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Tweet and you shall receive: Chrome Extension for Highrise Deals

I'm a power user of multiple 37 Signals products, including the Basecamp project management system (much less so since Socialize moved to agile scrum methodologies company-wide)  and its Customer Relationship Management system, Highrise.

Highrise is kind of like democracy:  Not great, but definitely the best thing out there, especially if you want a lightweight CRM.  (Salesforce is what you'd probably turn to for a more deeply integrated, enterprise-level CRM).

The biggest problem I have with Highrise, though, is its poor Deals section.  The entire reason a CRM system exists is to manage customer relationships, and part of that is an uncanny ability to manage sales opportunities.  I've hacked Highrise to make it better, but I wasn't satisfied.  I put a request out on Twitter and that's how I met Alexey Panteleev.

Alexey of Yoxel.com (great service, by the way -- check it out) created a Chrome extension that's absolutely killer with Highrise.  In this post I'll talk about how I've hacked Highrise to work well for me, and how Alexey's extension makes it even better.  If you want to try Alexey's extension too, just leave a comment below and I'll connect you to him.  If he gets enough interest in it, he may productize it and offer it to anyone using Highrise.

Learning to Take Insanely Great Pictures

My wife and I are on a quest to learn how to take insanely great pictures.  We are just starting this journey and I invite you to share it with us if photography is a passion of yours.  The picture above is one of our first attempts at taking the kinds of photos that have a "wow" factor that transcends a regular photo. The photo was taken by my wife; that's my friend Keoni on the left and me on the right.

My first step was to learn about cameras and settle on the right one for me.  After doing a lot of research, I chose the Panasonic Lumix GX1.  I explain below why I bought this camera and what I think of it, and I'll be posting more in the community section as I learn more about how to take world-class photos.