He is a vietnam war vet and he wears his army jacket every-were, He sleeps with a quilt that looks like the american flag and say's a prayer over every meal. He is a true american in my eyes. I can only wish to be as patriotic as he is.

He said after the commercial, that is why you buy from american companies. They have a genuine interest in the success of our country. They share our successes and our failures and we theirs.

If you think about the history of Daimler Chrysler you can notice a pattern.

Buy American, or American Made.
David Bates – Owner of a PT Cruiser deemed the most unique car in america that is now worth as much as my computer system

iftttb

You could have seen it first on Google +

You could have seen it first on Google +

1. +Google+ to Twitter: Takes the short title of the post and the url and post to Twitter.
http://ifttt.com/recipes/18784

2. +Google+ to FaceBook: Shares the URL of the post (FaceBook will auto-generate the title and description) with the comment "My Latest G+ Post:")
http://ifttt.com/recipes/19024

3. +Google+ to Linked In: Shares the URL of the post (Linked In will auto-generate the title and description) with the comment "My Latest G+ Post:")
http://ifttt.com/recipes/19023

4. +Google+ to WordPress Blog: Shares the full content of the G+ post with the tag "iftttb" in the body of a post on the blog (with pictures) You should edit the post in wordpress to your satisfaction.
http://ifttt.com/recipes/19025
I hope you find these useful.
David

ifttt / Put the internet to work for you.
Put the internet to work for you.

You could have seen it first on Google +

If This Then That is a set of webapi's that allows you to interlink accounts with actions. http://ifttt.com

Why I Use IFTTT
I use ifttt in order to broadcast my message from G+ to my other social accounts. Recently I have decided that G+ will be my platform of choice for originating my content but I have felt like I just abandoned my friends and family on facebook, twitter, my blog, and IN. I didn't want to do that so I have been posting things in several areas which ment I didn't get it right all the time and left several big gaping holes in content that I sent out to my friends. This is where ifttt came to the rescue.

How I Use IFTTT
The first step is to get an RSS feed of your Google + account. I use http://gplus-to-rss.appspot.com/ all you have to do is enter your G+ user id into a field and it pulls back an RSS feed of your latest post.

don't know how to get your G+ ID? http://ansonalex.com/google-plus/how-do-i-find-my-google-plus-user-id-google/

Next you can either use predefined recipes or create your own custom task.
I chose to create my own as I wanted full control of the message being delivered.

The four action I have are:

G+ to Twitter: This action takes an abbreviated portion of any post in my feed and shares it plus a link to the full post on twitter.

G+ to FaceBook: This action takes the URL of the latest post and simply adds the message "My Latest G+ Post" on it. This behaves just like sharing a link on FaceBook, it will fill in the short description and url.

G+ to Linked In: this works the same as the FaceBook feed but with Linked In

G+ to my Blog: This is probably the most tricky one. I use wordpress as the backend to http://dlbates.com/blog/ so I wanted any google plus content that I tag with iftttb to post to my blog. For this I told IFTTT to search through my RSS information and if it contains the tag then post the content to my blog with a custom title and tag.

One more thing to mention is that if you do this like I have done you may want to disconnect the interlinking you may have setup through twitter and linked in or you will have duplicate post.

Enjoy
David

ifttt / Put the internet to work for you.
Put the internet to work for you.

You could have seen it first on Google +

yesterday was so nice outside we decided to let the kids burn off some steam. Daniel's friend Ayana (Yawny) decided to join in on the fun as well. I decided to snap a few photos while I was out there. It was good for me to get some fresh air as well since I have been cooped up in the house since last Friday.

Hope you enjoy your weekend!
David

You could have seen it first on Google +

I love JQuery and I love JQuery UI even more but what I love most about the combination of the two is that they are cross browser compatible, delivered over a CDN network, and open source. This means that I can use anything I build on top of these two very powerful platforms in any website I wish, including the enterprise ones.

I was recently tasked with building a lightbox element that would allow me to showcase Vimeo videos (or any other content) in a cross browser CDN enabled way. At first I scoured the web looking for the best jquery lightbox plugin. I tried fancybox, shadowbox, thickbox, slimbox, facebox, other younameit-box plugins but they all either catered to one type of content, failed in the cross browser arena, or had unknown or grey licensing.

