Publicis Groupe announced today its acquisition of Flip Media, a leading digital agency in the Middle East. The agency will be folded into Leo Burnett Worldwide and will retain its name.

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Dubai (UAE), Flip Media has more than 100 employees across the Middle East and India, and has worked with some of the region’s most well-known brands. The agency provides end-to-end digital solutions, including strategy, design and production, content and delivery, and technology across all platforms. In the years since its inception, Flip has been recognized across the region for its award-winning creative and pioneering technology. Its founders, Martin Diessner and Dinesh Lalvani, will continue to be involved as non-executive directors with Flip and Yousef Tuqan will remain CEO reporting into Leo Burnett’s Middle East North Africa CEO, Raja Trad.

“Flip Media is a strategic and cultural fit for our company, and we believe its service offering of digital strategy, design, production and content delivery will be a perfect complement to the incredibly strong digital presence we have built across the region,” said Tom Bernardin, CEO of Leo Burnett Worldwide.

“This acquisition is the logical next step for Flip,” said Dinesh Lalvani and Martin Diessner, co-founders, Flip Holdings Ltd. “Integrating with a global network gives us the opportunity to provide a strong foundation for through-the-line communications strategy with digital at its core. We’ve been lucky to have the talent and dedication of a strong management team, which has been integral to the success we’ve had. Being part of Leo Burnett and the larger Publicis Groupe family will bring with it access to more clients, people and resources, all of which are key to take a company like ours to the next level.”

“Leo Burnett’s commitment to all its partners is to deliver a complete communication solution across all channels,” said Raja Trad, CEO of Leo Burnett MENA. “Today’s acquisition of Flip Media not only strengthens our offering but, more importantly, represents an important investment in strengthening our digital offering to the benefit of our clients’ businesses. Our mission is to ingrain digital thinking into every aspect of Leo Burnett’s work and culture. With Flip Media’s outstanding track record in their space, we are confident that all of our clients will appreciate our strategic plan to be an unquestionable leader in digital communication.”

phpVirtualBox – An open source, AJAX implementation of the VirtualBox user interface written in PHP. As a modern web interface, it allows you to access and control remote VirtualBox instances. Much of its verbage and some of its code is based on the (inactive) vboxweb project. phpVirtualBox was created for people (like me) who prefer not to have to log in to their headless VirtualBox host to administer their virtual machines.

To make it work in Mac I had to install the latest beta version of phpVirtualBox (4.1-1b) for VirtualBox (4.1.2). The current stable version had some issues with authentication. However, phpVirtualBox has wiki which helps to install and configure the web application. If you encounter any issues please refer to common errors in phpVirtualBox wiki.

Happy journey with virtualization

And the same video is playing on the embedded player in Google Plus…

Now my question is? Is it Sony ATV blocking it on Facebook or Google Plus not respecting this rule ?????

The movie I shared is a simple short film in Tamil “Claravin Pravin Tamil Short film by YesKay“. It is good one watch if you have time

Today I am releasing a new WordPress plugin Bitly External URLS which converts your blog post external links to a bitly url. This plugin comes with a very simple options page. All you have to do is

1. Register of new bitly account
2. Goto your bitly settings page
3. Fill in your bitly Username and bitly api key in the plugin options
4. Block the domain names separated by semicolon for which you don’t want to create bitly short urls
5. Save the options.

Once the plugin options are configured the plugin is enabled to rock and roll. All the post which has external links will be converted to short url as the post are requested.

Download WordPress Plugin – Bitly External URLS

WordPress Plugin – Bitly External URLS – GitHub

Today I am releasing version 2.0 with the following changes

• Updated the views to use UITabBarController
• Loads rss subscription from plist file
• More fun to learn

Download RSSReader Version 2.0 with complete source for iPhone. To see complete list of changes visit RSSReader on Github

Note: This source code does not have any license nor warranty. Please feel free to use this in any of your projects and don’t have to email me.

Enjoy, Happy Coding

This version supports the following

• Uploads any media file in the blog to a CDN
• Support for cloudfront
• Expire headers
• Support for CSS and JS compression
• Dynamic Cache prefix

Other developers can use this plugin to upload the files to s3 for example

1. This will scan the given content for images belonging to same domain. And will schedule the images for s3 upload. If the upload is done it will replace them in the text.

