News

Tapping Into The Awesomeness

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 05:50:21 +0000

In fact, I’m that’s what I’m naming my next Yacht (once the Awesomeville™ marketing deal goes through, or when I get back to Planet Awesome):

Espresso. Mac web development, now more productive than caffeine … Your cup of coffee has been the thing that gets you out of bed, the smell of creativity, the taste that makes your day. Soon, Espresso will deliver something better than a caffeine boost. Coming soon to a Mac near you! —MacRabbit.com

Even though I’ve been cutting down on my GUI intake, trying to get to slim enough for the party on the metal (the bottom layers of the TCP/IP stack where the action is), I still use CSSEdit frequently, because it saves me a lot of time when I step out of Vim back into the GUI-candyland called Leopard for design work.

Because this is an app coming from the creator of CSSEdit, MacRabbit, I have to buy it and try it on GP, plus I’m very impressed with MacRabbit’s awesome swagger. Have a look at their catch phrases, and you’ll see why I’m going to issue them an Awesome Certificate™: macrabbit.com/espresso I’ve highlighted my new favorite catch-phrase on a screenshot I uploaded to my flickr awesome-stream:

UW Extension: APPROVED!

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:46:29 +0000

Just today Jordan and I learned we have been accepted into the Ruby Programming Certificate program at the University of Washington! After previously being denied our applications were reviewed again and the instructor chose to admit us based on our technical background and experience.

So excited for this!

Stuff White People Like

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:58:42 +0000

Last week I came across a very funny and interesting satire blog stuffwhitepeoplelike.com. Here is a complete list of topics already covered, such as Indie Music, Frisbee Sports, Shorts, Bottles of Water and Recycling (My personal favorite). The author of the site published a book on this subject already.

Check it out and have a laugh

$100 Box Spring

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:44:19 +0000

Last weekend, I took a trip with my brother and some friends to Portland where I shot this polaroid of my brother outside a mattress shop. I just got my hands on some Spectra film and have had really good results which is bittersweet since polaroid has discontinued its film. I don’t like the flash on this camera and have had the best results without it. Also, I’ve heard some spectra cameras can make multiple exposures which I’m anxious to try.

UW Extension: DENIED!

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 18:28:10 +0000

Towards the end of August Jordan and I applied for the Ruby Programming Certificate program at the University of Washington.

Unfortunately this week we learned that we were not going to be accepted into the program. The reason was because we didn’t have proficiency in an object oriented programming language. They don’t count scripting languages.. we were told they are looking for experience in a high level programming language such as C++ or Java.

We’ve been communicating with the program director and hope to still be admitted into the program. If this doesn’t work out, I’m planning on doing the Free Online Ruby on Rails Course offered by BuildingWebApps.com

I’ll let you know if we end up getting in.. I sure hope we do!

Viral Marketing

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:13:00 +0000

I’ve noticed over the last few years that a lot of record labels have started to use the internet for viral marketing as a way to promote their artists. In an era where music can be downloaded at the push of a button this seems to be a great way to keep fans interested and coming back for more.

Fall Out Boy have done a perfect example of this by creating buzz around something called Citizens for Our Betterment that later turned out to be a very thought out scavenger hunt for fans as a way to promote their new album “Folie A Deux”.

Copeland is another band that recently used this strategy by making websites that looked similar to commonly visited sites like Absolutepunk.net but were actually a website promoting their new album.

I’m excited to see where record labels and other companies take this form of promotion in the coming years. Check out what happens when you type in myspace.com wrong.

New to Glue? Here's some help.

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:49:03 +0000

We release about 50 new accounts weekly on Glue, our simple web & mobile content publishing tool and while we’ve strived to make Glue simple, there’s always a learning curve with new tools.

Here’s some topics to help you get started!

Glue Help Blog Topics

I’ll add to the list over time, so keep checking back. You can also ask questions on our forum and follow us on Twitter for status updates and more.

Have a request for a detailed help topic? I’d gladly put it together for you, just email me at info@gluenow.com with your request.

Tell It To The Volcano

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 19:00:30 +0000

Be prepared for the latest MerchSquad store. The band Miniature Tigers just signed up and the store launches next week!

The sound coming from this trio has been described as a mix of Pinkerton-era Weezer, Ben Kweller, and the Beach Boys. There’s a ton of good reviews on these guys so check them out! The store launches with a Limited Edition CD of their debut full length, Tell it to the Volcano. The Limited edition of 1000 copies, each individually number-stamped comes boxed in an Arigato-Pak, printed on a 150-year-old letterpress!

