The project involved doing a complete rewrite of the code, which was originally written in PHP, and rewriting it in Ruby on Rails. The functionality of the application is more or less the same as it was before, except for a few added features that are primarily in the back-end to give Darren an easier way of administering the whole thing. We also updated the design from the old look to adapt the new look of the new ProBlogger design.

One of the primary reasons for doing this project is to give the back-end code a lot more extensibility, which is key in projects where you want to one day expand and improve on. Now that the thing’s written in Rails, there are a ton of possibilities which can be followed for the Job Board, some of which will be explored. So stay tuned for cool, new features to come!

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I built this because I wanted to see when I made my WordPress posts, in a more graphical interface. I already used Google Calendar, so I would have loved to see my posts right in my calendar.

You can do that with my plugin - no configuration necessary! Just download it from me, upload it to your server, and then activate it in your WordPress plugins page. Then, navigate to http://www.kinggary.com/?ical (basically visit your blog, and then add ?ical at the end of the URL) to see the calendar). Then add this URL as an external iCal calendar to whatever calendar application you are using. In Google Calendar, for example, go to ‘Add’ and then ‘Add by URL’, and then just add the URL to the input box and hit Enter! And it’s done!

If you want to only show posts from a specific category, then add &category= to the end of the URL, with the category’s name at the end. An example would be http://www.kinggary.com/?ical&category=web

Download the plugin

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It’s no secret that many will feel a twinge of anger to know that millionaires, meaning people with, oh, $2.5 million in the bank, for instance, are still continuously worried about their financial well-being. Part of this stems from jealousy, which is natural, and part of it comes from the fact that you can’t help but feel sorry for these people who continue to work 70-80 hour work weeks even when they can retire to a life of relative comfort.

On the other hand, after reading several posts talking about how they basically “can’t possibly imagine how one could continue to work so much when they have millions of dollars in the bank”, I was reading a paragraph in a particular post, which says:

It is disappointing that the NYT article is so one-sided in its decision to portray rich SV folks in such a shallow light. Not that what they wrote isn’t true, and not that I feel any differently. I just have a hunch there are at least a few people reading that piece, feeling frustrated that their charitable efforts, good work ethics, family values, etc are being ignored. Unfortunately, I think the article was all-too-easy to write and the story they tell was all-too-easy to substantiate.

I would have to agree with this, in that I’m sure there are an equal number of Valley millionaires who have since retired after getting their fair share of wealth.

It seems to me that the people who were profiled in the NY Times article are the type of people who simply enjoy working (i.e. workaholics). People with these characteristics exist everywhere, and it’s not surprising that the elite group of millionaires would have its fair share of them.

If put in very simple terms, I would say that there’s one group of wealthy Valley people who got their millions by being at the right place at the right time (i.e. Broadcast.com and Mark Cuban comes to mind, which sold to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion; the website is now defunct), and then there’s another group of people who would work as hard as possible no matter how much money they had, which I would say are the people who were profiled in this article.

It’s actually entertaining and annoying at the same time to see people from the Valley who continuously strive to make their first million (I’ve seen my fair share), maybe because their neighbor has reached the $10 million ‘milestone’. Up here in Toronto, at least in the neighborhood that I live in, people are very down-to-Earth. I keep my stress levels low by only talking ‘business’ when I’m at my computer and at certain times of the day; I wouldn’t know how to manage my life otherwise. (The next time I meet someone who is a workaholic and expects me to be one, I’m going to tell them to ‘chill the f**k down’.)

Anyways, I find it disturbing, and yet, refreshing, to find that at least these people are people who are deserving of their millions, and who (at least claim that they) enjoy working 70-80 work weeks. I know I sure as hell wouldn’t!

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A large number of the applications that I’ve built from the ground up with a partner (who wishes to remain nameless) consists of one group, which are basically TV shows, and another group, which contain several sports.

Some of our television shows applications include gems such as Dane Cook, Family Guy, and Harry Potter, just to name a few, with the first two reaching nearly 200,000 users each.

Our sports offerings include major sports including baseball, football, and hockey, with each passing the 100,000 users mark just recently.

The great thing about having a network of applications instead of one or two big ones is that they all help each other out in increasing the number of users for each one because of the heavy inter-linking going on between all of them.

We’ve been pushing out major updates every few days since we first launched these applications, and it’s been a wild ride so far. As long as we continue to please our users, I have no doubt that our growth rate will stay steady for quite some time.

With every new feature that we add to our applications, the stickiness gets better and better, which results in users returning to our applications, looking for more things to do.

So, that’s that. It’s what I’ve been working on recently. And hopefully some good will come out of it.

