Monthly Archives: April 2010

Twitter being used as a box-office sales crystal ball

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I think it is a definite reflection on the direction that social marketing is taken when Twitter is being used to predict box office hits, misses and general forecast number, with very good accuracy considering the nature of the subject, the old tweet.

As i read the BBC i saw an article about Computer scientists from the HP lab of social computing analysed about 3 million tweets from about 25 movies. First off it is great to see more quantitative data, as it starts to give a better handle on the larger scale influences social networking has on our lives. So the fact corporations like HP have taken the impact so seriously they have allocated resources and an entire department, dedicated to trends and scientific analysis of the Facebook,   Foursquare and others on our lives outside of the web.

image via flickr

Dr. Bernardo Huberman who is the head of the social computing lab at HP noted something important, all-be-it slightly intuitive, Continue reading →

Microsoft getting deeper into jQuery and open source

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Image representing Microsoft as depicted in Cr...
Image via CrunchBase

I much like every other developer has cursed Microsoft for bringing the ever, non-standards compliant Internet Explorer Browser suite to the world. Fortunately the pain of dealing with Microsodt based browsers has lessened but some pain at times is undeniable.

When Microsoft first included jQuery as part of its .Net framework stack with Visual Studio and ASP MVC as of version x it was a move that was essentially unavoidable. Their own platformwasn’t as robust and jQuery and the ease, as well as rate it was growing was eating the competition like Scriptaculous, and Mootools alive. Continue reading →

New Youtube channel!

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After a long time i finally decided the time was right to setup a new youtube channel to put out the a lot more videos. I think its personally a faster way to blog, easier to understand and not to mention the SEO benefits.

I think that i will keep the content on the channel primarily web development based, and this time if i am going to be presenting at the next Seattle PHP meetup again i can always put it online.

Well do enjoy the first post, it is another jQuery and Google Maps video, as i have noted before, i am amazed at the the number of people who end up here searching for both jQuery and Google Maps but to keep them coming here is link to the youtube channel, and check out the post if you are looking for another plugin. Continue reading →

jQuery and Google Maps with the jMapping Plugin

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It seems one of the highest keyword searches in Google is “jQuery Google Maps” so i figured i may as well continue and make a series of plugins that make Google Maps and jQuery play together.

This time is the jMapping Google Maps plugin. So here is the usual skinny on the features and background:

Who?

Plugin Name:  jMapping
Plugin URL:  http://vigetlabs.github.com/jmapping/
Author: Brian Landau (brian.landau@viget.com)
Github: http://github.com/vigetlabs/jmapping
Download: http://wiki.github.com/vigetlabs/jmapping/downloads Continue reading →

Include CiviCRM functions from standalone PHP script

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With CiviCRM being such a light, flexible and powerful alternative to use, and as an Open Source utility it makes it even better. Occasionally you will need to include functions, and extend the API.

There is a Wiki that is pretty well documented, but even i will admit it will take some getting into, but once you are going then you can do a lot, and i mean a LOT.

Granted that not everyone uses Drupal, or Joomla, and if you are using a

framework like Codeigniter, CakePHP, Symfony, Plone or even another CMS like Continue reading →

Bootstrap and include Drupal from outside the Drupal root

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Working on a site that needed to get some pretty detailed membership information as well as some payment processing the natural solution seemed like the Drupal based CiviCRM .  However, there was one problem and that was the CMS they had managing the rest of the site was actually in Worpdress, so i would need to bootstrap Drupal.

CiviCRM
Image via Wikipedia

Ideally if there was a CRM plugin with payment processing and some of the advanced features of CiviCRM then this would have been the natural choice. But seeing as none existed CiviCRM was the choice.

As a result we would also want to use some of the Drupal classes, methods, and functions so we needed to bootstrap Drupal outside of the Drupal root. Continue reading →

WordPress 3.0 Beta Released, get it while its hot!

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The long wait is now over, WordPress have announced via their blog that the new version WordPress 3.0 Beta is now available for download by the public. This is pretty exciting considering that we will also being seeing Drupal 7 some time soon too.

The final version of WordPress 3.0 is due out later in WordPress, but in a move to release early could also be beneficial for WordPress and the community for a number of reasons: Continue reading →