Guess-the-google

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:02:54 +0000

I found an entertaining game that everyone should check out. Guess-the-google is a simple flash game that reads in photos from images.google.com based on a search term you have to guess. What I like about this game is how it shows how user friendly companies can get free advertising. With Google’s attitude of allowing people to use their backends (APIs) to build other web applications. They not only created a following of supporters but a group of people that are basically performing free advertisements all over the internet, like this game.

How to setup svnX and use Subversion in OS X

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:03:20 +0000

Steps

Install a Subversion client. I used the compiled DMG from Martin Ott.
Install svnX
Start svnX and you should see two windows, Working Copies and Repositories. Enter you login information and location for your Subversion server under the repositories window and double click it in the list to launch.
Once it has opened, click on the main directory for the files you wish to edit and click the svn checkout button on top.
This will bring up a window where you can select the place to export the latest repository.
Now in your Working copies add in the location of that latest repository on your computer and open it.
A window should open a working copy of the latest repository, I turn off “Flat Mode” & “Smart Mode” when I am working.
You should be able to do all the normal SVN functions from here.

I am So Awesome Man!

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:40:49 +0000

I am So Awesome Man! I was born on Planet Awesome™, and after monitoring your planet through the 1980’s and 1990’s (Your Time) we have concluded (what has been our general feeling all along) that your planet is Awesome. After determining that a planet and its inhabitants meet a certain criteria for being awesome through a process called “The Planetary Probationary Awesomeness Discovery Period”, we travel to your planet for vacation to partake in the awesomeness, and share some of the awesomeness that we enjoy back on Planet Awesome. I’ve just arrived recently, landing in a small town in the United States. I rather not disclose the name at this time, seeing that I’m in the process of creating a marketing arrangement for the town to be renamed Awesomeville™ in a deal similar to the one of Half.com (see: designobserver.com article), and others—this is how I plan to pay for my expenses while here (Awesomelings are hard workers just like you Earthlings). I understand that this Awesomeville™ deal may be ways off, so I have decided to create a social network with my friends, Squad Studios.

Where do I find you So Awesome Man? – If you have mental communication technology, as we do on Planet Awesome™, you can look outside on a clear night when the stars and moon are shining bright and think of me I will open a communication channel with you, like mental Bluetooth, and we can shoot the breeze. However, I realize that your technologies, although awesome, may not have the ability yet to interface with ours, so I have set up some Earth-native-systems for now. I might have missed some important communication systems or channels for this festival you Earth people are calling “Web 2.0”, so please feel free to help me out by sending me an invite or friend-request.

iamsoawesomeman.com
1800AWESO.ME – my number
flickr.com/people/soawesomeman
twitter.com/soawesomeman
you can find me here at the SquadBlog.com
Soon I will launch a new social network with Squad, were we can become best buddies, and do awesome things.

I have used an image from Nasa to give you a perspective of where Planet Awesome™ is, it is not exactly accurate, but similar enough visually that I thought it was appropriate. I have read the guidelines of Nasa image use, and believe that I’m using the image accordingly. I’m not attributing the image to Pingnews.com, however I did find it via Pingnews.com on flickr, but pingnews is neither the creator nor the owner of these materials.

AYSABTU: All Your Social Are Belong To Us

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:29:02 +0000

I’ve decided to create a social network with Squad, so the first logical awesome question to answer was: what to call it? Back on Planet Awesome™, we’ve had many laughs at what you Earthlings call memes, for instance, we have a creature with a similar resemblance to your cats, except they can talk and are extremely sarcastic as are your lol cats as seen on http://icanhascheezburger.com, and when that meme started they were very excited, until they found out that the cats were mute, and being exploited. Memes are awesome, so when thinking of names for our new social network, the all your base are belong to us! meme came into mind, and it just felt right. I put my awesome skills to work and came up with a couple awesome variations on the AYBABTU (youtube link) meme:

AYSABTU: All Your Social Are Belong To Us™
AYAABTU: All Your Awesome Are Belong To Us™

And finally the name of our new social network:

RBLNG2.us
Social Awesome Network™

This is going to be an awesome place to test out some of the new Glue features that Squad is developing on PrivateBeta

E*TRADE Mobile Pro exclusively for BlackBerry

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 22:32:17 +0000

Wow this is sick.. I just downloaded this earlier this week and was super impressed. This is by far the best blackberry application I have ever seen. With this app, you can get real time streaming stock quotes, view stock market summaries & news, log into your account, place trades, check your watch list of stocks & transfer money!

The app is free, just go to etrade.com/mobile and follow the download instructions. You don’t have to have an etrade account to use it! Only if you want to trade, check account balances, etc. Otherwise you can use it to get quotes or read market news.

