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A little Folsom Prison Blues
I love music and it definitely inspires me in big ways. Johnny Cash is a legend and Folsom Prison Blues is legendary. I’ve probably heard the song a thousand times but for some reason when I was driving home the other day I really connected with a particular verse. There’s a lot of great lyrics out there but the thing with the Johnny Cash ones is they’re easy to hear. It’s almost like he’s talking rather than singing and most times he’s telling you a story from beginning to end, which makes it all very entertaining. Look I don’t want…
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Facebook in Japan
So I was reading this article on Yahoo finance Facebook Wins Relatively Few Friends in Japan. Wasn’t expecting much but turns out I was wrong. In the end it wasn’t really about Facebook, but instead it’s about Japanese culture, and how it differs from our own. This was the line that made me realize how important this article is:
“Facebook’s Japanese site, for example, allows users to display their blood types, considered an important personality trait here.”…
Amazing huh? The really crazy thing is that up until this point the article had been talking about how Facebook won’t work -
Safari Popup Blocker And Flash AS3
On a recent project we came across an issue where user initiated popups get blocked in Safari when being called by an AS3 Flash app. The issue doesn’t happen in AS2 and I’d not come across it before, but when I did and I researched it I found it was a well documented issue with no solution. Most popup blockers are able to distinguish between a user initiated popup and an automatic one, and this is the case with all browsers with AS2 or all browsers except Safari with AS3. But what do you do if a popup is an…
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Embedding Facebook Share Into Your Site
We’ve got this project going on where users can create their own artwork which is saved to the server as an image, and we want them to be able to post it into Facebook. At first I thought it was going to take some effort and have to use the Facebook Connect API. But I was hoping for something easier, kind of how easy it is on Twitter to just tag a status GET string onto the URL. Then I remembered Facebook recently released… something that does exactly this. It’s all very simple and pretty cool really, check it out
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Marvel Avengers: Greatest Movie Ever
I’m loving what Marvel has been doing lately with their movies. Yes the Spider-man movies have been okay-ish, and sure they screwed up Daredevil something chronic, the Ghost Rider and Punisher movies were terrible (for me as comics they aren’t so hot either), the first Fantastic Four was alright whilst the second sucked, but the X-Men series has been pretty good, and whilst I hated the graphic novel I found the X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie to be pretty great in it’s own way. And though the Ang Lee version of Hulk was a confusing mess we’d rather forget ever existed,…
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Measuring Social Media Efforts
Measuring the success of social media efforts can be automated to a certain extent, but also needs human analysis to really be able to assess the tone and brand positioning across the various targeted social media platforms. There is no industry standard for measurement and ROI but the introduction of standardized measurement by UKOM in the UK may lead to better benchmarks.
Before a campaign starts its goals need to be properly understood:
If the goal is qualitative then we consider the campaign a success if we have been successful in building better relationships… with our key audiences, have been -
Pop Your Facebook Profile Picture
I came across a cool article the other day which had some examples on how to go a little crazy with your Facebook profile picture, so I can’t take full credit for this. In fact I might not be able to take any credit at all, I just got done reading the article when my good friend (and awesome photographer) Doug… was walking by, he had his full set of equipment with him that day and the next thing I knew I was hanging from the drywall down the hall with a flash on either side of me, I’m just
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The Definitive Modal Layer
For the last couple of years we’ve been using modal layers where it made sense, basically most places where we would’ve used pop-ups in the old days, i.e. modal layer is to Web 2.0 what the pop-up was previously. But all the while I never felt like I was able able to lock down any solid way of doing this. Every time the issue came up I’d re-visit the functionality, never overjoyed with my latest implementation, so I never came up with a final solution. Depending on the website I was working with and the libraries they were already using…
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Masters of the Universe – A Web Systems Suite
Okay so this is really fun. Just over four years ago I was working at a popular mortgage company as a back-end Tech Lead and was tasked with developing a PHP web framework to replace the dated and abominable system they currently had in place. Their current “framework” was like the ugly bastard child of an MVC… with grade three burns. In other words it was total shit (all these years later and I still seem to harbor a great hate for it). The web had been advancing quite nicely and we were now looking at the birth of Web