Thinkcage

This morning I will be once again making the trip south to Austin, TX for the 2008 South by Southwest Interactive conference. 

SXSW is actually three conferences in one, covering Interactive, Music, and Film during SXSW Week, March 7 - 16, 2008. SXSW Interactive is really the premier event for people working in the web industry. The conference features nearly five full days and offers panels, keynotes, a trade show, and other events featuring the top minds in the field. SXSW covers a wide range of topics from business development on the web to social networking to technology, design, and even tactical topics like HTML and CSS. In years past, SXSW has been a favorite launching point for new “Web 2.0″ applications. Nearly anyone working on the web can benefit from something at this conference, even if it is only for the opportunities to network. And like many conferences, some of the best information is found in the form of meeting and sharing ideas with the smart people you meet throughout the week.

I’m looking forward to panels on design, social networking, CMS systems, and web startups. Speakers include: Jason Fried, Jim Coudal, Jason Santa Maria, Kathy Sierra, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Jimmy Wales with keynotes by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, community artist Frank Warren, and futurist Jane McGonigal.

This year, I’ll be heading down to SXSW with Element Fusion senior designer, Dustin Evans. While in Austin, we’ll be looking to line-up meetings with customers, partners, and new friends. If you’d like to meet us at SXSW, you can find us in the online registrant directory. Or leave your contact information below and we can provide email, phone, twitter, or other ways to reach us while at the conference. Hope to see you there!

Oh and did I metion that Mashable rocks?

A friend is just getting started with PHP. Like me, he’s not a coder by nature so I thought giving him the benefits of what I’d learned might help. I also thought it might help other people out there so I’m offering it here as a free download.

The PHP sites that I have built in the past - it’s been awhile - all were of the simple database read/write variety. So once I had cobbled together a simple set of db connection, add, edit, remove, list, view scripts I had a quick framework to start my projects. That’s what this set is. It has all the basic scripts you need to make a simple site with fairly verbose comments indicating what the various parts do. I left the SQL queries in there, but you’ll have to make your own based upon your application. Maybe in the future I’ll add a MySql script and instructions for setting this up as a working app - that might make a more valid example. Still if you’re reasonably experience in some other scripting language, this should be enough for you to figure out what it’s doing and how to make it do what you want. I’m primarily a designer, so “coding” for me often consists of finding basic scripts, putting them together, and hacking together an application. If you work that way, this is the file for you.

Happy coding!

Download my PHP Starter Kit.

I’ve been a Blockbuster Online subscriber since the early days of the service. It hasn’t been perfect but does offer a good value and decent selection. The recently added in-store exchange was a nice touch, adding a lot of new value without raising prices. That’s almost unheard of these days.

For those of you unaware, Blockbuster has a variety of plans that offer x number of movies out at a time for one monthly fee. Much like Netflix, you choose movies using web app, creating a queue of movies you’d like to see. They ship you 2 or 3, you watch them and mail them back and they ship you more. About a year ago they added the ability to return the movies in one of their retail store AND take an equal number of movies home with you right then. Not only did this save time in mailing the movies back, but it also did not count against your online plan so you still got your 3 movies in the mail a couple of days later. Free movie rentals. Awesome!

A few days ago as I browsed my queue, a lightbox-style modal dialog popped up in my browser. It seems the online system was now more tightly integrated with the retail stores which noticed that I had already rented a movie that was in my queue and offered to automatically remove it. Nice touch. It’s nice to see a web app with such a helpful feature.

Those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed (both of you) are about to notice a change. A few weeks ago I stopped splicing in my del.icio.us links and Flickr photo feeds so all you’ve been seeing is the woefully inactive blog feed. The reason? Jaiku. Jaiku is the best solution I’ve found to address my long-standing desire to offer a really comprehensive JasonFeedâ„¢.

At it’s core, Jaiku is a twitter-like app that allows for short IM-like blog posts. But the real beauty is it’s capability to read and splice most any RSS feed into your personal stream. And I might add, it does a marvelous job of auto-discovering these feeds. All you have to do is point Jaiku to a URL and it will find any associated feeds. Very slick. So the end result is a combined feed showing a large portion of my online activity. If you want to know what Jason is doing online (not sure why you would) you can see it all on Jaiku. The feed combines my Jaikus, tweets, blog posts, Last.fm tracks, mog tracks, upcoming events, Flickr photos, and my links from del.icio.us and digg. Its everything!

So tonight, I replaced my blog feed with the combined feed. This should show a lot more activity and really better represent me. If it gets to be too much, though you can still get the classic blog-only feed here.

All I can say is “wow”! I placed an order with pccables.com just over 48 hours ago and it is already here.

I needed a replacement USB cable for a Nikon camera that I recently purchased. It was a store display unit sans cables, manuals, and accessories. A quick look around the net and a few local stores showed me that this was a particular cable that wasn’t a standard size. A Google search for the Nikkon part number showed that PCCables.com had the best price - and they didn’t appear to gouge for shipping. Despite the fact that their website is very unappealing visually, I figured the presence of Google’s Checkout service afforded me at least some assurance and protection. So I gave it a go, and I’m glad I did.

What impressed me immediately was the amazing response time. After placing my order, I received an order confirmation within seconds. But here’s the best part, the shipment confirmation and tracking number arrived only 35 minutes after that! I’ve never seen a company react to quickly. Not only that, but I paid for the slowest and least expensive form of shipping: USPS. But even with that method, I had the package in my hands within, literally, 48 hours. You can’t beat that.

Oh and after all that, the cable I ordered seems to be exactly what I needed and perfectly fits the camera. Thank you PCCables.com.

One thing that is certain about the SXSW experience is the overwhelming presence of technology. One in five people is toting a laptop computer (90% of those using Apple portables) and nearly everyone has a mobile phone, iPod, PDA or some combination of all of the above. Seeing a person’s technology says a lot about them and I have to admit I had the occasion to peek over an occasional shoulder to spy an open window here and there.

On one hand I was very surprised at the wide range of people at the conference, as classified by what they were doing on their computer. There were plenty of the typical suspects taking notes, blogging the current session, or having IM conversations with friends. I also spotted developer types inexplicably configuring SQL servers and performing database maintenance remotely via a terminal application. There were even a few that were mired in spreadsheet applications working on a business…

…But others were doing what I could only describe as noodling. That is not really accomplishing anything but flipping between applications, swapping tabs, clicking all over the place looking for something new—ANYTHING STIMULATING—amongst the various blogs, IM clients, twitter, etc. Now I didn’t bring a computer to the panels at SXSW, instead armed with my trusty sketchbook I took notes and was generally as attentive and participatory as I could be. But I do know what these people were doing and I’ve since caught myself doing it to. It seems anytime I need an involuntary mental break I immediately begin hovering around my computer, checking email, flipping tabs on my browser, and seeing who’s on IM. It’s like a thirsty man crawling for an oasis as I try to find anything to satisfy whatever it is my mind is craving.

So it is with some understanding that I have to encourage people who attend conferences like SXSW to shut off the computer, sit back, and immerse yourself in the amazing creativity and community that is bursting around you. I think you’re missing out if you don’t.