My first usage was on my Quick Post WordPress plugin. I basically implemented code directly from a few tutorials to add the tabs along the top and the image previews. It proved to work flawlessly with very little tweaking.

My second project was a little more ambitious. A friend asked me to help with a search feature for his site administrators. By selecting options from five different drop down boxes, properties would be filtered until the site administrator found the ones they were looking for. Because this was for a friend, I decided to take my time and write it using jQuery and AJAX, just to learn it and see how it worked. I was therefore surprised when after 3 hours of effort, I had my web page passing the drop down options via HTTPRequest to a PHP page that queried the MySQL database and returned the proper result formatted in HTML. Further, using the power of jQuery Chainability – the magic of jQuery, I was able to make the results fade out and fade in as they were being uploaded.

The syntax used takes a little to get used to as it’s a hybrid of core object oriented programming, Ruby for example, combined with the formatting of JavaScript code. However, once you have it down, it is a breeze to interact with the document object model and manipulate anything on the page.

If you have examples of jQuery in action, please post your links below.

• What was the inspiration for IMified? Why IM? Are you guys old school users of AIM bots?The inspiration for IMified came about from a real need we were having in managing projects in Basecamp. Adding information to our Basecamp projects was becoming a job in of itself. We longed for an easier way to to dump things like notes and todos into our accounts without having to launch another browser tab and navigate to a web page just to close it after adding. We use IM for communicating with colleagues and friends throughout the day. It’s always on and the interface is clean and simple. It was the obvious solution to our problem. Once we started to see the real value in using our IM client to post data to Basecamp, we decided to connect some of the other web apps we use a lot like Gcal and WordPress. We’re definitely not “old school” bot users, so the learning curve was a bit steep, but where there’s a will, there’s a way.
• What programming language to do you guys use for the site/system? What’s the hosting environment?Most of IMified runs on Coldfusion MX7 Enterprise on Windows Server 2003. We’ve recently setup an Openfire Jabber server for our Gtalk/Jabber users and have some custom Java for connecting to AIM and MSN. Coldfusion’s event gateway’s handle all the back and forth messaging between our app and the networks. We’re big Coldfusion fans if you haven’t noticed.
• What has been the biggest challenge in working with multiple IM protocols from multiple vendors? Which is the easiest? Which is the hardest?Well, there are definitely some challenges and its not so easy to launch and scale a high volume bot. The issues don’t really revolve around the technology for connecting, but the willingness of the networks to let you stay connected. Yahoo actually deleted our screen name without warning and made it clear they are not interested in letting “bots” live on their network. AOL, is much more accommodating, letting you turn your screen name into a bot, and ultimately offering a network agreement if that’s too limiting. Microsoft is still defining their “interactive agent” platform and we’re working with them to define a long term solution. Running a Jabber server also comes with its own challenges. To answer your question, our AIM bot has been the easist to keep running and AOL has been very helpful. Get with the program Yahoo!!We just this week launched our IM widget platform along with a super easy API. So, for those developers out there who would like to skip the above “nonsense”, IMified makes it really easy to build IM access into your existing applications.
• It sounds like IMified was created to fill a need you guys were having with interacting with Basecamp. What is your day job that required you to manage projects?Both Anthony and myself (Dave Hoff), run our own successful IT consulting businesses specializing in web application development.
• Besides IMified, what are your favorite web based productivity tools?We love JOTT, stikkit, GrandCentral, Remember the Milk, and Gmail. Still waiting for that killer app, but when it comes, we’ll definitely IMifiy it : )

Thanks to the folks at 30Boxes.com, you can view Flickr photos and YouTube videos within Twitter posts. Simply link to them in any tweet, and using this Firefox Plugin, you can see them on your Twitter page.

Google Maps
The family is heading down to Phoenix this weekend to do some reconnaissance as well as visit with some family. Since we are flying, we need to rent a car to cruise around and check out day care facilities and apartments before heading out to Anthem. I wanted to see if I rented a car at the airport, which rental company would have a drop off closest to Anthem. Using the new My Maps function in Google Maps, I added a push pin for the airport and then did “Find Businesses” to search for each rental company. I added a push pin to the North most location. Here is my result:

Google Earth
After I had decided that most the rental places have a drop off point close to where I needed, I noticed a new icon with the KML link. Most Google Earth geeks will recognize this as an opportunity to view the map with snazzy fly overs. This added each point I mapped in Google Maps to a layer in Google Earth. This then gave me the idea to use Google Earth to map out the location of the apartments we were looking to visit as well as my wife’s new work and the day care facilities.

By using Google Earth, I was able to see a larger area and use some interesting tools like the ruler to gauge distances. I was still able to search by address or find businesses as well as add my own markers.

Both tools are helping me familiarize myself with the area. I’m a sucker for aerial shots, so for me this is the most interactive and interesting way to do some mundane research.

I love the idea of being brutally honest. In fact, I have a shirt that reads, “I Make Things Up.” Whether I actually make things up or not (and I do), it always elicits responses from shocked t-shirt readers. I think blogging transparency has the same effect.

At work, I am lucky to have a CEO like David LaPlante who understands the value of transparency. Often, we would like to push the transparency boundaries even further, but luckily we have great employees that rein us in.

Anyway, check out the articles and let me know what you think.