(A full list of all of our applications are listed at the top of every one of our applications, so if you feel like checking them out, then install one of our Sports applications for our sports apps, and one of our TV Shows applications for our TV Show apps.)

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Developing for the Facebook platform is very different from other environments that I have worked with, including vBulletin when I was building forums, and WordPress when I was working at b5media, a blog network.

vBulletin made it easy to create new pages powered by the system by simply including a particular file in the new files that you created. A few more steps were required to keep the whole look-and-feel of your existing design into new pages.

WordPress made it even easier to create new pages by creating them right from the administration interface directly in your browser, without requiring you to ever muck in code.

Facebook actually, in a way, makes development somewhat more difficult because the results that you get in your browser isn’t always what you intended it to be when writing the HTML for it, or in some cases, the FBML offered by Facebook.

Certain tags are banned, whereas functionality is unique in certain areas. For example, you can only have one link in certain places such as the title of every Mini-Feed item that appears in a user’s profile, and Facebook offers its own set of tags, called FBML tags, which do Facebook-specific things such as returning the name of the current user.

Some things that I enjoy about working on the Facebook platform include the fact that I don’t have to build an entire navigational system from scratch. I don’t have to create an application’s look and feel because Facebook already provides that. Any navigation that I introduce that doesn’t use Facebook’s default navigational system provided by FBML will more likely confuse users more than help them, because to them, they are still entirely within Facebook when using Facebook Applications, and nowhere else.

Another great thing with the Facebook Platform is that an authentication system is provided right out of the box, with users who have profiles that are already filled out with tons of useful information that can greatly richen their experience with your application.

It’s been interesting developing applications so far, and hopefully I’ll be able to reveal some of the stuff that I’ve built sometime soon!

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After building this, I found a post that was made over at TechCrunch which discusses about how it would be interesting if WordPress could have similar functionality to what Stumble Upon provides, so I hope that this fulfills that need.

What it does

It basically adds functionality to your WordPress blog which allows visitors to view a randomly selected post on your blog, with a higher probability of choosing popular posts, and with the option of only showing recent posts. You also have the option of giving recent posts more chances to be shown to visitors if you think that your most recent posts are more interesting to your visitors.

Example

To see how this works, click on the links in the sidebar on this page which say “random post” and “random recent post”, which are right below the search box. They are self-explanatory.

How to install

The plugin does have a requirement, which is the Popularity Contest WordPress plugin (install it like any other plugin; just upload it to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory and then activate it in your admin panel), so go and install that first.

When that’s done, download and install my plugin like a normal plugin, too. And you’re done! No configuration is required.

There are two important links that you need to link to. They are:

• http://www.yourblog.com/?stumble
  • Replace yourblog.com with your own blog’s URL, of course. This URL will show the visitor a random post but it gives a higher weight to popular posts, which increases the chances that visitors will land on a popular post. This is a really cool way of hand-holding your visitors to the great posts on your blog, without linking them to specific posts.
• http://www.yourblog.com/?stumble&date
  • Again, replace yourblog.com with your own blog’s URL. This URL will point your visitor to a random post, again, based on the post’s popularity, but also, based on how recent the post is. More recent posts will have a higher chance of being shown to your visitors. This is especially useful for blogs where posts are more news- and events-based, such as TechCrunch. It is more interesting to read posts that have been written in the past month rather than posts that have been written a few years ago on blogs such as these.

Anyways, please, PLEASE let me know how well this works for you. I have only tested this on a handful of blogs, and so far, it has worked great on them. But, if this plugin brings up posts on YOUR blog that are not popular at all, then do let me know! I’ll try my best to fix them ASAP.

So, I hope you enjoy this plugin!

History

• 07/07/15 - 1.0
  • plugin release

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First of all, here’s how it will look like in the end (I’ve hidden some plugins that I’d prefer not to appear in the screenshot):

I can’t call this a WordPress Plugin because it requires that you modify some files instead of having me just give you a file to upload and active. The reason for this is because WordPress doesn’t make it easy for me to implement this functionality any other way. What this means is that you have to modify one file yourself (which is completely harmless!) and whenever you upgrade your installation of WordPress, you’ll have to re-implement this modification again.

I submitted this modification as a patch to WordPress and they may or may not implement it as a built-in feature - who knows? If not, then it’d at least be nice of them to give me a hook to use so I can convert this modification into a plugin.

Anyways, on with the show!

Installing this modification

If you know how to use patch files, then download and use this file on your installation of WordPress.

