Jonathan Spooner

AdWeek published an article and video of Veoh’s video ad strategy.   I’ve been working
on the Flash integration portion of this for the past few months.

Veoh to Bring Behavior to Video Ads

I often use SubVersion from the command line to manage my projects and I quickly became tired of typing in the full urls to repositories. I’m now storing these long paths in environmental variables. So for example I previously had to type
svn copy http://repo/svn/spoonermedia/projectname/trunk http://repo/svn/spoonermedia/projectname/branch/feature1 to make a branch. After setting up an environmental variable I only have to type svn copy $R/trunk $R/branch/feature1

Okay if your sold on Environmental Variables this is how you do it.

1. Look in “/Users/your-user-name” for a .profile or .bash_login file. If you have both then open up .bash_login or if you have neither create a .profile file.
2. In that file you can use the export command to set all the variables you need. Each of these variables should be in uppercase.
   export W=/Users/jspooner/Documents/veoh/FlashPlayer/branches/wolverine
export T=/Users/jspooner/Documents/veoh/FlashPlayer/tags
export B=/Users/jspooner/Documents/veoh/FlashPlayer/branches
export SVNROOT=http://repo/svn/src/FlashPlayer/


You can also use alias and functions to do other task like open and close projects. Here are some of the other shortcuts I have.

## Open my current project
alias wolverine="cd /Users/jspooner/Documents/veoh/FlashPlayer/branches/wolverine && pwd && echo WELCOME TO WOLVERINE"
# mate
alias edithost="mate /private/etc/hosts"

alias stopmysql="sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysqld.plist"
alias startmysql="sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysqld.plist"
#
# # functions
# # change directories. echo PWD and show a list
cdd () { cd ${1}; echo $PWD; ls; }


After installing Flex 3 form Flex 3 Beta 3 I had lots of issues with keyboard short cuts. I found that some hidden files from the beta were still on my system in ~/Documents/Flex Builder. I was able to solve all issues by changing the name on that directory and reinstalling Flex.

If your having issues and had Flex Beta installed check out these instructions from adobe. The worked for me when upgrading from Beta 2 to Beta 3.

I found instructions for editing the host file and enabling PHP at 456bereastreet.com.

What is a host file? Lets say your editing website locally and would like to bypass any security errors caused by the localhost url. You can use the host file to redirect the real url “www.jonathanspooner.com” to point at your local copy.

I also added a short cut to my profile document so I can just type ‘host’ in terminal and TextMate will open the doc.
To do this create a file named .profile in your users directory “/Users/yourusername/” and bash script like the one below. I have a few other handy shortcuts in there too.

alias host="mate /private/etc/hosts"


TED | Talks | Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo (video)

Fast forward to the Mike V’s interview at Memorial Skate Park. It’s actually a good interview.

Blogged with Flock

I was recently informed on a broken google search. When you search for Rocky Dennis a boy with craniodiaphyseal dysplasia disfiguration you get a picture of professional snowboarder Shawn White. The resemblance between the photos is strange. Google must have matched up the red hair.

Google search for Rocky Dennis.

Go digg the post

Okay there is no gPhone rather an operating system called Android.
Check out the video below. If the video doesn’t spark any ideas maybe the 10 million dollars the Big G is putting up for the best applications built.

So what is OpenSocial? First of all OpenSocial is not GoogleSocial. OpenSocial is an industry standard for social websites. Check out the video below.

http://strizver.blogspot.com/

Have you ever received a text message that says something like this?

” I sent you a mulimedia message. You can view my message via the internet at viewmymessage.com using Msg ID w392gvgmn Password ors9vhem”

If that isn’t horrible user experience look at the website where you can read your message. They have about an 800 pixel wide
page and they squish the message into a 150 pixel wide box at less than 8 point type.

Yeah, Congratulations AT&T, you guys rock!

Client: Liberty Tax
Work: UI Design, Ektron CMS, Development
Link:

XML-RPC (Remote Procedure Call) has a bug in a popular version of PHP 5.2.2. You will probably see a call to an undefined function call to xmlrpc_encode_request()

Here is a link to the bug at php.net

Wordpress uses xmlrpc and there is a hack to correct the bug. The fix is to add the following line at the top of thte xmlrpc.php file.

$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA = file_get_contents("php://input");

I’m looking for a fix to the revver video api. If you find something let me know.
I’ll update this post when I find the fix too.

Like most other skateboarders, I have been filming filming for years. I have racks of mini-dv tapes with months of footy. A few clips made their way to videos like 411VM, and Creature Skateboards, but the others are hidden in my closet on little black tapes.

So here is the original idea behind bagoflix. I have a bunch of b-roll clips and I love watching them but there is a accessibility problem.

You have to plugin the dv-cam, dig out the RCA cables, and start scanning through those tapes. What is this? The stone age?

Read the full blog post at blog.bagoflix.com.

Google has come up with a way for an advertiser to get directly on the phone with you. Next time you see a phone icon in google ads click it and enter your phone number. They say with in 5 seconds your phone will ring. When you pick it up it will automatically be calling the advertiser.

Is this good functionality? Are people really unable to dial the phone number their selves? I think click-to-call is a good way to boost your phone call conversions. Hey and it also lets us web people track how many people make that call.

You can read more here.
Yardley

Client: International Franchise Association
Work: UI Design, CMS(ektron), and Programming C#
Link: Live

Client: Help-U-Sell
Work: Programming and Interactive Design
Link: Private Intranet

www.ie7.com

Here was the problem. In your template you have some links like <a href="images/photo.jpg">. When you save your template Dreamweaver places the template in a directory named Templates on the root. When this happens Dreamweaver took the liberty to rewrite all of your links to something like this <a href="/Templates/images/photo.jpg">. You could see how frustraing this would be since you don’t want to keep your images inside the Templates folder. The quick solution was to make urls that reference the root of the server like this <a href="/images/photo.jpg">. This still created problems when using php includes.

I just updated Dreamweaver to version 8.0.2 and there is not an option to not rewrite document relative paths. From your manage sites menu select a site to edit. In the bottom of the left column click on templates. You will want to then uncheck the checkbox that says "Don’t rewrite document relative paths".

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