Here are a few tasty screens to feast your eyes. If you know me and want to see a real life demo let me know!

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Travel Photos

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:19:49 +0000

Hey everybody! I’m back from a summer in Europe. I took a slew of photos and travelled through some not so distant lands by train, plane, and even boat… (well… boats by sea) I am still in the process of posting more photos online so stay tuned. I’ll be posting mainly at http://nonbreakablespace.com.

[glue-cut]

Livestation

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 23:23:58 +0000

When I moved in to my apartment a few months ago I decided not to get cable since I’m hardly home so I find myself watching my favorite TV shows on HULU or buying them off of iTunes.

But now there is a new application available called Livestation . It’s designed to distribute live telivision and radio broadcasts over a peer-to-peer data network. It even allows you to flip through different stations just like a regular TV.

Livestation is still pretty new so not all of the standard channels are available yet but new ones are being added regularly.

Its available for both Mac and Windows users and read that they are thinking of making a mobile version for the iPhone.

Glue: The New Mobile Interface Design for iPhone

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:03:06 +0000

Out of all our users on Glue: our simple web & mobile publishing tool, over half are iPhone users. Squad recently built a John Mayer iPhone voting site and an experimental iPhone tool for some fun and experience. (View these on iPhone)

This gave us a perfect opportunity to share our design experience and love for the iPhone with the Glue community.

Designing and building layouts for the iPhone is quick since you only have to test it in Mobile Safari. For Glue, our plan is to quickly revamp the iPhone design & interface to release about one page a week. We started with the login screen and we’ll be releasing the “Overview” page in the very near future.

Check out these before and after screen shots of the login page on the iPhone.

[glue-cut]

We opted to remove a few elements to keep things simple. First we nixed the “Remember Me” feature. It seemed obvious you’d want Glue to remember you, especially when you’re on a mobile device. We also got rid of the submit button as well. It wasn’t necessary since the keyboard offers a nice blue “GO” button and you must use the keyboard to login. Removing these two elements makes for a much cleaner page and doesn’t suggest that you need to hide the keyboard to continue. We also retooled our alert messages to display over the Glue logo since the alert should have more importance than the logo.

Here are some additional screens of the Glue iPhone login page with alerts & keyboard in vertical and horizontal formats.

As I mentioned before, the Glue “Overview” will be page is next and I’ll be sure to update you when it’s live and walk you through some of our design decisions for that page.

Glue is a free web and mobile publishing service that allows you to simply update your content to multiple websites. Sign up for an account to see for yourself or to learn more watch the Glue Demo Video: Add & Publish Content in Ten Minutes!

If you have any comments I’d love to hear them, just email me at jordan.dobson@madebysquad.com.

Google Adwords: A Gateway To Advertising

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:05:57 +0000

Recently I was playing around with Google Adwords. I’ve always been on the publisher side of advertising, but lately I’ve been researching more of the advertiser side for certain projects.

Google starts you out with a ‘starter edition’ of their Adwords system. This allows a new user the ability to slowly process and understand the Google advertising system, how it works and most importantly how to set it up effectively for your business.

Once you have successfully setup an Adwords campaign, the system tracks your usage and offers you helpful tips on how to further customize your campaign to yield better results. There are plenty of articles, how-to’s and other bits of info to quickly and easily guide you through the initial setup and go process. I thought that it was a very good idea to start users out with a simple setup of a what can be very complex tool. Once the users are acclimated to the starter edition, they have the option to ‘upgrade to standard edition’.

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The upgrade is free but is at the expense of not being able to revert back to the starter edition. Users are told several times that opting to the next level is a one directional move which (to me) makes me think a lot more if its something I really want (or need) to do. I think this forced thought process is good because of this. You sometimes will have users upgrade just because they can – not because they need to. For a small advertiser that is just starting out and is pleased with the results yielded so far that users may not wish to upgrade and risk loosing the simplicity of the starter edition.

After I poked around with the starter edition and felt myself wanting and looking for more, I choose to upgrade to the standard edition. Only then was it that I really discovered the genius of the starter edition. Be there, on my screen was a ridiculous amount of links, icons, tabs, etc all just asking to be clicked. I took a second and evaluated the screen and the options presented to me, and carefully selected the next links I clicked on. Good thing there was this nice message to help guide me along:

“You’ve successfully graduated to the Standard Edition of AdWords. Congratulations! Your ad is now running in a new Standard Edition campaign. Please visit What should a newcomer know about Standard Edition? to get started. (You may also want to visit the complete Adwords Learning Center.) We’ll keep these links here for two weeks, just in case.”

