Insights

closeup of a drawn mockup

The actual cost of buying a commercial WordPress theme

        Filed under: Web Design, Web Development, WordPress

WordPress out of the box comes with a pretty decent theme from the security and technical standpoint, but it works for a blog site, not for a marketing site. There are many websites out there that sell WordPress themes with wonderful design and features. They promise custom home pages, product/service pages, integration with other services … Continued

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Luis Cuellar lucuella

Work Anniversary: Luis Cuellar, 10 years at inQbation, Agileana

        Filed under: Jobs, Startups

In November 2007, I was seeking a tech co-founder who was well-connected with web designers and developers, who could work as a project manager, and help me launch inQbation, which ultimately spawned Agileana – also a web design and development company in the DC metro area. I could not have picked a better co-founder. Particularly … Continued

How to setup billing threshold alerts on AWS?

        Filed under: Amazon Web Services(AWS)

A common concern for a lot of clients using AWS as their hosting solution provider, is the variable invoices they get each month. Most organization appropriate fixed budget for hosting and this may impact their planning adversely. Keeping an eye on the budget manually is both cumbersome and prone to human error. So is their … Continued

agile plumbing

Should a client pay for refactoring?

        Filed under: Agile development

And what does plumbing have to do with agile development? In my spare time, I started this bathroom renovation project. Long story short, we are at the stage of life where we are taking care of children and grandparents.  The sandwich generation, I think is what it’s called. Anyway, we are converting an office, powder … Continued

do not feed the phish

Impaired spam: can you handle website design and accept credit cards

        Filed under: Cyber security, spam of the day

Spam phishing attempt of the day.  I get these at least once a week.  Always the same message … can you handle website design and do you take credit cards.  They claim to be hearing impaired so you only communicate by text.  Obviously, they don’t want to get on the phone with you and reveal … Continued

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Deborah Holmstrom

Celebrating work anniversaries: Deborah Holmstrom, CFO

        Filed under: Startups

At Agileana, we believe that work anniversaries are significant events – more so, in some cases, than birthdays.  This week, we are celebrating the first work anniversary of Deborah Holmstrom, our CFO. The CFO position is probably one of the most important positions in a company. If a company cannot meet its expenses, make it’s … Continued

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bootstrap columns grid

Creating Bootstrap columns in Drupal panels with mixins

        Filed under: Drupal, Front-End Development, How to

In terms of Front-End Drupal gives you several ways to achieve your goals, you can use Views, Panels, Display Suite, Templates overrides, Custom modules, etc., so sometimes it’s a bit difficult to define the best (or the worst) way to do something. A couple of years ago, we created a theme for a Drupal 7 … Continued

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Why using size to estimate tasks is better for agile

        Filed under: Agile development, Project Management

This past month my boss and I worked on a new contract for a current client. Even though our work with them is mostly Agile, and they genuinely understand it, our past contracts with them didn’t reflect that. Our past contracts were more rigid, and invoicing was getting harder and harder. For the past few … Continued

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How to modify a WordPress query the right way

        Filed under: WordPress

If you’re a developer, and have worked with WordPress, you should be familiar with something called “The Loop“. The Loop is the way WordPress handles the display of the content you create. Behind The Loop, there are the Wp_Query class, and the $wp_query object. That way WordPress decides what to output based on the page … Continued

SAM SPAM: SAM.GOV isn’t texting us – or you

        Filed under: Government

A funny thing happened this week when I updated our company’s registration with www.sam.gov, the official federal government website for acquisition activities — our CEO received a text to seemingly complete the process. He forwarded the text to me to handle. To my surprise, the link took me to an official looking website that gave … Continued

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terminal

oh-my-zsh or how to improve your Terminal

        Filed under: Git

As developers, we spent most of our time on the Terminal, and some of us prefer to run everything from it instead of access cPanels or Administration screens to handle our sites (MySQL client to manage the MySQL server, WP-CLI for WP, Drush for Drupal, you name it!) The problem with those of us who like to … Continued

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password security

Password Security: Too much could defeat the purpose

        Filed under: Cyber security

Identity theft, hacking, phishing, and malware are huge problems and they are only going to get worse. Once of the biggest issues we have nowadays is that we have hundreds of accounts on hundreds of platforms and many platforms have unique password security requirements. Some organizations require 8 digit passwords while others require 10, 12, … Continued