<?php
if(class_exists('S3Plugin')){
    $output = S3Plugin::scanForImages($output);
}

2. Advanced if you are control freak like me you would like to get more options.

<?php
if(is_singular()){
    $attachmentDetails = &get_children( "numberposts=1&post_type=attachment&post_mime_type=image&post_parent=" . get_the_ID() );
	if(!empty ($attachmentDetails)){
	    $attachmentDetails = array_shift($attachmentDetails);
	    $postImage = array_shift(wp_get_attachment_image_src($attachmentDetails->ID,'thumbnail'));
		if(class_exists('S3Plugin')){
		    $cdnImageURL = S3Plugin::getCDNURL($postImage);
			if($cdnImageURL!==FALSE){
				$postImage = $cdnImageURL;
			}
		}
	}
}

If you are interested in testing please download the wp-s3 1.1 Alpha or checkout from wp-s3 plugin repository trunk.

And another happy new is my blog got a descent page speed score with this plugin update

Note: Please not this plugin is in alpha stages. Please test this on local test environment before testing it on production sites.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Facebook Open Graph Meta WordPress Plugin
Plugin URI: http://imthi.com/blog/programming/facebook-open-graph-meta-wordpress-plugin.php
Description: This plugin will help you to insert open graph meta tags for the posts
Author: Imthiaz Rafiq
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://imthi.com/
*/

function getTheExcerptCustom( $post_id, $auto_generate = true, $length = 50, $ellipsis = ' [...]' ) {
	$post = get_post( $post_id );
	$excerpt = $post->post_excerpt;
	if ( !$excerpt && $auto_generate ) {
		$content = strip_tags( strip_shortcodes( $post->post_content ) );
		$content = preg_replace("/(^[\r\n]*|[\r\n]+)[\s\t]*[\r\n]+/", " ", $content);
		$words = explode( ' ', $content );
		if ( count( $words ) > $length ){
			$excerpt = implode( ' ', array_slice( $words, 0, $length ) ) . $ellipsis;
		}else{
			$excerpt = $content;
		}
	}
	return $excerpt;
}

function insertFBOpenGraphMeta() {
	$postImage = false;
	print "\n<!-- Start FB Open Graph Meta -->\n";
	if(is_singular()){
		$attachmentDetails = &get_children( "numberposts=1&post_type=attachment&post_mime_type=image&post_parent=" . get_the_ID() );
		if(!empty ($attachmentDetails)){
			$attachmentDetails = array_shift($attachmentDetails);
			$postImage = array_shift(wp_get_attachment_image_src($attachmentDetails->ID,'thumbnail'));
		}
		print "<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"". the_title('','',FALSE) ."\" />\n";
		print "<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"". get_permalink() ."\" />\n";
		print "<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"". strip_tags(getTheExcerptCustom(get_the_ID())) ."\" />\n";
		if(!empty ($postImage)){
			print "<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"{$postImage}\" />\n";
		}
		print "<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" />\n";
	}else{
		print "<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"". get_bloginfo('name') ."\" />\n";
		print "<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"". get_bloginfo('url') ."\" />\n";
		print "<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"". get_bloginfo('description') ."\" />\n";
		print "<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"[REPLACE]\" />\n";
		print "<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"blog\" />\n";
	}
	print "<meta property=\"fb:app_id\" content=\"[REPLACE]\" />\n";
	print "<meta property=\"fb:admins\" content=\"[REPLACE]\" />\n";
	print "<!-- End FB Open Graph Meta -->\n";
}

add_action('wp_head', 'insertFBOpenGraphMeta');

This plugin is already activate on my blog. If anyone shares or likes a link from my blog it will have all full details on facebook

Download Facebook Open Graph Meta WordPress Plugin

I subscribed for Grid Service hosting which is for 20$ monthly. After moving my blog I did a load test and it seems to be pretty stable.

The good thing about this hosting is for 20$ you get fixed 1000 hours of GPU. And based on load and usage it gets consumed. Suppose if you see a sudden spike in the traffic your website will be scaled automatically. If you cross 1000 hours it charges 10 cents per hour. If anyone is looking for scaling your website I suggested you do a test drive with media temple.

After Googling for few hour and with trial and error method I got the correct Apache log format so that the real remote IP is logged.

I created a custom log format with a name “combined_new” and used it in all the virtual host configured in Apache. But you can use the format however you want.

#
# The following directives define some format nicknames for use with
# a CustomLog directive (see below).
#
LogFormat "\"%{X-Forwarded-For}i\" %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined_new
#....

#...
#
# START_HOST example.com
<VirtualHost *:80>
	ServerName example.com
	DocumentRoot "/var/www/example.com/html"
	<Directory "/var/www/example.com/html">
		Options Includes FollowSymLinks
		AllowOverride All
		Order allow,deny
		Allow from all
	</Directory>
	CustomLog /var/www/logs/example.com/access_log combined_new
	ErrorLog /var/www/logs/example.com/error_log
</VirtualHost>
# END_HOST example.com

Before you make any changes to httpd.conf please go through Apache log module.

I hope this small tip helps

Note: Always backup your original httpd.conf before you make any changes.