Blog

I've kinda disliked Joomla's content management for a while. Main reason: there isn't, by default, a mechanism to link from one article to another in the content management system (unlike SilverStripe - love it!). Until now, enter Linkr.  The most amazing little tool for finding links in your Joomla! install and automatically inserting them into your editor.  If you have to use Joomla's content management system, I highly recommend checking it out!

Over and over again, I find myself needing to put text over an image for some reason or another. (Darned designers and their good ideas!)  Recently, I decided to fake it and just cut the image from a designer's PSD and use an image map. I know, I know; I'm bad. It was the quickest way I could think of to get this task done, until the customer wanted different wording and I couldn't track down the PSD.

Recently, as we were wrapping up work on a Social Engine project (stay tuned for more info on that!), we noticed that people who put colorful text art (see below), were unintentionally (or maybe not) breaking the blog comments display.  Really, what it came down to was the over exuberant use of special characters in the word art, specifically single quotes and double quotes. Looking into this a bit further, we noticed if we escaped the incoming text using PHP's htmlspecialchars() function, we'd no longer have this problem. So, for all of you looking for the answer to this question, here you go!

So, we've been using the most amazing editor ever, Coda by Panic Software[http://www.panic.com/coda/] for a little over six months. Amazing, rock solid and well, amazing. This site you're viewing, built in Coda. We heart it...real hard.

After reviewing some site stats today, we've noticed that kurl.it[http://kurl.it/] (our URL shortening service) has been used over 2,200 times (i.e. - people who have clicked on a kurl.it link). Not bad for a small in-house system we set up and haven't been pushing too much (get ready for that to change, though!).  Thanks to everyone who used it and we look forward to providing you some very interesting features in the future.

Recently, Ben & Jerry's, the iconic Vermont ice cream manufacturer decided to re-release one of their flagship product "Chubby Hubby" as "Hubby Hubby" for the month of September in Vermont as a show of support for Freedom To Marry in honor of the Vermont legalization of same-sex marriage. While my general view of the issue doesn't matter (marriage is a church matter, not a matter of the state), I would like to applaud Ben & Jerry and the folks of Vermont for taking progressive stance on the issue. This product change prompted me to ask the lesser controversial question of "When is it acceptible to alter a flagship product to meet a perceived social need?"

"I twittered her, but she won't tweet me back..." Awesome. Too funny!

No, seriously. The rules are simple. We'll select 5 of the first 100 Facebook fans and send you a t-shirt.

So this morning I was working on one of our new projects.  It's a web based iPhone application that among other things uses geolocation.  The latest Safari on the iPhone with the 3.0 update has geolocation abailities built into it, so it was time for me to take them out for a test drive.  Here below is the sample javascript I wrote.  Any of you that enjoy lolcats, or know of some of our inside jokes here at kiveo will probably get a kick out of this.  You don't even have to know programming to enjoy it, I promise.  For those of you programmers out there who might read this.  This code actually works.

As a part of my job and as a way to provide you with information, I'm constantly following Twitter conversations about Social Media and I've noticed that a lot of people are finally getting it, and that a surprising number of people *almost* get it. Like this image from headstreampr.com - a company trying to position themselves within the media-verse as a go-to company for social media and public relations integration. Take a look at the image and see if you can tell what's wrong (hint - just think about my previous post "It's about the conversation[its-about-the-conversation/]"):