Recently, we’ve been sharing a lot of technical lessons from building our new Help Center and in upgrading Harvest to Rails 3. The gem Harvest is releasing today, Thebes, is at the intersection of both projects.
Thebes is a wrapper around Sphinx, the search engine we use on most of our projects. Thebes differs from other solutions by staying as far away from your Rails code as possible. Instead of hiding the Sphinx configuration file behind a domain-specific language, this library assumes you will write Sphinx config files by hand. In Thebes, you edit an ERB template of your Sphinx configuration and populate it with variables at generation time. For developers needing the most flexible or fastest solution possible, this is a great way to work with Sphinx. Continue Reading …
Harvest will be offline for 60 minutes between 1am EST to 2am EST on Sunday March 6th, 2011. What time is that for you?
This coming weekend, our datacenter provider is performing network maintenance to improve network redundancy. Many core services in the datacenter will be offline for 5 hours, between 1am – 6am EST, Sunday March 6th.
We have reconfigured a number of our systems so that we will be able to stay online during most of this maintenance, even when a large set of datacenter resources go offline. That said, we plan to take advantage of this maintenance to perform some upgrades of our own, increasing our storage capacity by more than 400%. For this reason, Harvest will be offline for 60 minutes.
During the extended 5 hour network maintenance we will be monitoring the progress and doing everything possible to keep Harvest systems online.
Follow @harvest on Twitter for real time updates from the team during this work, and thanks for your patience.
Five years ago, we created Harvest with two goals: to take the pain (and ugly) out of time tracking, and to create a powerful report that’s easy to read by normal people like you and me. What we came up with was a deceptively simple and visual interface on top of layers of complex data. You can quickly glance at a report and find out what projects are consuming the most of your business’s time, and click one button to see distribution of billable hours.
Over the years, the reporting tool became more sophisticated with even more data: billable amount, budget, invoiced vs uninvoiced hours, etc. Frankly, the original interface structure is not holding up to the amount of data points Harvest supports today.
Late last year, we set out to improve Reports. We started with a customer survey, and thanks to your participation, we received a ton of amazing feedback. We sifted through your comments and boiled everything down to a few major goals, providing us with a solid direction as we began our overhaul of Reports. We’ve been working hard on this project since January, and have internally nicknamed the project “Reports 2.0.” Here’s a preview:
We’ve broken up the goals into different milestones, and the initial release of Reports 2.0 is coming Tuesday, March 8th. Here are some of the highlights that you can expect:
Blazing fast report render – Our development team rebuilt the reporting engine from scratch, taking advantage of some of the cool, new things that came from Rails 3.
A spanking new Staff report – This is one of the highest requested reports from the survey, and we added a few bells and whistles to make it easier to scan the report.
Improved navigation and data layout – You’ll see a brief summary of important data points on top, and a clearer table structure makes it easier to digest numbers and details.
And there are many more improvements and surprises for you to uncover next week. Our design and development team have poured their hearts into this project and it’s a work of beauty. We can’t wait to share the fruits of our labor, and thank you all for your patience, support and feedback!
Two weeks ago, we launched the new Harvest Help Center. The goal for the redesign was to provide comprehensive and well-organized content, so you could get what you need and move on with your day. We thought the design was effective, but how do we really measure and continuously improve the Help Center? Stats from Google Analytics tell us part of the story, but nothing beats actual customer feedback. So today, we’re launching a small feature so you can tell us directly how we’re doing:
At the bottom of each help article, you’ll find a “Was this article helpful?” question. If something was helpful, great! If not, leave some suggestions on how we can improve. Your feedback will help us update current articles and guide us in writing future ones.
As always, get in touch, and let us know how it’s working for you!
We’re ready to unveil our shiny, new Harvest Support! We’ve added a whole lot of content, changed the layout, and incorporated a fast and efficient instant search. Here’s a peek:
Take it for a spin, and read on to find out more about the specifics of what we’ve done.
Why the Redesign?
We love talking to our customers, but we understand that it’s more convenient for you to find answers to your questions through a support section. Our old Help & Support was full of useful information, but it was hard to scan, and some of the content was outdated. We wanted our support section to be easy to use, so you could get what you need and move on with your day.
The new section has been dubbed Harvest Support, and it’s divided into three main parts: the Help Center, the Forum, and a Contact Support form. Help Center is where you’ll find our updated and new help content, reorganized and easily searchable with our fast instant search.
This Saturday, January 15th 2011, we’ll be taking Harvest (as well as Co-op) offline at 6am EST (what time is that for you?) for system maintenance. This work is to upgrade some operating systems as well as completing an important upgrade of our configuration management software.
Harvest will be offline for no longer than 2 hours and will be back online before 8am EST.
Thanks for your patience while we continually improve our systems.
We recently added signature authentication for Harvesters who accept online payments using PayPal Website Payments Pro (WPP). Previously you could only connect Harvest with your PayPal WPP account using a downloadable certificate. Now you can link the two with a signature. Both options are PayPal SSL encrypted and secure.
If you would like to switch from certificate to signature authentication (and vice versa) simply change the settings in your PayPal and Harvest account. Visit our help section to learn more about setting up PayPal Website Payments Pro for online invoicing.
Hi there! I’m Matthew, Harvest’s new visual designer, having joined the team here in October. So far I’ve been responsible for the new look of this main website and blog, recent ad campaigns, and now I’m onto updating the look and feel of Harvest. I’d like to explain what changes we’ve made today, and what these changes mean for you.
We’ve nicknamed this layout update Harvest HD. While we know it’s not quite 16:9, this new design brings a wider HD feel to the application. We’ve removed the borders around the main content area and pushed the page out to your full browser width. Before HD, Harvest had a minimum width of 840px, and HD takes us out to 980px.
In addition to widening every section of Harvest, we’ve brought in a modified version of a 16-column Blueprint Grid. We’ve brought the Invoices and Estimates pages into this grid already. As we move forward, we’ll be using the extra room and this unified grid to make better usability choices.
This Thursday, we’re releasing a significant update to the Harvest layout: the app will have a wider, borderless shell. The look and feel of Harvest largely remains the same, but you’ll notice more breathing room throughout the entire app. We’ve come to affectionately refer to this update as Harvest HD.
Over time, we’ll be using the extra space to make layout changes that increase usability. We’ve started making some of these additional improvements on the Invoice and Estimates page. Some changes you can expect on Thursday include:
This week, Google launched the Chrome Web Store, an online marketplace, where users can search, browse and use web-based applications and extensions.
You can now install Harvest and Co-op (our team communication app which we live by everyday) for your Google Chrome browser via the new Web Store — it’s available at no additional charge for existing Harvesters. Once installed, the apps will appear when you load Chrome. This makes accessing our apps from Chrome on any machine even easier.
Additionally, we’ve started to add some HTML5 goodness starting with @reply notifications in Co-op, so you can take advantage of great desktop-like features right from your web browser.
Head over to the Chrome Web Store via your Chrome browser to install them today!
Published March 7th, 2011 by Matt Beale 