On day two of my growing frustration a friend of mine suggested I look at JQuery UI and specifically the Dialog method. So I did and was instantly hooked, and while it didn’t provide all of the functionality you need from a lightbox it came pretty darn close. So I began hacking away until I got down to a pretty comprehensive lightbox solution for video and then wrote a little helper function to populate the content area on the fly and set the title. What follows is how to do that:

Step one: includes

So first you need to include JQuery and JQuery UI within your page. The easiest way to do this is use Google’s CDN by placing the following two lines in your head.
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src=" https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.16/jquery-ui.js"></script>

You will also need to include a JQuery UI theme you can use the starter theme hosted on Google’s CDN too!

<link href="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.16/themes/ui-darkness/jquery-ui.cs"
type="text/css" rel="Stylesheet" />

Again that needs to be placed in your head.

Step two: create a div

We need to create a div that will not only hold our dialog but also most of the embed code for the video’s we will want to play.
I would suggest adding this code near the footer of the page since it will load an iframe.

<div id="videoPlayerDiv">
<iframe id="theVideo" src="" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</div>


Step three .dialog()

Now you need some JQuery magic on page load as well as creating the helper function
<script type="text/jscript">
$(document).ready(function () {
$('#videoPlayerDiv').dialog({ autoOpen: false, modal: true, title: "RFMD Video", width: 664, resizable: false });
$("#videoPlayerDiv").bind("dialogclose", function (event, ui) {
$('#theVideo').attr('src', '');
});

});
function SetVideo(source, title) {
$('#theVideo').attr('src', source);
$('#videoPlayerDiv').dialog("option", "title", title);
$('#videoPlayerDiv').dialog('open');
$('.ui-widget-overlay').click(function () { $('#videoPlayerDiv').dialog('close'); });
};
</script>
This can go in your header or wherever you might have already put the $(document).ready clause.

Final step: Call your helper function

So now all you need to do is call the helper function and pass it the src url for the video and the title

<a href="#" onclick="javascript:SetVideo('http://player.vimeo.com/video/18888136?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=af0522"&autoplay=1', 'Courtesy Vimeo User 1024');return false;">Video</a>

You can prolly tell I use asp.net from the javascript surrounds and return false. If you don’t use .net you don’t need this.

Demo

Click to open demo

Today Google’s choose to do a Scooby Doo Ghost-Busting theme for this halloween but I am not here to talk about the theme but rather the mechanics behind it.
I have heard the control they choose to implement be called many things such as slider, carousel, gallery, ad-rotater, and best of all multiple image thingy-majig. However I don’t know exactly what to call it. But the principle is very simple. You line up a set of images in div’s or unordered list set the width of the first div to the size of the picture and then tell it not to overflow that div hiding the rest of the images. You then move the images based on the navigational queues to the furthest left. Kinda like shuffling cards.

I have seen this control used on several hundred websites and even this one. It is a great way to get multiple ideas across in an unobtrusive and pleasing way.
However a few questions arise as there are so many librarys and methods to do this.
What kind of library do you use to accomplish this effect, do you use a library?
Do you prefer the slide or fade transitions?
What should we call this control?

Leave answers below or tweet them to @davidbates

Thanks
David Bates

Today Adobe released their new version of the flash player 10.1 and I will say it was a much anticipated update for me. I love flash and have developed in it since it’s early day when it was another product altogether. Flash started out as a way for me to program desktop apps that looked and felt the way I wanted as I have always loved to be able to create the interface and then program it to do what I want. Since then my love of Flash has faded in and out as changes and flaws where found in the system. I almost completely wrote off flash until YouTube and Air had launched. I had been writing projectors for autoplay cd’s for years and air gave me a whole different type of application delivery mechanism. Anyway I love flash and even though I use Silverlight quite a bit, when someone needs a project completed in a hurry and want it to look custom my default is always Flash. So with that here are my thoughts on the release.

