing. In the near future Gliffy will have BPMN symbols to assist in the documenting and analysis process. Lucky for me, using Gliffy’s Flow Chart software, the swimlane decision shape showed this was the right choice.

It feels good to put the experiences of Barbara Kingsolverand Michael Pollan into action, the folks at Gullwash Gardens are fantastic and it tastes great!

Lately, I’ve been working on implementing a new symbol library, our BPMN symbols. We’ve been using a graphic designer in Brazil, and Gliffy has played a big part in making the communication process to get the symbol assets developed a snap (which is kind of unfortunate because I’d really love to have a reason to go to Brazil on business).

To start the symbol design process, we give our designer a list of symbols we want done, some inspirational mock-ups or examples and ideas on style, and he then gives us a single image of his design. Once we approve the design, I let him know how we want them delivered (various .swf and .svg files). For our more complicated symbols, I need to give him a guide on how certain assets are cut. For instance certain parts of a symbol may “stretch”, while other parts may not. So I’ll need the asset cut into those parts. This is where Gliffy has sped up the process. I’ll create a guide of how these symbol assets should be cut and organized in Gliffy and share the diagram with the designer. Below are some snippets from these diagrams.

As with the Horizontal Scrollbar above from our user interface library, after our designer gave us a design image of the complete symbol, I was able to bring that into Gliffy using the image import feature. I then laid out how the symbol is cut into multiple assets. The nice thing is that I don’t need to bring the symbol image into photoshop or anything to cut it up. I just use Gliffy’s “visual magic” by overlaying a white rectangle to cover up any areas I don’t want shown. (so asset #2 is the same as asset #1 with a white rectangle over the right). This makes producing the design so much faster. And the added bonus is, its easy to make revisions or revert in Gliffy, and our designer always has the latest revision.

My girlfriend and I recently decided to move in together, sharing my 2-bedroom condo in Washington, DC. The master bedroom is currently my “man-cave” (which houses the equipment to support my expensive pro audio hobby). Its generous walk-in closet is a pack-rat’s dream, holding, among other things, four boxes of G.I. Joe toys, five of Star Wars, my Atari 2600, Commodore 64 and an Amiga 500. Plus, the box to everything I’ve owned in the last 10 years. When my girlfriend actually saw this closet (which is off limits to just about everyone), she suggested the radical notion of using it to store our clothes. This meant swapping the bedroom and man-cave.

First thing I did was to create my man-cave in Gliffy. The floorplan symbols made this a snap (Although Gliffy doesn’t have inches just yet, multiplying feet by 50 gave me plenty of room to work). The before picture is a pretty accurate view of this crowded room. While most of the furniture in there would be going, some would be staying, like my workdesk (where I’ve been hard at work on Gliffy’s developer API). We also needed to fit in my girlfriend’s armchair and ottoman. We were definitely having a hard time visualizing where things would go and even if they would all fit.

I did a quick redesign of the room and used Gliffy’s collaboration feature to send it to my girlfriend. We share calendars with Google Calendar, and have planned our vacations with Google Docs, so she instantly knew what to do when she got the email from Gliffy. She made a few adjustments and we decided on a layout that should fit everything nicely.

The “new” man-cave was a bit trickier; the room is smaller and oddly shaped, and it still needed to accommodate a couch and chair (I’ll often have two or three local band members in there during mixing sessions, and folding chairs just don’t cut it) Fortunately, everything seems to fit (and I might have a bona-fide vocal booth; much to the delight of my upstairs neighbor).

I’m pretty confident we’ve just reduced the move-in stress by quite a bit, and hopefully staved off our first domestic argument (odds are now on my cat eating her plants).

We’ve just released a minor update to the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence today which includes several bug fixes, a small feature, and Confluence 2.9 compatibility. We recommend this update for users of Confluence versions 2.6 and better. Download the update here.

Highlights of this release:

Confluence 2.9 Compatibility

Atlassian has made significant improvements to the plugin architecture of Confluence in the upcoming 2.9 release. Our plugin needed some modifications to ensure compatibility, which we’ve implemented in this release.

Option to turn border off

We’ve added a small new feature in this release which will enable you to turn off the border in a Gliffy diagram in a Confluence page. Simply add ‘border=false’ to your {gliffy} macro, and the border will be turned off.

Detailed Release Notes

• [GLIFFY-15] - The label for the "login" button is moving towards left, when it is clicked more than once.
• [GLIFFY-662] - Breadcrumbs on view large diagram action are broken
• [GLIFFY-680] - showgliffyeditor.action should fail gracefully when user doesn’t have permissions
• [GLIFFY-685] - ‘Remove Diagram’ link should not show if user doesn’t have Remove Attachments permission
• [GLIFFY-705] - GPFC Document Manager shouldn’t have a ‘public’ column
• [GLIFFY-706] - Add Diagram links don’t show up for the non default themes with for Gliffy 1.4, Confluence 2.8
• [GLIFFY-709] - Remove link should be shown when user has permission to edit page
• [GLIFFY-711] - Improve null checks in confluence extractor
• [GLIFFY-748] - Group Function Not Working
• [GLIFFY-789] - Reference to nonexistent action in LargeDiagram.vm
• [GLIFFY-798] - Clicking on diagram image results in page not found
• [GLIFFY-801] - In some cases, symbols fail to load in editor
• [GLIFFY-638] - Remove the ‘requires restart’ checks from the confluence macro and actions
• [GLIFFY-660] - Remove pre 2.6 elements from atlassian-plugin.xml
• [GLIFFY-661] - Confluence 2.9 compatibility
• [GLIFFY-461] - Edit/Remove Border to Gliffy Diagram in Page
• [GLIFFY-695] - Setup bamboo for 1.4.1 branch
• [GLIFFY-751] - Remove Struts from Plugin