A few weeks ago welikesmall and I launched a new site for Sarofsky Corp. a design driven production house based out of Chicago, IL. They do amazing video work – I’m a big fan of theirs.

The site is running a 100% custom Django based CMS that allows users to easily upload new projects, including production stills, multiple videos, downloadable media and other information. It also includes an externally embeddable Flash video player that I wrote which allows users of the site to embed videos anywhere they want.

I did all of the development work – which utilizes both heavy Python scripting on the backend, but also quite a bit of jQuery work on the front-end. I ended up using SWFObject 1.5 because when I used 2.0 it wouldn’t allow me to effectively clear out an asynchronously loaded SWF and replace it with static content. Odd.

You can see this site @ http://www.sarofsky.com.

Yes, it’s true. I’ve resigned from position as Senior Developer for odopod. I really enjoyed my time there and I learned a great deal from both the partners as well as my colleagues – and I wish them all the best.

I just found myself increasingly drawn to my freelance work, as well as my various personal projects – most of which sit unfinished (including this website). I’m excited to have a chance to revive some old stuff, and introduce you to some of things Kiala and I have been busy dreaming up these past few months.

I’m very lucky to know a fantastic group of wonderfully successful people who have been able to provide me with steady work so far, but I’d always love to hear about new projects – you can reach me @ dane@doesnotvalidate.com.

I’ll be updating this site with my most recent launches – like this project that I worked on with the guys over at Instrum3nt for DC shoes, and the new Odopod site.

I’ve got some really exciting stuff happening in the next few weeks, and I’m very optimistic about the future. Thanks to everyone who helped get me here.

This is one of the first projects I worked on with STRUCK over a year ago for laminate floor manufacturer Pergo.

While we were busy building the site – Pergo was purchased by another company, and we were never sure if the site was going to see the light of day.

Well today it finally launched.

The site is written on this massive .NET e-commerce engine and I was in charge of all of the backend programming work, as well as managing the .NET + AJAX + Flash integration points.

URL: http://na.pergo.com/

URL: http://www.timberlinelodge.com
Agency: Nemo
Role: Lead Developer
Technology: PHP / Wordpress

Featured in the Wordpress Showcase

The following code will let you create a custom “Wordpress Loop” that contains the post objects of the children of the current page.

Just drop this code in your theme file:

<?php
    $project_list = get_posts('numberposts=5&order=ASC&orderby=menu_order&post_type=page&post_parent='.$post->ID);
 
    foreach($project_list as $post):
    setup_postdata($post);
?>
    <div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
    </div>
 
<?php 
    endforeach; 
?>

URL: http://www.nemohq.com
AGENCY: Nemo
ROLE: Technical Architect, Wordpress Integration
TECHNOLOGIES: Flash, Ruby on Rails

It seems simple, but one of the most troublesome tasks is to get a Flash fly-down (or drop-down) menu to reliably collapse when it sits over non-Flash content. Some browsers (IE) have trouble recognizing the change of control from the Flash Player application instance to the browser. For that reason Flash won’t always read when the mouse has moved outside the bounds of the Flash Player… worse still – it just receives no notification at all, which means that if you’re relying on Flash to read when the mouse has moved outside the bounds of the navigation – you’re out of luck.

Over the years I’ve come up with many tricks to help deal with this – some more effective than others. Today I found the best solution to date. It’s not 100% effective, but it’s much better than any of the other options that I used.

I decided to try using the jQuery hover method to detect when the mouse leaves the Flash’s containing DIV element in the DOM.

The AJAX code looked something like this:

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$('document').ready(function()
{
    $('#flashNavReplace').hover(
        function()
        {
	    //rollover functionality here
        },
        function()
        {
            getFlashMovie("flashNavReplace").jsCloseNavigation();
        });
});
 
function getFlashMovie(movieName) 
{
    var isIE = navigator.appName.indexOf("Microsoft") != -1;
    return (isIE) ? window[movieName] : document[movieName];
}

and then the Flash side uses some code like this:

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import flash.external.ExternalInterface;
 
/**************************************************************************
* 
* CONSTRUCTOR
* 
**************************************************************************/
public function TopNavigation()
{
    //setup the JS callback
    ExternalInterface.addCallback("jsCloseNavigation", jsClose);
}
 
function jsClose():void
{
    Logger.log("CALLED FROM JS");
    //close the nav
}

This works for me pretty much all of the time… I can break it if I really try, but it works great for normal usage.

Congratulations to the entire NVIDIA team here @ odopod on the success of the Speak Visual site on being featured in F:E:D, StyleBoost, and being chosen as the FWA Site of the Day.

In a current project I’m reading in a user’s Twitter feed and displaying it on the hompage of their Wordpress blog. I know that there are a thousand plug-ins that exist to do this exact thing, but I wanted to write my own.

Using the official Twitter API the contents of the individual were returned as plain text, meaning that all HTML links were totally dead. I wanted a way to automatically add the HTML to enable URL’s as well as twitter “@” profile links. I found some regular expressions and with some tweaking came up with these 2 functions.

To activate the URLs in block of text pass it to the following function:

function activateURLS($tweet)
{
    return preg_replace("@(https?://([-\w\.]+)+(:\d+)?(/([\w/_\.]*(\?\S+)?)?)?)@", 
        "<a href="$1" target="_blank">$1</a>", 
        $tweet);
}

To activate Twitter @ profile links using the following PHP block:

function activateTwitterProfiles($tweet)
{
    return preg_replace("/@([^ ,.!#$%^&]+)/", 
        "<a href="http://twitter.com/$1" target="_blank">@$1</a>", 
        $tweet);
}

They’re super easy to use, just call them like this:

activateTwitterProfiles(activateLinks($tweet->text))

Thought Wordpress nerds might find this useful, a function to retrieve a list of posts by passing in a custom filed key=>value pair, with an optional count parameter.

Just drop this in your “functions.php”:

function getPostsByMeta($key, $value, $count = -1)
{
    global $wpdb;
 
    $sql = "SELECT DISTINCT wp_posts.post_title,
    wp_posts.ID FROM $wpdb->posts,
    $wpdb->postmeta 
    WHERE $wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->postmeta.post_id 
    AND $wpdb->posts.post_status = 'publish' 
    AND $wpdb->postmeta.meta_key = '$key' 
    AND $wpdb->postmeta.meta_value = '$value' 
    ORDER BY post_date DESC";
 
    $sql .= ($count != -1) ? " LIMIT ".$count : "" ; 
 
    return $wpdb->get_results($sql);
}

and then you can use it like this:

$news_home = getPostsByMeta('_tb_post_section', 'News', 3); 
 
<?php foreach ($news_home as $news) : ?>
    <!-- OUTPUT TEMPLATED HTML -->
<?php endforeach; ?>