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July 11, 2009

An exclusive interview with the man behind the twitter bird

twitter-bird-001

You may recall seeing this bird everytime you login through twitter. While it’s not the official logo, it immediately comes to mind when you think of twitter.

The man behind the bird is a Japan-based illustrator named Simon Oxley. His image originally came from iStockPhoto, where he also has dozens of other images that have the same style. For only $7, you are able to freely use the bird in almost any way possible, much like twitter has done. read more …


March 06, 2009

Social Site Bubble

social-bubble

We’ve all heard about the dot com bubble. It generated millions of dollars for young people who spent it all on luxury items thinking that money will continue to fall in their lap. Well that bubble burst, and people panicked, lost jobs and struggled ever since.

We’re facing a new type of bubble, however this one is the other extreme. Now sites generate nothing, everything is completely free to the user. If it weren’t for the cheap hosting and giveaway domains, these “businesses” would’ve been bankrupt years ago. Every once and a while a new one pops up with some clever spin on an idea with only one business strategy. Hope.

These startup companies that push out a savvy web 2.0 site really have no business plan other than to capitalize on an idea, then get bought out for quick payment.  I mean just take a look at the CEOs of Myspace and Facebook, they’re richer than most people in their 20s – early 30s. Since then there has been hundreds upon hundreds of social networking sites that, for the most part, focus on a niche. This is fine, but there’s always a limit as to how many people can join these types of sites regularly.

However, unlike the dot com bubble, there isn’t much money floating around (if at all). So the bubble will not be as dramatic. Some networking sites will come and go, others will have to modify their business plan if they want to stay around.

One site in particular has people asking the question, “How do they stay in business”? (By business, we mean exist). This site known as Twitter, gives the user to tell the entire world in less than 100 characters about what they are doing at the exact moment, so that others can either relate or become interested in their otherwise meaningless lifestyle. (Unless you’re of course a celebrity, then it’s ok). It’s really a short blog that you can text in from your phone. It has caught the attention of the media, making it one of the biggest social sites out there. With all that bandwidth being used and constant feedback from the server, one has to wonder, who pays for the servers? According to CNET, if they were to generate money, they would have a few plans, but for now they don’t have anything in store to generate a profit. Even though we’re in these tough times, it would be a decision worth thinking over.


March 04, 2009

Removing Leading Zeros in PHP

It’s pretty easy to do, many thanks to laserlight at phpbuilder:

$var = ltrim($var, '0');

If there’s more than one zero use the following:

$value = 003;
$value = intval($value);

February 27, 2009

Convert US states from abbreviations to full name

This is a real time saver just to convert the abbreviation to a full name. I made this function and always use it in my projects. read more …


February 23, 2009

Convert month name to a number

For the longest time, I’ve always come across this barrier. No pun intended. I wish there was an easier way to convert the month name to a number, but after searching, I came across this thanks to doodlebee from webmasterworld.

Here’s what we have as follows, just copy and paste it and obviously change the month name to whatever month you need and it’ll show up.

function getMonth($m) {
$monthnames = array(
01 => 'January',
02 => 'February',
03 => 'March',
04 => 'April',
05 => 'May',
06 => 'June',
07 => 'July',
08 => 'August',
09 => 'September',
10 => 'October',
11 => 'November',
12 => 'December');

for($i=1;$i<=12;$i++){
$i = sprintf("%02d",$i);
if(date("F", mktime(0, 0, 0, $i, 1, 0)) == $m){
$month_number = $i;
}
}
return $month_number;
}//end function

echo getMonth('March');
echo getMonth('December');

And vice versa

function getMonthNum($m) {
$monthnames = array(
'01' => 'January',
'02' => 'February',
'03' => 'March',
'04' => 'April',
'05' => 'May',
'06' => 'June',
'07' => 'July',
'08' => 'August',
'09' => 'September',
'10' => 'October',
'11' => 'November',
'12' => 'December');

return $monthnames[$m];
}//end function

echo getMonthNum('09');

February 16, 2009

Migration to Wordpress

Finally the conversion to wordpress is done. I’ve also built up a portfolio to work with it. It’s a bit tricky and will eventually get around to make it available to everyone via a plugin.


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