The Good:
As you all are aware Apple recently hit Adobe below the belt saying that security flaws and memory errors. I would have expected that in Adobe’s press release they would have addressed that first. But instead they slyly take on the mobile market slating that performance and low power was their main focus. This should make Google happy as it show them that Adobe is not lying down and taking Apple’s low punch lightly.
Better Hardware video decoding… they already own most of the video market. HTML is too early and silver light is just now hitting the market hard. I would have liked to have seen more about HTML 5 video and how Adobe was going to provide tools for video publishing compatible with HTML 5.
Mac Specific Improvements: this is a straight jab at Jobs. I read this as here you go. You wined and we fixed it, now put us in the iPad

The Better:
Mulitouch: I have been having to use third party apps to accomplish this thusfar it is great to see this come to the mainstream and is also another sideways jab at Jobs
Multi-Tab memory usage: This is much improved and a much anticipated release. If you have a ton of windows open and multiple flash objects they each have their own memory space. Adobe has streamlined this now.

The Scary:

Ok this one paragraph scared the heck out of me:
“Now, content that runs in Flash Player will automatically shut down when the available memory is running low.”
This is scary because what if you are running a mission critical flash app and you run out of memory? They also did not state whether it was physical RAM or paged? Scary stuff.

Hope you enjoy
David Bates

Today I was invited to join BEM Interactive’s March Madness Google Analytics event. It was a great overview of Google Analytics that I used as a refresher since it had been 2+ years since I had taken any real time to mess with GA. However I also come away with some high level tips from BEM’s GA Ninja Jeremy Shaffer. This guy really knows his stuff and can speak to a crowd very well… something I am still trying to master So without further adieu I would like to share you with what I took away from today.

1. Without a good foundation IE. hosting/website design analytics won’t do you a bit of good. Analytics are meant to help you streamline and custom tailer a site for a visitor, not fix a broken site.
2. You will not magically gain traffic by installing analytics. It takes a full market strategy to drive traffic and analytics can quantify if a strategy will or has worked.
3. Just running reports showing numbers will not get you anywhere. You need to be qualifying questions instead. How can analytics tell me I sold a product from this campaign for example.
4. Define conversions for your site. Having traffic is cool but at what point in your site do you deem their visit valuable? Is it when they click order now? When they visit your careers page? Fill out an email sign-up sheet? define these conversions and then use analytics to quantify them.
5. Quantify valuable metrics. You may have had 43,00000000 visits to your site over the last year but where did they come from and what did they do? How long did they stay? Did they bounce? (yeah that one is for Jeremy Shaffer for those of you who where there.
6. Segment traffic. It is great to know what is happening with all of your visitors but when you get down to answering questions about specific ad campaigns segmentation really helps you find out about your traffic patterns and customers.
7. Analytics should help you come up with solutions to problems. You can report a problem but you will really shine if you can also suggest a solution based on traffic patterns.
8. Don’t get in the mindset that web based analytics cannot help quantify your traditional advertising. You can give customers unique urls or include tracking data in the url so that you know that traffic to that url is from a traditional campaign.

Hope this is helpful to you, if you have any other tips leave them in the comments below.
David Bates

So now that I got their attention I delve into why Windows Phone 7 Series is an OS worth having such a long name. I think they got it right. First they are requiring the device manufacturers to have certain features like touchscreen, accelerometer, and three hardware buttons along the bottom. Then they are basing the phone on an already existing platform, Silverlight and XNA both of which are highly used on the xbox 360 Microsoft’s gaming platform. Finally they are making the tools free. This is a big step for Microsoft and you can still see on the http://developer.windowsphone.com/ they still charge $99 per year for developer access to legacy SDK’s and samples. What freelance developer wants to pay that… especially when Apple and Google both have free tools (Apple is not completely free as you have to buy an Intel mac) and the phone up till now did not have powerful processors or GPU’s. Windows Phone 7 Series even goes one step further to make the software on the phone support full multitasking or as some like to call it multi-APPing. Combine that with a slick UI and sound UI standards we have a real contender on our hands. I wish this phone would be released a lot sooner than the Christmas time-frame that they currently predict.

Now I have downloaded the SDK and even followed the keynote given at http://live.visitmix.com/ to make a picture viewing app. It worked great, was easy to follow given I already knew the tools from silverlight development and fast… on my computer the emulator outperformed any picture app I ever had on my IPhone. I can’t wait to see what comes of the app store and I hope that MS takes a hint from Apple and Google and decide to make it free to publish apps but charge for advertising and take a cut of sales. If so I’m in.

Thanks for reading
David Bates