Subscribe To Seth Godin’s Blog. Do It Now.
If you aren’t reading Seth Godin’s blog, you ought to be. Especially if you’re an entrepreneur, independent contractor, in sales or a client-facing role, or are otherwise responsible for leadership or the bottom line.
Since that describes pretty much every developer, probably you should be checking out Seth’s Blog.
He posts once a day, usually in the morning. Which is actually a trick he recently blogged about: Rather than looking at Twitter or Facebook or whatever first thing, and thus following, make a point of doing something — anything — productive, first thing, so that you’re leading. Then you can check out your social media channels.
I’m trying to learn that habit; it’s difficult, but it does make a huge difference in terms of productivity.
Detractors and naysayers consider Godin’s posts tripe and self-promotion. Sure, some of it can come off as a bit pandering, important or simplistic. Don’t confuse the words for the message. And it’s always good to be reminded of the basics.
I subscribe to Godin’s RSS feed via Google Reader. He notes blog posts on Twitter at @ThisIsSethsBlog and on his Facebook page.
However you get Godin’s thoughts, get them. You’ll be doing yourself a favor.
All links in this post on delicious: http://delicious.com/dougvdotcom/subscribe-to-seth-godins-blog-do-it-now
Tumblr Mangles Developer Relations
Last week I logged on to Tumblr and was confronted with this abomination:
Missing e notice from tumblr. Way to encourage API development, guys.
Needless to say, this is pretty disturbing, and I wonder what Tumblr is thinking by posting this.
Continue reading: Tumblr Mangles Developer Relations »
New England GiveCamp 2011: What A Weekend!
Last weekend was New England GiveCamp 2011, in which 100+ developers, designers and other volunteers gathered to donate time and skills to some 30 charities who needed IT help.
This year, I was project lead for Alex’s Team Foundation, based in Andover, Mass. Our team was Saurabh Moondhra and William Wade, both experienced ASP.NET developers.
Alex’s Team Foundation, named after 16-year-old Alex Miliotis, who passed away from leukemia in 2002, raises money to support nurses and other oncology professionals, and supports youth sports. The foundation is largely the labors of Patti Rae Miliotis, Alex’s mother, and a handful of reliable volunteers. Like every small nonprofit, Alex’s Team doesn’t have a lot of money.
From the right to left: William Wade, Doug Vanderweide, Saurabh Moondhra and Patti Rae Miliotis of Alex's Team Foundation. The lady with her feet up is Deanna Lohnes, who worked on another project; the woman in green, whose name I do not know, was her charity's contact person.
Like every other leader of a small nonprofit, Patti is pulled in a lot of different directions and has all she can do to keep track of the people with whom she comes in contact, nonetheless all the donations she gets. Patti also hosts a few events every year. She basically needs a way to keep track of who attends those events or otherwise supports her organization, and to mail merge thank-you notes.
So that was the project I led this weekend: Converting a bunch of data stored in (of course!) Excel spreadsheets into a more relational database, with the ability to export that data in order to mail merge thank-you and fundraising letters.
Continue reading: New England GiveCamp 2011: What A Weekend! »
Automatically Hash Tagging Text With PHP And MySQL
My recent work on the Google Reader to Twitter interface led me to recognize a serious shortcoming of such a basic system: A lack of support for hash tags.
For those unfamiliar with Twitter, hashtags are basically words proceeded by a hash mark (#). When a word is “tagged”, it becomes a hyperlink to content also containing that term.
Tagging isn’t unique to Twitter. It’s integral to WordPress, Tumblr and many other blogging platforms; Google uses tags (which they call “labels”) in most of their major applications, including GMail and Google Documents.
The reason is simple: People tend to organize information in terms of categories, so interrelating content by linking items that belong to the same categories to one another makes it easier on us to find and process that information.
So here’s a quick and easy script that lets you take keywords / tags / labels / categories / what have you from a MySQL table, run those terms over a string / subject text, and automatically tag that string with those terms.
(In a later tutorial, I will describe how to add new terms to the database.)
Continue reading: Automatically Hash Tagging Text With PHP And MySQL »
Hello, I’ve a question about your post “Using AJAX To Update A Non-Map DIV Via Google Maps API’s GDownload() And GMarker OnClick Event”. Your example is for the V2 version of google maps, so, is it possible to have exactly the same things for the v3 api?
I believe the objects and methods are the same between the two versions of the API, so the answer is probably. Unless, of course, they objects and / or methods have changed. In which case, no.
