All Blogs from XOXCO - Web and Community Development

XOXCO Hacker Tools Updated

2011-04-18T02:06:35+00:00

There are new versions of XOXCO's popular developer tools available today!

PeoplePods 0.9 is out, featuring a brand new HTML5 theme, improved JSON api, expanded plugin capabilities, and an improved install and configuration process. Download PeoplePods to create your own social application or community site. It takes only minutes to get up and running with a fully functional social network, and adding custom functionality and features is as easy as creating a few PHP files. Download the latest version from PeoplePods.net, or from our brand new GitHub repository.

jQuery Tags Input 1.2.3 is out as well, featuring a few handy new options, as well as a fix for the most reported bug (pertaining to duplicate tags being added when using the autocomplete option). Many thanks to our new friends on GitHub, devbrothers and erlend for their contributions. Download the latest version from GitHub.

Sourcing business ideas from real-world communities

2011-04-01T02:34:06+00:00

Our friend and associate, Bryan Boyer, has written about opportunities he sees in Helsinki every day: empty storefronts. Specifically, Bryan would like to be able to publicly request that a cafe opens up in an empty commercial space in his neighborhood:

On the ground floor of my apartment building is a small shop that just went out of business. It used to sell snowboard clothes but during two years of residence I never spotted a single customer inside. Lacking a great cafe in my neighborhood, I would love the next person thinking about hanging their shingle to have a way to get an idea of what the market might be interested in.

A fantastic idea. Most entrepreneurs keep their eyes open for opportunities in the market, but it's always a significant gamble. With a public forum listing the market's wishes and needs, the degree of risk is slightly less. Kickstarter, the creative micro-financing site, played the muse of Bryan's theory:

What would the Kickstarter of real estate look like and how might a similar demand-aggregator offer a productive counterpart to the dreaded “not in my back yard” syndrome? Is there a “please in my backyard” platform that could act as a spatial happiness engine, better empowering individuals to inflect their own corner of the city to meet their personal desires?

Do go and read his whole post, which includes pictures of the unused storefronts in Helsinki. In addition to a canny eye for design, he is a very talented writer: Please in My Backyard. One day, we'd love to help Bryan make this idea a reality.

SXSWi: Tales of the Past Future

2011-03-02T12:06:58+00:00

We have little more than a week before the masses descend on Austin for SXSW. If you'll be attending SXSWi, you should come to my core conversation, "Tales of the Past Future." It's going to be less formal than a panel, no stage, no AV equipment nor power point deck. We'll all be sitting around, discussing our earliest experience on the internet and where it is we saw the internet going versus where it went. It's basically a good excuse to reminisce about the old 'net days.

The very nice folks at SXSW suggested I include the phrase "web pioneers" in the title of my talk. While there will be a couple of old school bloggers in attendance , I think we can all consider ourselves to be "web pioneers" in some sense. Everyone (with a badge) is welcome to come and share their experiences and lessons learned.

Some things to think about before coming:

How did the internet come to your house?
How old were you when you first logged on?
How did your online life affect your offline life?
How does the internet of today compare to your ideas of the internet back then?

Speaking of old school, after the core conversation we will be attending the Old Timers Ball at the Side Bar, hosted by Matt Haughey.

Tales of the Past Future / Friday March 11, 5 pm / Austin Convention Center, Room 8A

We're hiring!

2011-02-18T02:19:35+00:00

XOXCO, a small web development company located in Austin, TX is looking to hire a developer to join us full-time in designing and building web applications.

We specialize in designing web products built around community functionality. Some of our projects include MediaBugs.org, dooce Community, and NeighborGoods. Our recent focus has been on location-based and mobile technologies, as well the new capabilities available through HTML5.

We are looking for someone in Austin who is self-motivated and enthusiastic about creating new products. You will be involved in all stages, from concept to launch, on variety of cutting edge projects. Though your responsibilities will primarily involve writing code, you will be involved in activities like product design brainstorming sessions, usability testing, rapid prototyping, and research.

Applicants must be fluent in PHP and Javascript, HTML and CSS. Experience with Drupal is a major plus, as is a talent for Photoshop.

We are cool people committed to making useful, interesting and fun software. We have a lot of fun working on our own products and on products for a wide ranging group of clients. There is always lots to learn and neat stuff to work on!

Sound like your kind of job? Send a resume AND links to a few examples of things you've built that are available online to info@xoxco.com

NILM Bugs joins the PeoplePods family

2010-12-14T09:42:50+00:00

Well this is pretty nifty! Carl Malamud (Wikipedia, Twitter) and Karl Fogel (he created Subversion!) have taken the open source version of MediaBugs and turned it into a bug tracker about the availability of legal materials.

Says Carl, in his blog post for O'Reilly Radar,

The legal bug tracker is a classic open source story. We started with the Media Bugs code base developed by Scott Rosenberg and his team, the winners of a Knight News Challenge award. Media Bugs, in turn, is built on an open source toolkit called PeoplePods.

Says Karl, in his blog post about the project,

Usually people address customized bug tracking needs in one of two ways: they make do with some existing tracker (e.g., filing non-software bugs in one of the many free software bug trackers), or they spend a lot of time and effort building a bug tracker from scratch or near-scratch. Neither solution is entirely satisfactory...This code base has the potential to drastically lower the cost of making a customized tracker.

