Hope everyone survived the first week of 2012 unscathed. Just wanted to announce that we helped the Detroit Red Wings and the Michigan State Lottery launch a Facebook promotion. It’s a pretty neat deal, all you have to do is LIKE the MI Lottery page and submit your information to be entered to win a Zamboni ride. And honestly, who doesn’t love a Zamboni ride.

The promo is live here https://www.facebook.com/MichiganLottery

Unfortunately, its only open to Michigan residents.

Our friend Walt launched 500Pearlstreet.com earlier this week. It’s a blog that will be focused on covering white collar crime in the news as well as exploring other topics related to white collar crime. We’re excited to see where Walt takes the blog and wish him the best of luck!

Technically, 500Pearlstreet.com is running Drupal 7 with a couple of of pretty neat modules:

• The theme is a standard sub-theme of the excellent Omega responsive theme. The amount of configuration possible through the Omega UI is really impressive and a welcome change from how difficult theming was in Drupal 6.
• In-context links and images are being automatically powered by Zemanta which is pretty neat.
• OpenCalais is also running in the background providing semantic tagging capabilities. These aren’t exposed yet but hopefully will become useful when there is more content.

Anyway, it should be a good read so drop it into your readers!

Last week was a big week over at tru.ly!

We launched our lightweight social verification service that allows partner sites to verify that their visitors are 18+ or 21+. We’re hoping that this will replace current age solutions and allow sites to safely show and monetize 18+ and 21+ content.

Check out the awesome write up The Next Web did (Thanks Courtney!).

Anyway, theres a live demo at https://tru.ly/social-api-demo/ and the demo video is below.

Last week we launched RentPrefs a new take on renting an apartment. RentPrefs flips the process around by allowing renters to post their preferences and then allowing agents to match them with listings that fit their criteria.

Anyway, yesterday Xconomy did an awesome write up about them so definitely check it out. We also got a nice mention at the end there!

Happy Friday!

Over the past month we’ve been working with Her Campus (HerCampus.com) to help them with issues they were having. When we started talking with Her Campus, we learned that they had different types of issues ranging from some Drupal based ones to actual server level problems. They were having some trouble keeping up to traffic demands, and if a traffic spike occurred their current infrastructure wasn’t sufficient.

After looking at their setup, we noted quite a few areas in which we could improve performance. The old setup was a fairly standard setup, a frontend server using Apache to handle HTTP requests and then a second server which was their MySQL database server. The servers were a 4 gig and 8 gig server respectively.

It was clear Apache was adding unneeded overhead, and wasn’t the best solution for them. We revamped their setup significantly. We switched them to Nginx + PHP-FPM. We immediately saw great improvement on from this change alone. However we wanted to get them to a single server, and to be able to handle traffic spikes with a single server.

We look forward to helping Her Campus with their continuing expansion of their site and user base!

Earlier today we launched Boston Built in collaboration with our friends at Bocoup, UpStatement, and SignedOn

Basically, Boston built allows you to “represent” by either adding a graphic logo or a 1×1 tracking pixel to your site via Javascript. Then, the bostonbuilt.org site will pick you up and list your favicon along side the other sites that are including the tracking code.

BostInnovation has a nice write up and a poll at The ‘Built in Boston’ initiative.

Happy Friday!

Recently we’ve launched a new site for a client called Purpose Beverages: http://trackyourimpact.com . We’ve received great feedback from users so far. The site uses a wide range of technologies. It is built on symfony and uses the Apostrophe CMS to manage the main parts of the site. It integrates with a SMS provider to allow you text into it to find out more about your purchase.

Tēvolution is a new brand of tea on the market that does good with each purchase. Every time someone buys it they done a specific amount(for example 25 cents) to a specific charity. In order to find out how large of a donation and what charity your bottle goes to you can actually text the code found on the bottle to the website, or you can login in on your phone browser or regular browser and enter the code. You will find out how much and to whom you just donated money to!

Right now Tēvolution is just coming to the market so keep your eyes peeled for it! It’s a great product that does good!

We’re proud to announce the relaunch of of a partners website: http://www.forextv.com.  The website delivers Forex news and video along with other Forex resources.  The website has been rebuilt on the Symfony framework.

In the coming weeks we will be rolling out many new features, including several social components.  Keep checking back and let us know how we are doing!

Over the past few weeks we had the opportunity to work with FanFeedr to put together some widgets for their sports news platform. Previously, FanFeedr had been using Sprout to build their widgets but this required someone to hand build a Flash widget for every “resource” on FanFeedr (there are a lot). In addition, since the Sprout widgets are Flash they aren’t easily crawled by search engines.

Our widgets are different. They allow FanFeedr to generate widgets on the fly for any of their pages and allow users to customize the color schemes. Check out a widget builder for the NY Yankees here.

Basically, our widget builder works by allowing users to customize the size and colors used in the widget. This data is serialized as a JSON object and then base64 encoded so that it can be sent to the “generator” on the server. Then, the server unpacks the payload and builds a widget according to the data specified in the JSON object. In addition, our embed code includes a noscript tags so that search engines pick up the links in the widget as well.

Anyway, working with FanFeedr was a great experience and we hope to continue our relationship moving forward. Go build yourself a widget!

For one reason or another we decided to sponsor a pub crawl this weekend. The plan was hatched over some beers at Underbones on Thursday night for a Saturday morning go time. We knew we basically needed three things: a list of bars, some swag (tshirt?), and obviously a website. We decided that the route of the crawl should follow the MBTA Redline so that we could start downtown and then finish in Somerville. This made picking bars pretty simple, gave us some branding, and of course we registered
REDLINECHALLENGE.COM.

We wanted the website to have some informative information, live location updates, and of course pictures of the debauchery. The biggest problem was that neither Daum nor I have location aware phones. To get around this, we decided to update Twitter with our current location along with a “#loc” hashtag and then have the site update based on that. Since we were all ready using Twitter, we decided to use Twitpic to allow us to post pictures to twitter on the fly. Additionally, we took advantage of Verizon Wireless’s email to SMS service and allowed people to contact us via the website. All told, we built the site in about 3 hours and it proved to be pretty useful. People used it to find us on the crawl and to contact us while we were out. Everyone also got a kick of seeing a live photo stream.

What’s next? Clearly, The Greenline Challenge.