noinput.net | plug it in

Sometimes a project comes your way and you know you were meant for it. Regardless of the cost, the time it takes, or the dedication, you really just know you were meant for the job and feel humbled to play your part, no matter how big or small it may be. That’s how I’ve felt since I was offered to take the reigns of helping The Salvation Army to streamline their management system.

I don’t want to go into detail about what they currently have in place, but it’s sort of sad. Very old school, not hardly usable at all, and it runs quite a bit of their operation. We met with them yesterday and they are the nicest, most genuine people you’ll talk to. What a great team they have, all dedicating their efforts to help those in need. The least we can do is get them running on a usable, and extendable system which can actually save them time and not hinder it.

More to come as we get the plan figured out, but needless to say, I’m thrilled to work with them and know the end result is going to benefit more than rent to my landlord, it will continue to keep those who fought for our freedom, alive.

After quite a bit of work, a few months of planning & and a lot of code, I’m excited to announce that yesterday we released the new version of whatsopen.com

Earlier in the year, my man Jason Schultz asked me to work with a fellow developer Brian Hall to release the first version, which became more of a proof-of-concept and PR site. It was fun and simple, we had a good time getting it running and listening to feedback, however we knew that it was only a step towards the final if we really wanted it to shine.

Shortly after that, Brian moved to Guadalajara, Mexico to do some amazing things which we’re all jealous and proud of him for. From that point Jason approached me with the concept that we could take our site to that next level, and I was in. We then started planning, building, designing and building our strategic plans out from scratch. In the end you can see we had a great time with design, and figured that form didn’t only have to follow function these days, they can be just as awesome and work together to break out of the web 2.0 trendy crap. That being said, we’re pretty happy about the final product.

To switch gears to the technical side for a minute, I want to explain some of what’s powering the experience which I built out.

• The design is pretty intense with a lot of transparencies and web-blending modes, I guess you can call it. We did this for a reason. Rather than adhering to every strict standard and loosing the fun & and intention for 90% of our viewers, we decided to go for it.
• When you first visit the site, it will find you, and give you a listing of open entertainment based locations near-by. Typically its accurate up to the closest metropolitan city away, but from my testing and tweaks it should be fairly accurate unless you’re on a corporate web line.
• Based on your location or where you are searching, and what time of day/night it is, we customize the display. For example, search for Los Angeles, CA & then San Francisco, CA and watch the header. Additionally if you do this in day/night, you’ll see a nice change to make you feel at home. Right now we’re live for California and expanding around the country.
• Additionally, based on location, I’m setting your local time. It still needs some refining, but it’s working well. Since our concept is that you’re a local anywhere you go, you should be living in the now. No one cares about looking up listings that are closed or gone because it’s the weekend, so why not enjoy just seeing whats happening, right now.

That’s only a portion of what I got running to really make the site work how we vision it. There’s a lot more we plan on enhancing, adding and refining down the road. Not to mention the API which powers the iPhone app we’re patiently twitting our thumbs for (Apple, where are you.)

Hope you enjoy finding whatsopen.com in your area, let me know what you think.

A few weeks back Tim & I along with The Duarte Group headed up and launched a new widget for Yuuzoo Media. We created two versions of the widget, one that can be fully customized based on your media preferences and another for facebook.

 

They had the need to promote their Mobile Media, generate more sales and provide a fun and websavvy way to spread the word. We came up with this super-slick system for presentation and so-far it’s been a hit.

 

Right now you can create a custom widget in one step and then immediately share it on any social site you choose thanks to our working with the clearspring wrapper to help us handle the viral aspect of things.  For example to my right here, I chose a few categories of media I like, and grabbed the embed code right from the widget.  If you like the same things I do, you can post this same version right to your facebook, myspace, iGoogle, etc. acct, or you can get your own.

 

I built an entire backend system to not only track what’s most popular but to provide the media for the widget and a CMS to allow for the management.

 

Ajax search with media administration

Media Add/Updates with hot preview & server removal

We had a good time on this project and realize that widgets are the new in-thing. Based on the stats, people agree it’s only doing better. We’ve generated almost 500 custom widgets in the last couple weeks and theres been well over 2,600 installs for the Facebook app.  Go make one right now.   

