Ryan Leland

Tricia Helfer Appreciation Day

Okay, so perhaps not officially, but perhaps it should be. Or, maybe everyday should be. At least if you are a horny sci-fi nerd from Alberta. Sure, Tricia Helfer plays the to-die-for Cylon siren “Number 6″ in the Sci-Fi series Battlestar Galactica (which I may have alreay mentioned that I LOVE), but as it turns out she’s amazing in nearly every possible way. I guess the only things that would keep her from perfection is that, well, she’s married. Or, more accurately, not married to me. Bah, I’m just joking. Seriously though, there are plenty of reasons to love this elegant woman. For starters, she loves animals, and she’s an environmentalist (one that actually does something). And so, please take a moment with me to appreciate this fine lady.

Web 2.0 Internet Business Marketing

I’ve been pretty hard on the industry buzz words, but I came across a definition for web 2.0 that actually made sense to me today. The definition was that web 2.0 is actually a computing platform, rather than a collection of web pages interconnected by URLs. I had heard similar definitions, but this made sense to me in a new way.

I’ve been researching OpenID for a website I’m currently building, as well as other various APIs. It is pretty interesting, because I’m starting to see so many opportunities for web products, and services that could be possible simply by making API mashups, or even just utilizing feeds in a clever way. It’s making me think more about where the industry is headed, and what the next youtube or digg might be, as an example.

I don’t think anyone can possibly know for sure, but I do think that looking at what the successful sites are doing, and taking it to the next step would be a pretty good start. I do think that where 5 years ago content was still king of the internet, it’s slowly transitioning to communication, and empowering users. I think any tools that could help people communicate in new and more effective ways are the best bet fir the future. I think youtube, and flikr are good examples of sites that empower users by providing structure. I mean, you could host pictures or video in many ways.

Certainly neither of those sites did anything revolutionary by allowing people to host media. But the service empowered the users by providing the audience, and the tools for communicating. I think based on these observations, there is a fairly simple formula to success on the internet. That formula is pretty much what I just said too. Empower users by providing an audience, and the right tools for communicating. Of course building the right tools, and doing the creative marketing to get the initial audience is where the unknowns come into play, but I really don’t think there is any magic in those either.

Anyway, I have to get back to my web 2.0 internet business marketing plan.

Discipline

So Nine Inch Nails has released a free single on their website, and it’s actually pretty good for a free song. It kind of reminds me more of Only, or With Teeth from the With Teeth album. Ghosts I-IV was pretty good for a free album as well, but it wasn’t really inspiring with the lack of vocals. Is this a sign of what Trent Reznor is planning on doing with his music? I sure hope so. I’ve always appreciated his music, but I’m seeing his entrepreneurial spirit with how he’s marketing his music, and I’m finding it pretty inspiring.

It’s Official!

This is 11 days later than I had planned on officially announcing the launch date of you-vs-me.com, and all my wild plans for it, and the frameworks. It’s getting late though, so I will only be posting the link to the teaser/place holder page, and will be posting details on a regular basis regarding you-vs-me, the frameworks, and several other sites I have in the works.

Enjoy: http://you-vs-me.com

New Hosting, and Catching Up With BSG

Finally found a new host after keeping my eyes open for the last few months. GoDaddy served me well for the cheapness, and reliability, but things like the lack of control, and scalability, and not being able to use Zend Frameworks at all was really starting to get to me. I’ll be gradually moving my sites over to the new Media Temple server over the next week or so.

Also been catching up with season 4 of BSG, and it feels great. Oh, Baltar & 6, how I’ve missed you. So far I’m pretty happy, although all the new cylons is almost a bit too much to handle. You almost start to wonder who isn’t a cylon. Well, they do have a plan.

Zend Frameworks Ajax Controller

This is a kind of quick and dirty approach to making an ajax responder in Zend Frameworks. The more elegant solution would be to make a controller plugin to add support for auth, and acl, but so far it looks like this approach works just fine for simple things.

<?php
class AjaxController extends Zend_Controller_Action {
	private $ajax_output;

	function init() {
		if($this->_request->isXmlHttpRequest()) {
			//The request was made with JS XmlHttpRequest
			$this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender();
			$this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoController();
		} else $this->_redirect('index');
	}

	public function indexAction() {

		Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Json');

		$myArray = array('someData',
             			'moreData' => array(
                             			'hello'
                           			)
           	);

		$this->ajax_output = Zend_Json::encode($myArray);
	}

	function postDispatch() {
		echo $this->ajax_output;
	}
}

Tags: framework, php, zend

08.04.08

Today is significant. I have committed to releasing a site I have been working on for 2 1/2 years on 08.08.08 (Aug, 8, 2008), and today is 4 months from that date. Despite having a crazy amount of work left, I just committed rev 58, and have nearly 4000 lines of code that I’ve written in the last 4 weeks.

So despite having worked on this site for 2+ years, this is the 3rd complete re-write, and it is epic. I am so excitd to finally have a product, and officially be able to call myself a web entrepreneur.

If I had had more time I would have made an official announcement with some details, but I think this will have to do given my limited time, and unlimited tiredness.

My First Day of Work

Or rather, my first day being self employed again. It turned out to be fairly interesting. A good mix of struggling with Zend Framework, which is awesome in every way despite some often confusing documentation. The classes themselves are documented as well as one could hope for, but there are times when peicing the library together to make an actual framework takes some trial and error.

I also had some issues with SVN not quite working properly. My hunch is that the service I use, and the combination of my wireless network dropping packets like crazy, causing commits to time out, and corrupting my working copy. This technically should not happen, but it did. I had to create a new project, and create the directories manually, and copy over each file, and commit. All 53 files.

I  did get a lot done, and I plan on announcing my project within a few days in a fairly big way (at least that is the hope).