Blog

  • Cool Links from SxSWi 2008

    Location Based Interactive Sites for both Mobile and Web:

    • Plundr – the area code based, mobile phone, pirate game
    • Socialight – leave geographic-based post-it notes using your phone.

    Sites with great Community Managers:

    Partition Your Tables with  HiveDB

  • Day 4 Vlog of SxSW 2008

    Secrets.

    Jakob Heuser, Gordon Luk on selling Upcoming to Yahoo, Sarah Cooper on Polyvore, Nikhil Bobb and Natalie Villalobos share secrets after the Post Secret Keynote, An Austenite on What He Thinks About SxSW

  • Day 3 Vlog of SxSW 2008

    Are you Internet Famous?

    • Alice Marwick on status in her “I’m Internet Famous” core conversation.
    • Eric Nakagawa on icanhascheezburger as a project for becoming part of the Web 2.0 crowd

    Tomorrow: Scalability Bootcamp, How to Party on a Monday, and Why didn’t you go to any panels at all?

  • Day 2 Vlog of SxSW 2008

    Breakups 2.0 – Can we make technology that will ease the pain of a breakup?

    SxSW 2008 Day 2 - Joey Hardy

  • Day 1 Vlog of SxSW 2008

    Did you know that bacon is an emotion?

    SxSW2008 Day 1

    Here are some quick clips from:
    1) John Vars, co-founder of Dogster.com
    2) Ted Rheingold, co-founder and Top Dog of Dogster.com
    3) Jakob Heuser, lead developer at GaiaOnline.com

  • Byte Size Gossip At SxSW

    Right now, I’m in a room listening to LisaNova talk about how to quit your day job and vlog, and am watching a Zadi Diaz video, Epic Fu.

    It’s day 2 of my stay in Austin, TX for the SxSW festival, and here’s a quick recap:

    1) Anil Dash won Battledeck II, a parody of corporate pitches contest. His megalomaniac comment, “Give me the applause I deserve,” and his ability to not read the slides got a lot of laughs.

    2) The Valleywag crew was hanging out in the back of the Battledeck II audience.

    3) The Laughing Squid party changed from the Gingerbread to Six to the confusion of many.

  • Quick follow up on JS-Kit

    You can now snag ratings pretty easily. I got this from Lev Walkin who works at js-kit. Here’s an example:

    http://js-kit.com/rating-data.js?
    ref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cyphgen.com&p[0]=/&jx[0]=0

    The first param in the query string is your site URL put through a url-encoder. The 2nd param p[0] is the path to the thing you are rating. In this case just the home page.

    I hope this helps and thanks again, Lev and the folks at js-kit.com

  • Stealing Your Js-kit Ratings for Fun and Profit with Ajax

    Want to steal your js-kit data back now? Get the source.

    Keep reading if you want to learn more about getting your data if it’s hidden in Javascript and can’t be scraped.

    TechCrunch enthusiastically blogged about Js-kit, which TechCrunch bills as “Web 2.0 for lazy people,” more than a year ago. The first time TechCrunch blogged about js-kit’s commenting system, and then the 2nd time, the site blogged about the ratings system.

    Js-kit is great because you just paste two lines of code into your blog or website and then kapow, you have a ratings and/or commenting system with 0 money spent on coders.

    But all your ratings data is hidden in a sea of javascript that cannot be easily scraped.

    Imagine you’re a long-time customer of js-kit. It’s two years later. You need to do some web analytics on the ratings. You’re wondering, “How do I steal all of my data for Js-kit?”

    I emailed Js-kit this past Wednesday asking them to how to access my ratings. So far no word from them.

    But if you’re like me and have watched The Matrix a few too many times, and sometimes dream that you are Neo, then there’s hope for getting your data. I found an easy way to get your Js-kit data that they won’t share with you.

    1) Alter your js-kit ratings code so that it has a dom id.

    Js-kit ratings code looks like this:
    <div class="js-kit-rating" title="" permalink=""></div><script src="http://js-kit.com/ratings.js"></script>

    Change it so that it has a unique id. In this example, I use “js_stuff”:
    <div id="js_stuff" class="js-kit-rating" title="" permalink=""></div><script src="http://js-kit.com/ratings.js"></script>

    2) If you don’t already have it, add prototype.js to your library of scripts. We’ll need prototype’s Ajax class.

    3) Create a javascript function for snagging js-kit’s rating. The gist of this function is to dump the innerhtml of the id, js_stuff, and pass it to a script that parses it and snags the ratings.

    4) Create a script used for parsing the ratings and saving it to a file or database.

    You can see the js-kit rating snagger in action along with source code.

  • A Comparison of PHP Frameworks

    I ran into a great summary comparison of PHP Frameworks. I just started using CodeIgniter because it allows me to rapidly prototype facebook apps.