So here’s a little something that I’m really happy to announce, the public launch of Eco-Safe.com. My man Jason Schultz pulled me in on this project to help him develop out a really hot system we could pioneer off of the concept to bring environmental responsibility to the web. This project on like everything I work on with him has sofar been a hit, and it’s a real treat to see such a great success in just a few days of going live. Tim did an amazing job on the widget and the site was designed by Dave. Always a honor to work with these guys.

The site has gone through many revisions and we decided that the best way to rock this idea is wide-open and free. Anyone can jump on the site, grab the code to install the Merit Badge on their site (like you may have seen on the sidebar here), and you have sustainable options. You can Email the page to yourself, Send yourself a PDF of the page, or download the page as a PDF. Nice and simple, and doesn’t cost you the price of paper and ink. Give it a try below, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised how we managed to make it easier then printing to a PDF.

As of right now over 22K Merit Badges have been served up and in just a day and half over 200 people have chosen the Eco-Safe method of print 2.0 as I like to call it. Today a few big websites asked about installing the badge on their home. It’s taken off in the blogosphere as well, quite a few people have already put it on their blogs.. and thats just a couple.

I’ve also built a pretty extensive backend system for it that will soon offer a user to login, claim their domain, and show stats and reporting about which pages their users value enough to print 2.0 the pages. We figured this offers something you can’t even get with Google Analytics, and should be a big hit.

If you value things like this, I encourage you to install this badge on your site and embrace the fact that we need to all do what we can to protect the world we’re so badly abusing. I’m glad to say I was a part of this project, and looking forward to a lot more awesome ways of pushing the web to work for us in a new and unique way. Spread the word.

Digg this!

Check out my newest project. WhatsOpen.com. Myself and another developer have been working on this project for a few and it launched a public beta just after Christmas.

Anyone who is familiar with google maps [mashups] will know the basic idea of this site, but it goes one step further, and tells you what’s currently open, closed and 24 hour joints for a late-night fix. Being still in beta, currently only available in CA, soon we’ll have major metro based states for america and a few international locations. Register with a quick account and you can post your own favorite spots that are instantly searchable. Soon to come you can rate places, edit them wiki style and even upload photos from your camera phone.

Im also working on a WAP and Ajaxy iPhone version. Let me know what you think, there’s still a lot we plan on refining and adding.

Sometimes I debate the idea of how much it was worth taking freelance projects again. Working a 9 hour day then sitting in front of the glowing box programming till 1am isn’t always the best way to spend an evening (or week or month), especially now that I get to see my girl every night when I get home. But I do have to appreciate all that extra cash at the end of the month that I would have spent clicking through flickr or sitting on my ass killing time for.

Like this current project I’m working on. I literally built an algorithm for this project. Don’t ask me how, I’m still a bit lost on the time between where I said I knew how to do it and the time it took to realize I hadn’t a clue where to start *chuckle*, but hey that’s the fun in it. What I love is how we launch the site this friday and today they tell me the logic needs to change. Not like I’ve invested 25+ hours into this 1100 line code file (no comments yet) or anything. This is why God invented overtime. At an increased rate. With no guarantee of validity due to last minute changes.

Did I mention I love the creative copyright under pressure?

So here’s a pretty sad story.

I was finishing up the work week last friday and all was going fine, typical friday. All of a sudden I get an order confirmation email from a website I did well over 2 years ago and took down by the preference of the client. At first I didn’t know what to think, hell, I didn’t even know the application still worked. hahaha. But then another came in, and another, and another. So I looked at the order details name and realized that it was the clients son that was filling these out. Right after that, an email came in that deja-vue’d me back a few years of a small debug script that did an email test and shot some DB variables out to check if all was working well. So I came to the conclusion that this dude made a copy of the site and re-set it up on another server.

I shot him an email and he replied back explaining how he was testing it to see if it still worked and all, and started talking how now hes an ASP programmer thanks to me! haha, i asked him what he was talking about and i remembered that i was giving him some pointers back in the ASP days and helped him learn his first bit of code. the dude was like 12 years old when we first met! He showd me some recent stuff he did, wrote some binaries and server apps and I couldn’t believe it. Hell when i was 12 i was sitting on BBS’ and making ASCII pictures with COM proggies on my 9600baud modem

Anywhoo, long story short, he basically told me that he’s re-setting up the website for his dad and doing a lot of code (that i wrote) re-config for him and they’re looking at re-launching it soon (obviously not with me because his son has his own server…)

Do I laugh at this or cry? *blink* ahh yea, life is good…