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

I know most of us are liking Firefox 3’s new save password dialog box. Very slick. If you frequent sites on the internet where you have to login (Gmail, Pandora, Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo, Garden Gate Delivery, the Commons Cam, etc….) you aren’t going to want to enter your password every single time! Here are AWP we login into dozens of sites every day in order to access our site, our client sites, internal project pages, and our blog, of course.

The save password feature is nice for preserving my own brain capacity! But you might be wondering, what about when Molly asks me, hey what is the login for AWP’s WebTree so I can post some juicy details about the project I just finished? I go to the site, and of course I can login (because I choose Remember my password). But I can’t give the password to Molly, because it is hidden. Is Molly out of luck? No!

Firefox does store your passwords where you can see them. Although a bit cumbersome, just head to Security > Saved Passwords. (Note: This is also where you can delete passwords that you saved accidentally, which might happen if your cat walked across your keyboard without you knowing).

But here is an even better method. Download this great Firefox Add-On, Web Developer Toolbar from Chris Pederick. As the name suggests, this toolbar is great for Web Developers. I use this tool when developing websites to examine what they will look like in a smaller browser, determine rendered font size, disable cache, disable images or css, outline table cells and even edit html live.

However, I use Web Developer Toolbar most for its Show Password feature. Once you have this spiffy toolbar installed, simply visit the site with the hidden password and choose Show Passwords from the Form menu. Password revealed, just like that! Completely for free! Imagine what I can do with the time I saved looking up obscure passwords!