Nothing fun right now. Something fun in the works. Sit tight.
Happy Labor Day.
Nothing fun right now. Something fun in the works. Sit tight.
Happy Labor Day.
We use jQuery on almost every project we do. As many know updating your theme for your website widgets can take a long time. Recently we found the jQuery UI – ThemeRoller. This allows you to quickly skin all of your jQuery UI widgets within a matter of couple of mouse clicks. For those of us who can’t pick matching colors for their life, ThemeRoller has many template themes. ThemeRoller allows you to start with a templated theme, and to easily modify it via the GUI.
This will save you time and money as hand editing the CSS files to update your jQuery UI widgets is slow and tedicious.
So we decided to use the Google Calendar API in one of our applications to allow users to easily view and export events from outside the app. In general, the API was working well – I was using the Zend library to interact with Google and things seemed fine.
That was until I tried to embed the calendar using Google’s iframe embed code. For some reason, events weren’t showing up in the embeded iframe calendar even though they were showing up in the actual calendar on calendar.google.com. Even stranger, the events were present in a JSON object on the embeded page and they were showing up in the RSS feed for the calendar.
After literally days of debugging and experimenting I finally found out the culprit.
For some reason, events created via the API that start and end at exactly the same time – say a start date of 08-05-2009 10:00:00 and an end date of 08-05-2009 10:00:00 don’t render on the embeded iframe calendar.
What is even more bizarre is that if you create an event via the web interface that starts and ends at the same time, it will render correctly on an embeded calendar.
Anyway, that was weird. All the events without explicit start and end times now last a grand total of one minute.
PS. Kudos to Daum for finding a constant for PHP’s date() function to generate RFC3339 timestamps.
Use like so:
$date = date(DATE_RFC3339, $timestamp);
To get back a valid RFC3339 for the Google Calendar API.
A few months ago we integrated Google calendar into an application that we built for a client. Anyway, today I sat down to customize which calendars certain events were being created on. We’re using the Zend Framework’s GData package to interact with Google Calendar and surprisingly the documentation is pretty lacking.
Specifically, I was looking to create events on a calendar that was not the “primary” calendar for a user. After poking around and experimenting, I finally got things to work.
First, you can retrieve the list of available calendars with:
Next, when creating the events pass in the uri and the events will appear on the alternate calendar.
self::$service->insertEvent($event, $arr[1][“uri”]);
A week or so ago my Dad asked if we could have our designer put together a logo for him. Unfortunately, our guy was buried under a mound of work and generally couldn’t help us out. We haven’t always had the best luck with Craigslist so I was ready to try something new.
Over the last few months, I’ve been seeing a good amount of chatter surrounding “spec” design sites especially 99designs.com. After taking a look around the site I figured now was a good time to give it a shot. We were on a tight budget, tight time line, and my Dad didn’t have much direction for the logo.
I posted up a contest last Sunday here and we were looking at entries by Monday afternoon. Now things got more difficult. We were having a hard time coming up with “star ratings” and constructive feedback in general. My Dad’s staff was having a hard time not getting pigeon holed by the submitted designs and Setfive wasn’t doing a great job helping them along.
We did our best and we felt like the entries were moving in the right direction. Then the contest closed. In the last 8 hours of the contest the number of entries nearly doubled. With 70 entries we now had the problem with objectively picking a winning logo.
At this point, I wanted some more input on what people thought about the logos. I decided to create a set of Amazon Mechanical Turk tasks to get some feedback.
After about a day, I had 200 responses asking for user’s top three logos and any additional comments they had.
Some of the comments I got back were insightful and moving:
I tallied up the results by weighting +3, +2, +1 for first, second, and third choices respectively. The results were interesting.
The top ten logos as voted by the Amazon Mechanical Turks were:
Personally, I like the top ten logos and my Dad’s staff seems to like many of the same logos that were voted up. It’s been an interesting experiment almost exclusively using the “crowd” to design and then select a logo. I’m not sure if we’ll use 99designs in the future but it has been a pleasant experience.
We still haven’t picked a winning logo but I’ll update once we do!
We finally picked a winner! We decided to go with the crowd and selected http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/88 as the winning logo.