Chris Steins's blog

For a recent project creating video-based courses, I needed to select an affordable USB microphone to provide to remote instructors who will be recording video, audio and screencasts directly from the instructor's computer.

A technical case study into how we developed the new Planetizen Video Courses platform using Drupal 7 and Brightcove Cloud video hosting to deliver affordable online education to professionals in the urban planning, architecture, and related professions.

Meetings are expensive, and most people hate them. Most people hate meetings because most meetings are not productive and are run poorly. But meetings do not need to be hated. It is not hard to run a great meeting. However, it does require planning, an agenda, and clear goals.

A smart IT manager or system administrator who previously paid $50/year for a low cost shared-hosting environment for a static HTML website often needs to justify to management why the organization will need to spend more on higher-quality hosting for their new Drupal website. Following are seven criteria that you can use to evaluate Drupal hosting options.

Having recently gone through the process of negotiating a new office lease, I discovered that there are several ways to measure square feet. If you don't know the difference, you can easily get taken.

I had an opportunity to attend an engaging discussion on building action-oriented websites with Sam Graham-Felsen, Barack Obama's chief campaign blogger. Following are the major tips I took away from the discussion.

Here at Urban Insight we run through a 25-point checklist when we launch a new website. One of these checks is a baseline search engine optimization (SEO) and evaluation.

Here at Urban Insight, we use a VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service for our telephone system. I've answered a lot of questions from my colleagues in other small businesses who are considering moving to VOIP, so I thought I'd share our experience using VOIP.

Here at Urban Insight we offer developers the choice of Windows, Mac or Linux as their primary development environment. Increasingly, team members are choosing Mac notebooks. Securing a Mac notebook is a trade-off between ensuring good security, and enabling the functionality required by developers. Here's our 15-step checklist for setting up Mac OS X notebooks.

After you finish building your new Drupal website, you have to launch it. Typically this means you'll need to make some DNS changes to point your domain name at your new site.

As the resident DNS guy, I'm often helping with the process of managing Domain Name System (DNS) changes. This usually involves making updates to a nameserver -- a server that maps your human-recognizable domain name to a numeric identifier, typically an IP address.