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!
We started to notice www.setfive.com was starting to show some signs of age so I figured it was time to give it some web 2.0 love. It’s still basically the same site but the HTML+CSS have been modernized, we updated some copy, and added some screenshots to the client page.
Anyway, without further ado check it out at www.setfive.com
I’ve also slowly started updating my Github! First up, check out a Setfive Boilerplate to help your bootstrap projects.
Our friends over at Tēvolution were written up on the incouraged communications blog today. Check out the post at http://www.incouraged.com/2011/06/08/tevolution-authentici-tea/
The post outlines their business and how the application we built supports their business goals. There are also some screenshots of the application in action.
If you haven’t already, check out their site at http://www.trackyourimpact.com/
I was working on an application earlier today that required allowing a user to upload a large file (several hundred MB) which would eventually be stored on Amazon S3. After reviewing the requirements, I realized it made sense to just upload the file directly to S3 instead of having to first stage the file on a server and then use PHP to push the file to S3.
Amazon has a nice walk through of using a plain HTML form to upload a file directly to S3 here.
I had all ready been using SWFUpload to upload files to the server so I decided to look into using it to uploading directly to S3. After some head banging, I finally got it to work – here’s the quick n dirty.
Thats it! It’s pretty straight forward once you have things going. As an FYI, you can put SWFUpload into “debug” mode by adding debug: true as a property to the initialization object. You can also debug the responses from Amazon by using a packet sniffer like Wireshark.
You probably want to make this file a little less permissive. More details here. Also note, there are differences in the implementation of the file between various versions of Flash player.
The HMAC signature MUST be calculated on the server because it uses your S3 secret. You MUST keep that value secret in order to maintain the security of your S3 buckets. I’m using Don Schonknecht’s S3 PHP library to calculate the HMAC signatures but you could just as easily do it in straight PHP.
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!