A bunch of friends and I entered the Techcrunch Hackathon this year for 20 straight hours of hacking. We created Link Current which is a tool that measures the current and future social value of your content. You simply enter a link and our system begins to aggregate data from across the web to give you a “Social Score”. The Social Score is based on the virality of the content, how old it is and many other components. We also have a realtime geolocation of Tweets and Facebook likes so you can see where your content is being consumed and spread. This is all bundled up with a pretty cool looking techy interface that I put together.

It was a fun and exhausting weekend. I had the opportunity to work with a rockstar team which included people from MovableInk, SimpleReach and Opani. I can’t explain how excited I was to be working with these guys.

After a solid night of sleep and recovery, I can honestly say that what we created was a lot more than a hack. We created, what could be, a viable business that should appeal to any content provider – anyone looking to measure the impact of their content and figure out where their campaign may fall short. It’s a broad and interesting enough idea that the product could grow in so many ways.

The whole thing was designed and built in a warehouse at Pier 94 in New York City’s Upper West Side. That’s pretty cool.

I always forget this information so I’m noting it here. For complete instructions visit the official rvm site.

rvm allows you to switch versions of ruby for different projects without conflicts. It also allows you to create gemsets to use with different versions of ruby (an old version of ruby might use older versions of gems).

Enter the following commands (minus the comments in parentheses) into your shell.

rvm info (get info)
ruby -v (get ruby version)
rvm use 1.9.2 (use a specific ruby version)
rvm use 1.9.2 --default (this sets the default - otherwise it'll use the system ruby by default)
rvm gemset list (show all gemsets)
rvm gemset create (create new gemsets)

Scott Taylor and I have been working evenings and weekends on Upstage App. It’s been a fun experience working on a project outside of work that belongs to us. I love working for clients and I like my job but there’s nothing like the experience of having something that’s all your own.

If you’re a designer or developer working on iPhone or iPad, you should checkout Upstage App. We’re currenlty working to implement better sharing functionality but even as it stands now, it’s a very useful tool that I use daily in my workflow.

I just pushed a TextMate bundle to supplement the CSS bundle by adding CSS3 properties and their browser specific counterparts.

https://github.com/jeffboulet/CSS-Extended-Bundle

There are two ways to include Apple touch shortcut icons as bookmarks/favicons for a website. The differences in their appearance are determined by the the “rel” attribute:

1. Without the signature Apple aqua gloss (Pre-composed):

   <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" class="/images/apple-shortcut.png" type="image/x-icon" />

2. With the signature Apple aqua gloss (Composed):

   <link rel="apple-touch-icon" class="/images/apple-shortcut.png" type="image/x-icon" />

You can name your files anything. They don’t need to be named “apple-shortcut.png”. You should make them a .png though.

CSS background images look really bad on the iPhone 4. They’re stretched and ratty. Without going into the details, you need to declare the size of the background image for the device:


"px">Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know about all the unnecessary extra bandwidth this will take for devices that don’t support the higher resolutions. But that’s another problem.