We are fans of Ask A Ninja, so we made this widget. I know I said we were done, but we decided to go out with a bang! Enjoy!

Space. The final frontier. Also, our latest widget. I am totally ruining the cadence and meaning of this iconic phrase.

Yes, we just completed a new widget. The NASA Image of the Day widget. We are fans of space and space exploration. If you are also a fan of these things, put this widget on your site.

Just made some updates to the Twitter widget. We also got whitelisted for the API limit, so there shouldn’t be any more problems going forward.

Awesome.

We love Twitter. So much so that we made a Twitter widget. We are fortunate enough to have it on some pretty cool sites, even. Twitter has been having capacity and API issues and up until now we haven’t had a problem. Today I was alerted through email from one of our users that something wasn’t working. Twitter is limiting the rate at which clients can access feeds. This is understandable but since we server over 3,000 people with this widget if they all accessed it in one hour we wouldn’t be able to serve 2,900 of them.

Before this wasn’t an issue, but because of changes in security (for the better, so no complaints) and their API restrictions there is really no way for us to get the data we need. Even if we cached the data on our machine, as far as I can tell, we wouldn’t be able to get under that limit.

Anyway, we are trying to work out a solution. In the mean time, we apollogize. Happy Tweeting!

Not sure if I should say this lest a malicious hacker ever decides to take over our site, but we are building project NabberHackey with the CakePHP framework. We ran in to a snag these last few weeks in that we could get the home page to work properly but then any other page we made would show an internal server error. After a lot of prodding, we discovered that our custom folder structure (maybe we should have gone with the vanilla cakePHP install…) was causing issues with .htaccess. After some searching and tweaking all is now in working order.

Frameworks are nice because they make development faster. Now that the framework is actually working as it should, our development should start to really pick up.

Working on graphics and copy tonight. Jared is busy researching other aspects of the code.

Update for project Nabberhackey: Main widget package structure is complete. What does this mean? Well, in order to offer downloads of our widgets, we need to know what to package together. We have updated our code and put together the archetype for the downloadable package.

The download will include things like the compiled swf, some usage instructions, and some configuration files. We may also include information and instructions on how to track widget usage as well. Actually, and this isn’t something we have discusses, but we might even just throw in an entire widget tracking package. Jared, what are your thoughts? I could probably ask you this in person…

Anyway, that is where we stand. I am going to start developing the user facing site soon.

We keep moving forward.

Just added a really simple AS3 class to our code page. It is a utility class called “Link” that has one method, “go,” that acts like the “getURL” method so familiar to those that are used to programming ActionScript 2. Included in the file are some examples and the class itself.

Enjoy.

During the week we will be doing some site changes. It might not seem like anything major has changed, but we are restructuring a lot of things internally. If there are short outages, we apologize.

Along with some server changes we are also going to start making some changes to our business. We will still offer our custom-made widget service, but we are going to be doing things a little differently. I can’t say too much right now, but in the coming months there will be some dramatic changes to the WidgetNest brand. Some of these changes will even be viewed more externally, as we strive to be transparent with our business practices and proceducres. As we have alluded to before, we are in the middle of some pretty awesome projects. So awesome, in fact, that they are taking up a lot of our time. We hope to start documenting our progress, in an effort to help others know what it is we are doing.

We have often wondered “what do people do all day?” when we think about all the startups and small development teams there are out on the web. We have finally decided to help answer that question. We will be updating this blog regularly with recaps of the day’s or week’s activity as well as our thought processes and actual work methodology. We are not worried about people stealing our ideas. We are prepared for critique and discussion. This will be a learning experience for us all.

Hope you all will enjoy it as much as we will.

Thanks.

Our latest widget:

March Madness 2008

This was fun to make and it is just as fun to use (I think, anyway, but I am biased.) Check it out and let us know what you think.

As I transition from AS2 to AS3, I find that sometimes what used to be accomplished in few steps now takes more. One of these is the old AS2 LoadVars object. It was pretty straight forward, but now it requires multiple classes and methods to make work. This is not necessarily a bad thing, AS3 is, in my opinion, leaps and bounds ahead of AS2, but that doesn’t mean we can’t all work together to make things easier for ourselves.

So, in that vain, I offer up my first ever AS3 Class - the VariableLoader (zip). It takes all the new steps and packages them in something that feels a little more like the old method. Included in the .zip file are the class, the package directory structure, and an example usage file. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me at dave [at] step7design.com

I can’t guarantee that this is the best, most fool-proof, amazing AS3 class ever coded in the history of the Internet. But I can tell you that for my own AS3 development it has made things a little easier.