Otherwise, to install this modification, open up your /wp-admin/plugins.php file and find this line:

echo '<h3>Plugins Table of Contents for ' . (count($plugins) / 2) . ' plugins</h3><table id="plugins-table-of-contents"><tr>';

$k = 1;
$starting_plugin = $plugins_per_table;

for ($i = 1; $i <= $table_columns; $i++)
{
echo '<td valign="top"><ul>';
for ($j = $k; $j <= $starting_plugin; $j++)

{
$plugins[$k]['order'] = $k;
echo '<li>' . $k . '. <a href="plugins.php#plugin-' . $k . '">' . $plugins[$k]['Name'] . ‘</a></li>’;

if ($k == $number_of_plugins)
break;
$k++;
}
$starting_plugin += $plugins_per_table;
echo '</ul></td>';

}

echo '</tr></table>';

for ($i = 1; $i <= $number_of_plugins; $i++)

{
unset($plugins[$i]);
}

• Remove empty “By: ” line for plugins without an author specified
• Don’t link plugin names if no URL is specified
• Link to jump directly to a comment in the “Edit Comments” panel
• Table of Contents for all plugins

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I’d like to thank Tony for giving me the opportunity to write there - it’s been a great experience the whole time!

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Every person there will have equal equity in the company that they build. This is absolutely insane - 70 equal founders of this one company where they just decided on the company’s first product in one meeting? This is going to be one heck of an interesting experiment to keep an eye on!Personally, I don’t think that anything great will come out of this group. No matter how great every one of them are as developers, it is near impossible to co-ordinate well with that many people.

I predict that people in the group will end up befriending only a handful of people - maybe 3-4 - and then code a small module of the final product together. If they do work like this, then they have a chance of building something that’s more useful than what a thousand monkeys could produce if they jammed out on keyboards!

One thing that I can picture, though, is that many of them will build startups of their own with new people that they meet from the experience, which I would imagine will be the most valuable thing to come out of the whole event.

You can see them working, live, at Ustream.

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Personally, I’m still waiting for Mac OS X Leopard!

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Immediately after installing the application, I noticed that I need to STILL have a Zoho account even though I’m already on Facebook and they should just be able to identify me from my Facebook account. TechCrunch poses a similar question.

I’m also not a fan of the fact that all ‘Create Document/Spreadsheet’ windows are still in new windows, showing that this entire ‘Facebook Application’ is actually just the same Zoho office suite packaged as a Facebook Application.

I don’t think that Zoho will be a big hit on Facebook - it’s not where people go to in order to type up documents and spreadsheets.

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Why do I say this?

Because it gets annoying when scrolling through a Facebook profile that is several pages long (I’ve seen a lot that are easily more than 10 pages long if printed out).

Facebook is starting to look like a (more organized) MySpace every day - now if only there was a table of contents at the top of every profile that helped you quickly jump to certain sections of the profile, then it would help browsing considerably - AND it would show you what the person had on their profile, just in case you wanted to find out what their favorite music was, if you wanted to post on their wall, or if they were going to the same music concert that you are going to next week!

Here is an example of how it could look like:

Unfortunately, ALL of these applications WERE installed on a friend’s profile. You know who you are .

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I must say, the television commercial for the move does not do the film justice - this is definitely a movie that cannot be judged based on what their marketing department can conjure up. When living in a world with movies such as “The Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End”, “Shrek 3″, and “Spider-Man 3″, - movies which made nearly a billion dollars, and walking out of the theater feeling ripped off - it’s not difficult to see that the quality of a movie can be vastly different from what the general perception is before walking in to the theater.

The television commercial for the movie DOES display how far some of the great technological advances computer-generated animated films have come, what with very realistic-looking fur on the rats and smoothly flowing water in the sewers. What it does NOT show, though, is just how well the story goes along with it.

The premise for the film, as is described in the commercials, explains that a rat who likes to cook befriends a chef who can’t cook, and together, they become one of the greatest cooks in France. To I don’t know about you, but to me, this is a story that seems unappealing, but it all works out in the end! The funny thing is, the movie trailer for Spider-Man 3 was so appealing to me that I wanted to see it over and over again. But, it turns out, the movie Ratatouille is so great that THAT’S what I want to see over and over again.

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I won’t mention any specific Application names right now, but hopefully we’ll hit the half-million-users point soon in terms of the total number of users that we have across all of our Applications. A few of our applications are even in the top 100 most popular application list.

You may also have noticed that my Facebook profile has recently been having a major make-over. No, it’s not turning into a MySpace profile! I’ve just been testing out so many Facebook Applications that I end up just leaving them there

I’m also building a few Applications for other people as well; a few are in the education world, helping students with their notes, and others are more oriented towards the business-minded people.

