We all have our work and the “other stuff”. For me that other stuff is my work with the local startup community and a few open source projects I maintain. For you, it might be a charity or maybe a team you coach. In any case, we want a way to keep our client’s work in one place without getting mixed up with our other stuff. That's where Blimp's new workspaces come in.

Workspaces allow you to better organize your work. Keep all your client’s projects on your company workspace and your cool weekend projects on your personal workspace.

Everyone with a Blimp account just got a FREE Personal workspace. That workspace comes with a free project to get you started. If you need to have more projects under your personal workspace, you can always upgrade to Blimp PRO and get unlimited everything in that workspace.

If your company works on a lot of projects at the same time it’s really difficult to know the status of all projects in a simple and convenient way. You either have to ask the people involved on the different projects or you can go into your project management app and try to figure out the progress by looking at completed and pending tasks. If your progress depends on client approving your work, you know that completed tasks are just a part of the story.

Blimp set out to fix this problem from day one. That’s why we have a very nifty progress indicator that tries to help you make sense of the real progress of a project. Taking into account tasks that are waiting to be approved or validated in some way.

Today we are taking another step towards fixing that problem and in so, make projects progress information simple, more flexible and understandable to everyone on the team.

This new feature allows users to set a status message and a status color to any project. The idea is that users should update that status periodically to reflect the most recent state of the project.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

We’ve been working on freelance jobs for years. A client calls us and we setup a meeting, discuss what they want to build and after signing a very short and easy to understand agreement, the project starts. But just before signing that agreement we have the “this is how we work” talk. This has proven to be very helpful. I make sure clients know what to expect and make sure they are satisfied with the level of control we give them during the project.

Read more about our process here.

Do you have any process when working with clients?

At Blimp we love working with Django. We use it for almost all of our projects, including Blimp and -M.

In Django 1.4, the startproject and startapp commands came with a new template option. Specifying this --template option lets you use a custom project directory structure for your project from a path or URL. By default when you run the startproject management command, it creates a Django project directory structure that contains manage.py and a project package (containing a settings.py and other files) based on this default template.

We decided to create a project template with the things we always end up doing on our Django projects. This template has a couple of useful settings and Fabric commands that make deploying, managing, and using Django with Heroku easier.

How to install

django-admin.py startproject --template=git.io/… --extension=py,md,dev project_name

What’s included?

• Fabric - Fabric is a Python library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks.
• South - schema and data migrations for Django
• dj-database-url - Django utility allows you to utilize the DATABASE_URL environment variable to configure your Django application.
• django-extensions - Custom management extensions for the Django
• gunicorn - Simply implemented, light on server resource usage, and fairly speedy Python WSGI HTTP Server.
• psycopg2 - PostgreSQL database adapter for Python

Fabric Script

Fabric is definitely the easiest way to execute local and remote shell commands. We’ve created quite a few of these to help with deployment, database management, and Heroku, all aware of the environment, so for example, you can easily run database migrations in development, staging, or production.

One of my last posts I talked about FlirtTape. Since that we spent some time testing and taking in feedback from people using the product. One thing we kept hearing was that people wanted to share mixtapes with friends, without it being a flirt. At first, we tried to ignore this suggestion, but it just kept coming so we decided to change the name to HipTape. We also took care of every single little detail that could have gotten us blocked by Youtube again, that required some UX/UI changes, but no big deal. What really sucked was that Youtube blocked us like 3 times, and we had no way to know why or what we could do to make it work.

Here's a mixtape for yesterday's #TopTracks hiptape.com/m/…

Right now we know we have issues on Firefox, but like always help and feedback is very welcomed!

Wrote a small blog post about the minimum requirements you need to know to get custom Facebook Open Graph actions working and implemented into your app. I recently had to integrate a web app heavily with Facebook and this part wasn't that straightforward for me. So maybe it'll help someone out there.

Remember when you used to make a mixtape and give it to a girl you liked? Well we do. @elving, @gio, and I built FlirtTape in a couple of days for fun. We used Backbone, Eco, Stylus, Node.js, Parse JS SDK, ACS and Postmark to put together a little web app that lets you make a mixtape with 5 songs and share it with someone you like. We decided to use the YouTube API for the song data, hide their player and make our own custom one.

We had pretty awesome feedback from the post in Hacker News

600 playlists and 4 hours later, our domain seemed to have been banned by Youtube for violating their TOS. You aren't allowed to: "separate, isolate, or modify the audio or video components of any YouTube audiovisual content made available through the YouTube API; promote separately the audio or video components of any YouTube audiovisual content made available through the YouTube API; access any portion of any YouTube audiovisual content by any means other than use of a YouTube player or other video player expressly authorized by YouTube;"

So we just changed a couple of things to work around this to show the video as well and are looking for ways to reinstate our domain as we are no longer violating any of the TOS(if you have any clue how, please let me know). On the meantime we are using our Heroku domain.

Check it out, make a mixtape and share it with someone you like :)

A couple of weeks ago Parse announced a pretty cool and simple geolocation app with great tutorial on how they did the whole thing. I decided to try and use Appcelerator Cloud Services and build an Anywall inspired app but with Titanium and ACS. This is what I've got till now. The only thing I'm probably missing is the settings view, might get around to doing that later.

I'm also thinking about working on an actual good looking UI and publishing to the app store, and maybe trying an Android version as well.

A little something @gio designed a couple of days ago. (Blimp)[getblimp.com) robot is kinda like our mascot and is in charge of sending out email notifications and what not. What do you guys think of this wallpaper we are now rocking on our laptops?

Yesterday I decided to contribute a simple API Python Wrapper for the recently launched Postmark Inbound. Postmark Inbound makes it awesomely easy to parse incoming emails into JSON.