Tags: Wired, Jenna Fischer, Transparency, David LaPlante

I reached out to one of the developers on the Twitter team and asked if he would answer 5 questions. Alex not only answered them but is very honest and up front with his answers. Thanks Alex!

1. How did you end up on the Twitter team? What is a little of your background?Pretty simple: they posted on their blog that they were looking for
   people in late 2006, and I jumped on it! I think I replied within a
   few hours of the posting. I starting doing contract work on Twitter
   earlier this year, and earlier this month I accepted a full-time job
   after working in the Obvious office for a week. I’m moving out to
   San Francisco in mid-April, and I can’t wait to be out there with the
   rest of the team.I’ve lived most of my life in the Washington, DC area. As one might
   guess, being in the nation’s capital means that everything revolves
   around politics. Most of my early jobs were developing web
   applications for various non-profits, non-governmental organizations,
   and for-profits supporting campaigns and such. I’ve also done some
   information security work (an equally ubiquitous industry around DC).I came to Rails after working in PHP like many developers, but I’ve
   never been a language purist. I was looking at developing some Ruby-
   based blogging software with a friend a couple years before Rails was
   on the scene, but at that time it just wasn’t a friendly language for
   web endeavors. When Rails first crossed my eyes I remember thinking,
   “cool, someone made Ruby work for web apps!” I jumped right in to
   working with the early releases.
2. How has Ruby on Rails been holding up to the increased load?By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right
   now. Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues -
   issues that any growing site eventually contends with – far sooner
   than I think we would on another framework.The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that scaling
   Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it. The problem
   is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel
   cluster, in our case) means more requests to your database. At this
   point in time there’s no facility in Rails to talk to more than one
   database at a time. The solutions to this are caching the hell out
   of everything and setting up multiple read-only slave databases,
   neither of which are quick fixes to implement. So it’s not just
   cost, it’s time, and time is that much more precious when people can['t]
   reach your site.None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing
   for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that
   makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely
   punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of
   traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that
   Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move
   the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s
   mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people
   are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right
   now, it’s tough. If you’re looking to deploy a big web application
   and you’re language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby
   will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big
   Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of
   those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.
3. How difficult has it been to add hardware to the environment?We’re hosted at Joyent, and they make the “throw more CPUs at it”
   approach easy. We’ve been able to get new server containers
   provisioned within hours, generally.I’d like to experiment with Amazon EC2 to handle load spikes, but the
   prospective database latency is prohibitive.
4. How large is the current Twitter road map? How many features are you guys looking to add?Not to be evasive, but it’s hard to say right now. There’s a lot
   that we’d like to do while still maintaining a simple, focused, easy-
   to-use service. Lots of people are interested in a groups feature,
   and that’s definitely on our radar. There’s lots of good stuff coming!
5. How do you see Twitter affecting the blogosphere, IM, SMS, and Email?I don’t think Twitter is a replacement for blogging, just as I don’t
   think blogging is a replacement for journalism. As far as
   communicating ideas to an audience, one-to-many, Twitter works best
   for those particular ideas that are terse yet expressive, and don’t
   benefit greatly from an in-place thread of replies. For more
   personal (some might say mundane) updates, I think Twitter is a
   better fit than a blog. People are going to talk about their cats,
   inevitably, but do you really want someone talking about their cat in
   more than 140 characters?I think the real power of Twitter is its ability to channel over
   different mediums at the user’s whim. IM, SMS, email, and the web
   are just transports as far as Twitter is concerned. Generally, you
   have to go out and get information via whatever medium that
   information is on. With Twitter, information can come to you via
   whatever medium you prefer. Or, if you want some space, you can
   easily turn off the information tap with a simple “off” command.
   That’s powerful.

Notice the small link after the from txt. It reads, in reply to RobbSmith. When I clicked on it, I got this:

Since Dave’s send was via SMS, I can only guess it was due to the @RobbSmith text at the front. This is a cool new feature add. Did it exist before and I just didn’t notice?

I initially heard about Twitter from Dave, but saw no point in exploring it like I do most new technologies. But after hearing a few others bring it up around the office, I didn’t want to be left behind – I can’t deal with others being more informed on a new technology than I am.

My Twitter contact list therefore started out as just Twelve Horses co-workers. My participation was light but consistent. I was usually “nudged” into messaging after receiving a message from someone else’s account. At this point, the reinforcer was the self satisfaction of learning a new technology and knowing I was “in the know.” However, as I started to hear Twitter come up on my regular podcast playlists – TWIT, Buzz Out Loud, etc. – I became motivated to take it more seriously.

I starting following tech gurus like Robert Scoble, Veronica Belmont, and Steve Rubel. The way Twitter works, I would get their messages but they wouldn’t necessarily get mine. However, getting insight into their thoughts and activities, I started to feel more connected and involved. I also learn of cool links and events.

This doesn’t explain why I send updates. I guess it’s the feeling of giving to the machine in order to get back. I think Twitter is the trendy thing to do right now, but since it doesn’t have a real use – or said differently, there isn’t a clear reinforcer to continue the behavior – I think it’s popularity is temporary. I will be amazed if it becomes used outside the geeky class. I fully expect to see mainstream media coverage of it shortly, as a tech phenomenon, but I think all that will do is showcase how geeky us geeks truly are.

Anyway, in the mean time, Twitter on!