Hopefully I’ll have fancy graphs and statistics to show in the near future

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First of all, I’d like to thank them for giving me the opportunity to work there. I’ve learned a lot of things, and I take away with me experiences and relationships that I will use for the rest of my life.

In a way, this event is perfect for me. Now that I have more time available to myself, I’ve invested it into my own projects that I have planned for quite some time (most of which are still under wraps!) I also have several projects that I have been working on but had to put on hold because of my work at b5media, so now I can spend more time to focus on them.

Anyways, thanks, muchos gracias, to everyone who has been involved with my experience over at b5media. It’s been fun, but I can only work at the same place for so long!

Plus, I get bored easily, so I try to spice things up by changing the platforms that I work on and such (I primarily used WordPress over at b5media). Which, leads me to my next point… I’m building Facebook Applications now. Read on by clicking here!

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I released 40 official modifications in total, all which can be found on my vBulletin profile page, and all of them are free.

In total, all of my modifications have been marked as being installed nearly 2000 times. If you look at the dates, you’ll see that they were all released within roughly a one-year timespan, and the last modification was released over 3 years ago.

Those were fun and interesting times. It was a time when I contributed a lot of free code to a project just for fun, when I suddenly had the urge to just release a lot of stuff for free to the public, as long as people would use them. I also wrote a simple-but-useful vBulletin tutorial on ‘how to create your own vBulletin powered page‘, which managed to garner nearly 100,000 views and over 500 replies.

I think I really need to find a way to get my groove back

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This is unfortunate. I have had similar-but-not-as-bad issues with the Facebook platform and with Applications that I have on there, which I will post about hopefully sometime in the near future.

I think that it’s important to take advantage of the news feeds of your application’s users that are available to you because these are published to the friends of all of your users. This will have to be the next big goal for Facebook Application developers because Facebook has now add a limitation to only allow up to 10 invitations per application to be sent out by each user, per day.

This is very disappointing indeed.

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Here’s an excerpt:

Whenever I write a new blog post, I always think about which category suits the post best. I keep the number of categories that I have at a minimal level so that an appropriate category for every blog post is immediately obvious to me.

My rule of thumb for naming categories is, if you’ve got two categories that can overlap each other in an obvious manner, then you’ve got to change something there. Either merge the two categories, or remove one and expand the remaining one. I also tend to review my categories every few months, and if I have a category with less than 10 posts, then I ax it and merge the posts with that category into another category.

Go check it out!

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It certainly was a surprise to see the changes at first. I used Google Docs back in the day, when it was still Writely (and I conversed with the team fairly regularly, giving suggestions, some which were implemented and still are.) So, I was used to the old view.

This new look incorporates folders, which are new, as well as tags, which existed before. Does this mean that tags aren’t working out as well as Google had hoped? TechCrunch poses the question to Gmail to see if they will also implement folders. I personally much prefer Google’s ‘labels’, as they call it, which are essentially just tags. I like these because they give me all the flexibility in the world, and I’m sure most of you who have worked with tags before know what I’m talking about.

It’s nice to see that Google still gives care to these products. I’m waiting for the day when I can finally ditch MS Office for good and move completely to Google Docs. They implemented graphs in Google Spreadsheets not too long ago, and that was one major step forward, but without the powerful features that Microsoft Excel has, Google Docs & Spreadsheets still has some ways to go before being more than a convenience for me.

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TechCrunch mentions that being a member of a social network is thought to be mutually exclusive, meaning that there can only be one major growth leader in the world of social networks. With Facebook booming as much as it has been lately, one would assume that other networks such as MySpace and Friendster would slow down in growth, but that is not the case. I somewhat agree on this.

The one thing that I do completely agree on with VentureBeat is that social networks are finding new markets in places where there previously were no real reigning social network to begin with. Places like the Philippines and Malaysia have people that are attracted to Friendster, which is probably partially fueled by the fact that Friendster is already one of the social networks of choice in China, whereas Facebook is not nearly as popular as it is in the United States.

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This isn’t going to be nearly as big as Twitter; not even a quarter of the popularity. Audio is just not as easy to glance over than text.

Podcasting, for example, has gotten relatively big, but blogs are still massive compared to podcasting, which is partially why podcasting startups such as Odeo didn’t do nearly as well as they would have hoped for. I would imagine that podcasts take up less than 5% of all existing blogs. The same will go for TwitterGram.

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People have been saying that this is in response to Facebook, but in my opinion, if done properly, an application could be developed that would merge the best of both worlds from Facebook and LinkedIn to create a hybrid of sorts. Now THAT could be potentially a very useful application to many people, including myself!

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(From radr)

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When you’ve got the audience that Facebook has (20 million unique users each and every month, and counting) and you give