Last week we finished up quite a bit of work for one particular project that is exciting to us for a lot of reasons. Our Ithaca friend, client and professional photographer Shai Eynav has invented a very cool photo/camera accessory! It is called the Spider Camera Holster and was made as an alternative camera carrying method (notice there isn’t a strap on the camera, or the model in the photo above). I don’t need to say more than that because the video on the Spider website that we made really does explain everything (not that it needs explaining, you’ll get it when you see it).

As psyched as I was to develop the brand and put the video and microsite together with Shai and the AWP team I’m even more anxious and excited to actually own this product. No joke, I had it on for 5 seconds and that’s all it took for me to want one. We’ll be expanding the website in the future when the product becomes available (and adding a ton of videos).

Production side-note: we shot the hi-def video with Shai’s gorgeous Canon 5d mkII, which was wonderful to work with in Final Cut Studio. We’re serving the video up on Facebook (?!) because it looks/sounds/responds better than Vimeo and YouTube (we were shocked to realize that Facebook knows video)! Become a fan and watch this beauty unfold…

Here’s a little trick I just saw on Twitter that will let you tweet upside down. All you do is go to this website and enter the text that you want to flip and reverse:

http://www.revfad.com/flip.html

¡ǝldɯıs ʇɐɥʇ s,ʇı
It’s that simple!

Follow us on Twitter: @AWPNY

I found this easy solution for changing GoDaddy’s default server time so my PHP 4 scripts would display the proper dates and times when fetching and displaying an RSS feed with Simplepie. Just add this code to your script before you include the “simplepie.inc” file (or before you begin to calculate dates or times on the page):

<?php
//set timezone
putenv ('TZ=America/New_York');
mktime(0,0,0,1,1,1970);
?>

Just replace America/New_York with whatever your local time zone is. Check this page for valid entries: http://us.php.net/manual/en/timezones.america.php

For PHP5.1 or newer use date_default_time(’America/New_York’).

Also check this page in the Simplepie docs for reference.

Cheers!

I recently had trouble getting CakePHP running properly in a subdirectory on the Mosso cloud. The main site URL is http://thinkandthrive.com, and the Cake app lives in a folder off the site root called “tw”. So I was able to connect to http://thinkandthrive.com/tw/, but not to http://thinkandthrive.com/tw (without the trailing slash).

The fix to get Cake working in the subdirectory was to add a single line to the .htaccess file in the Cake root directory ( the “/tw” folder in my case). The .htaccess file should look something like this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule    ^$ app/webroot/    [L]
RewriteRule    (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]

Add this line after “RewriteEngine on”:

RewriteRule /YOURCAKESUBDIR$ /YOURCAKESUBDIR/ [L]

Obviously, replace “YOURCAKESUBDIR” with the subdirectory your Cake app in running in. So my .htaccess file now looks like this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /tw/
RewriteRule /tw$ /tw/ [L]
RewriteRule    ^$ app/webroot/    [L]
RewriteRule    (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]

(The third line, “RewriteBase /tw/”, is necessary to get CakePHP working in the Mosso hosting environment. If your Cake installation is at the server web root (the Mosso “content” directory) then it should read simply “RewriteBase /”. If your site is not hosted at Mosso just eliminate this line.)

Thanks to Jeff Loiselle for the quick fix: http://jeff.loiselles.com/wordpress/?p=22

So yeah, the AWP blog has been a bit quiet lately, but only because we’ve been very busy working on some awesome new client websites and logos, and a brand new dedicated site to represent our wildly popular AWP Express service.

Speaking of Express, we’re on the hunt for web-savvy sales professionals to represent AWP while working with clients through our Express development process. Design or coding experience is not required, although a familiarity with web design in general is necessary. If you or anyone you know are interested in learning more about this exciting new opportunity please contact us.

Just for fun, here are some of the things we’re talking about this week (follow us on twitter to keep up with the latest). Every link is amazing, so you won’t be disappointed!

• From Tyler: Deep sidewalk art, Oregon Trail
• From Bryan: Calling All Fans of Near Disaster
• From Katy: I LEGO N.Y.
• From Chip: Coding Standards for CakePHP (amazing if you’re a developer)
  
• From Molly: Tilt-shifted photo from Molly’s trip Barcelona - Oh, and on a dare Molly devoured 15 consecutive cloves of garlic in a single sitting last week, and then proceeded to play drums with the AWP band. Woah!