Most of the design work was done in Adobe Illustrator. I ended up grabbing some custom brushes to get the sketch look I wanted for the logo of Wickett. The rest of the design elements were completed using standard Illustrator brushes.

As always, the Wordpress setup was fairly standard along with the template creation. I love how easy Wordpress makes everything.

In my second reading I worried less about understanding the proper usage of http-methods like PUT or DELETE and focused more on specific structural gems buried in the text. A perfect example is a section discussing how to structure value-pair information such as geo-cordinates (Lat and Long). In a URI one could do /lat/34.2345/long/67.345/ problem with this structuring is it indicates that there is a hierarchical relationship between lat and long when there isn’t. They are in fact a value-pair. A better representation would be /geo-cords/34.2345,67.345/ One might wonder why I use a comma. I could of course use various other characters “+” or “;” that are acceptable and do not require encoding as defined by RFC-1738 URL. But the authors discuss that “,” should be used for ordinal sets of data and ; when the non-ordinal. So for instance if you wanted to represent the colors found in a bedroom that could be /bedroom/colors/brown;light-blue;white/

The authors also spend some time discussing the importance of creating and structuring what are known as ‘resources’. A resource can be anything including a composite of multiple resources. At one point the author makes the statement, if what you are trying to define isn’t working then perhaps you need another resource. A better solution than trying to bend and contort an API to work with your data.

Lastly, As I’m now in the process of writing several RESTful services there is a need to develop an approach for documenting and visualizing the service. Especially as my list of resources is growing and the need to organize everything into systems so I can a top-down approach. I’ve looked at the twitter api documentation which is a bottom-up perspective consisting of just a list of URLs which can be daunting to interpret. One of the author’s Leonard Riahcardson discusses the documenting format known as WADL which is supposed to be similar to the concept of the WSDL. However, much debate has erupted over the WADL format, for various reasons a few links: [Aristotle Pagaltzis, John
Heintz]. Some of the arguments are valid. I agree that having machine generated code breeds major issues and in some ways a RESTful service is self documenting. However, having a standard that provides a methodology for documenting is never a bad thing. Especially as I’m now in the process of creating a service with 20-30 resources each with various methods – some more RESTful than others. I don’t plan on building a WADL file and telling people that this is the be-all-document for everyone to use. But, having an internal documentation structure for myself would be beneficial as I’d conform to some set standard rather than creating my own.

The talk was fast paced and informative. Rick gave a brief overview of the client work they focus on including several high profile clients – Apple and Fox. The discussion eventually evolved and turned towards how in the past they have worked with successful start-ups in various phases. Of the several successful start-ups mentioned, Brooklyn based Hello Health stuck out because I’d met the founder at SXSW this past year.

To illustrate the typical relationships with start-ups Rick had compiled an interesting line graph that depicted when start-ups generally hire a digital agency. The take away, the beginning stages when start-ups had a little bit of money and then the end stage where business is booming. There exists this middle lull which Rick made several speculations why start-ups chose not to contact a marketing specialist in that stage. Common thoughts are the start-ups are in sprint mode and not marketing focused, which arguably a company should never ignore their marketing.

To me what mattered most was the marketing for equity offer. Rick’s firm is approached by start-ups that want a full range of services from development to marketing. However, for those tech-entrepreneurs that boot-strap their start-up and build their own software (conceivably the hard part) and just need marketing help for launch The Barbarian Group is willing to do that portion for equity. Not a bad offer in the scheme of things. This concept is not new though in that I heard a similar offer from Duff & Partners at the AIGA Smart Models event last year. But if you are software / business focused like I am which I could spend my time formulating a marketing strategy however I should focus on running the company. And a little bit of equity share or risk share isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Arguably, it motivates the agency to help you succeed if they want to get their return on investment.

Ultimately I was impressed by the presentation and the energy Rick gave. The Barbarian Group definitely has a young and energetic energy about them that makes them very appealing once I get my software written.

After my exploration was complete it was time to upload the package and configure an environment on my hosted solution. Of course being slightly lazy I went ahead and just used ftp and dragged the unpackaged folder into the corresponding web location.

When the upload had completed I began the installation process. Unfortunately the install page threw:

Fatal error: Call to a member function append() on a non-object in /app/code/core/Mage/Install/controllers/WizardController.php on line 72

My attempts to google the error message returned terrible results filled with servers actually throwing the error or German forums with the error in question and no answer provided.

Finally while digging around I saw someone mention files may be missing from package, as a result I uploaded the archive instead. SSH’d into my solution and unpackaged it. Build ran fine.

Lesson learned: just use the package archive and go through the extra step of having to unpackage it on the server. Otherwise you could end up wasting time trying to troubleshoot a non-existent issue.

Overview

Exciting news today as I led the release for Brooklyn based vintage auction website Marketpublique. The release specifically includes my work on the Photo Management tools for sellers, providing a rich user interface for multiple file uploads and an easy to use drag-n-drop photo arrangement panel.

For a look at the new tools visit MarketPublique’s screen cast covering the new Photo Management tool. Also, visit their auctions to find yourself a fresh outfit for this fall.

Technology

The design proposal called for a considerable amount of front-end work drawing inspiration from incredible upload tools such as flickr. After researching the client libraries and my partiality to jQuery I settled on the Uploadify library. Uploadify is the leading swfUploader plugin for jQuery with incredible extensibility. Some additional customization was required however to join the uploadify plugin with jQuery’s . Ultimately, the project’s front-end came together coupled with the re-architectured file system not only has user functionality been improved but site performance as well.

Just a teaser about my concept, Glaxal is a persistent MMOG that will usher in the next generation of casual gaming. Built as a sci-fi resource control and simulation game, players compete against each other to build a galactic empire. Some of the core innovative features are ubiquitous play and involved social media aspects.

I’ll update as events unfold.

Stay tuned for an updated calendar listing of which sessions we plan to attend.

The latest release features the newly designed match-maker panel, a dual column panel that allows users to play match maker with their friends. In addition, users requested new ways to contact potential matches. As a result we added new features that allow file-attachments and email support.

Join Cablight on Facebook today to find your potential matches.