Pretty awesome. I am loving this even more. The way that my experience is helpfully guided in a seemingly complex world of online advertising I feel safe and confident in my endeavor. But it doesn’t stop there!

Like one might guess, in traditional Google style there is way way more available to you in terms of advertising your business than simply Adwords. Lower on my screen I saw a few links that peaked my interest. These were as follows:

Television Campaigns – Now you can place ads on television
Audio Campaigns – Increase the impact of your AdWords campaigns with radio advertising
Print Campaigns – Now you can place ads in newspapers

This I couldn’t believe. The fact that through this one interface I can manage all of these advertising channels? More yet Google was going to help me ‘Create your first audio campaign’ or ‘Create your first television campaign’. Now that was just awesome. But the question shifts to ‘Yea – but how well does this work’. as we know.. its not all presentation, there also has to be equal if not greater execution. The results of which tests I will have to save for a later day.

Exploration of Jupiter's Moon Europa by 2019

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:35:15 +0000

I recently found a video of Bill Stone giving a speech about going to one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa. First a little on Bill Stone. This guy is known as one of the world’s foremost expeditionary cavers. He has explored some of the world deepest caves and not always in person. He helped create The Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer which is an autonomous underwater vehicle.

This AUV was the first robot to use SLAM or Simultaneous localization and mapping. SLAM is a technique used by robots and autonomous vehicles to build up a three-dimensional map within an unknown environment while at the same time keeping track of their current position. Through the use of more than 100 sensors, 36 onboard computers, and 16 thrusters and actuators, DEPTHX decides where to swim, which samples to collect, and how to get home, based on maps that the probe draws during each dive. The use of around 100,000 lines of behavioral autonomy code helps with the decision making. This technology helps DEPTHX to become essentially a field micro biologist. DEPTHX proved itself by finding several new classes of microbes in a dive into one of deepest water-filled sinkholes here on Earth. This is one smart robot. Now hopefully its smart enough to find life on another planet. Which brings us back to Europa.

Many scientist believe that there is a water ocean that exists beneath Europa’s surface that may harbor life. We plan on sending a probe to Europa and dropping a DEPHTX like AUV into this ocean to explore. Even though sunlight does not reach below the surface of this moon there is still hope for life. Sunlight was thought to be a key ingredient to life until the 1970’s. Then we found bacteria and little creatures sustaining and thriving in environments completely devoid of sunlight using a process called Chemosynthesis. So this all makes for a very compelling case that we are not alone. It’s really exciting to know that in our lifetime we could see a mission to Europa and that if we are lucky, will find life out there on another planet.

The last half of the video Bill talks about what we need to do in order to see common access into space and to further space exploration. Partly by mining the moon for propellant. To mine the moon for resources and demonstrate they can form the basis for a profitable business. Which he plans to do in 7 years. Sign me up! For more on entrepreneurship in space check out a speech by Peter Diamandis.

How to setup you own secure Wiki page

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:57:03 +0000

I have a massive amount of different things I do at my job. It is hard to remember where everything is and how to do everything the best way. So I decided to start my own Wiki and start writing out how I do everything for quick reference. If this works well, I can give access out to other people I work with. After that I can forward them to a Wiki page when they ask a question. That way, when they need something from me they can just check the Wiki first.

Now because some of the information I plan to write in here is slightly sensitive (I won’t be writing passwords or anything that important). I did my best to secure my wiki, so unless you are a register user (which you can’t register). You can not view any page, unless I allow it in the code to be viewed by all.

I used MediaWiki , You can check out my custom setup how to in my new Wiki

Good Google Ads

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:23:02 +0000

For a long time I swear I never clicked on any ads online. I wondered who actually clicks on these things? Well for some reason semi recently I feel like there have been some clever, new approaches to text link ads – specifically Google Gmail Ads that run up top with the web clips.

I have been keeping a record of the ones I see and click on, to see if there is any pattern to my clicks. Here they are. Would you click on any of these gems?

Upgrade Secret #7 – FirstClassFlyer.com – People who sit up front don’t have the money. They have the brains.
GPS Vehicle Tracker – $79 – www.ProofPronto.com – Is he really working late? Did she really go to the mall?
Texas Mormons Confusion – newsroom.lds.org – Mormons are not polygamists Meet the real Texas Mormons
The Purple Running Skirt – www.SkirtGoddess.com – New! From atalanta. Say good-bye to chaffing forever.
$5000 to $50000 Websites – BHWDS.com – We Design Only Hi Priced Websites Flash and Action Designed Websites

That last one is a riot and I actually discovered it today. I felt like emailing them to see if they really take themselves seriously.