We are excited to see PeoplePods powering another site, and grateful for Karl and Carl's contributions to the core project.

Get in touch if you'd like to help out with the NILM Bugs project. If you'd like to set up your own clone of MediaBugs or contribute to that project, check out the code here, and it will automagically install the latest version of PeoplePods for you!.

Ben Brown on OpenSoure.com

2010-11-18T09:37:41+00:00

An interview I did with OpenSource.com is now online! Read it here.

In it, I discuss how running an online community is like throwing a giant, never-ending party, how open source techniques can help change journalism, and why people should use PeoplePods:

Unlike a lot of similar tools (like BuddyPress and Drupal), PeoplePods has no predefined shape or format - it is not a blog, it is not a social network in a box, it is not a content management system. TRUE, it can be used for these things, but instead of trying to build the best generic product I could, I decided to built the best generic COMPONENTS and SYSTEMS I could, and let developers weave them together whatever way is appropriate for their project. I hate to hear about software where a developer's job is reduced to removing and hiding functionality through a series of CSS hacks and config options. With PeoplePods, you build UP from a simple base, not DOWN from an overly complex generic solution. This way, you are not limited by some other developer's dream of how things should work, and you are not forced to squeeze your idea into the confines of a blog or some other pre-existing design metaphor. Thus, MediaBugs looks and acts totally different from NeighborGoods, which looks and acts totally different from Helsinki Design Lab - but they're all using the same basic, solid, tested infrastructure.

Weeknote 119

2010-11-03T01:58:14+00:00

We got a new logo this week, by Jason Permenter. Jason also designed a suite of document templates that will make all of our paperwork shine. We are very pleased.

MediaBugs is now available nation-wide, so you can now file bugs on news reports from any publication or news source, no matter where they are located. In addition, much more information is now available about publications, including information about their correction policies. Mediabugs' launch was covered by BoingBoing!

We've been working for a few months on a big enhancement to the dooce® Community, and it is finally live: dooce Groups! Members of the community can now join together in small groups and participate in conversations outside of the main question-and-answer site. This addition to the site happened in response to how quickly the site grew, and how active the membership is. When we noticed that members were struggling to group together and organize themselves using the existing software, we knew it was time for an upgrade!

In case you missed it, we released a new version of our social SDK, PeoplePods. The new version features a redesigned and enhanced command center, as well as new plugin capabilities. Also, PeoplePods now ships with Twitter, Facebook and OpenID compatibility! We're putting lots of work into PeoplePods, and releases should now happen on a more regular basis. The latest and greatest code (and info on every change as it happens) is available on the PeoplePods Project Page at Google Code.

And finally, our awesome intern Damien has been working diligently on a Chrome version of SendTab. If all goes well, SendTab 2.0 will be released sometime this month in both Safari and Chrome versions with some much requested new functionality. Hooray!

jQuery Tags Input

2010-09-22T02:38:45+00:00

Magically convert a simple text input into a cool tag list with this jQuery plugin.

Do you use tags to organize content on your site? This plugin will turn your boring tag list into a magical input that turns each tag into a style-able object with its own delete link. The plugin handles all the data - your form just sees a comma-delimited list of tags!

Jump to: Examples, Download, Instructions, Options, License

Examples

Download

Download the latest from Github

And then follow XOXCO on Twitter for updates!

And bookmark our official jQuery project page.

Instructions

First, add the Javascript and CSS files to your <head> tag:


	<script src="jquery.tagsinput.js"></script>

	<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="jquery.tagsinput.css" />

Create a real input in your form that will contain a comma-separated list of tags. You can put any default or existing tags in the value attribute, and they'll be handled properly.


	<input name="tags" id="tags" value="foo,bar,baz" />

Then, simply call the tagsInput function on any field that should be treated as a list of tags.


	$('#tags').tagsInput();

If you want to use jQuery.autocomplete, you can pass in a parameter with the autocomplete url.


	$('#tags').tagsInput({autocomplete_url:'http://myserver.com/api/autocomplete'});

You can also send in options to the autocomplete plugin, as described here.


	$('#tags').tagsInput({
	   autocomplete_url:'http://myserver.com/api/autocomplete',

	   autocomplete:{selectFirst:true,width:'100px',autoFill:true}

	});

You can add and remove tags by calling the addTag() and removeTag() functions.


	$('#tags').addTag('foo');

	$('#tags').removeTag('bar');

Options


$(selector).tagsInput({

   'autocomplete_url': url_to_autocomplete_api,

   'autocomplete': { option: value, option: value},

   'height':'100px',

   'width':'300px',

   'unique':true,

   'defaultText':'add a tag'


});

License

This code is released under the MIT software license.

Helsinki Design Lab launches "Dossiers"

2010-08-23T03:00:45+00:00

We just helped the fine folks at Helsinki Design Lab launch a major new piece of their site: Dossiers.

From the HDL blog:

We needed the ease of use of a blog, where content is stored in a database and easily manipulated, with the flexibility of a sketchpad, where the presentation is freeform and maleable. And since this is a tool that we intend to use in the daily course of HDL's work, it needs to have a sense of history as well. It needed to be able to keep track of time by allowing versions which the user can then "scrub" back and forth between.

Announcing SendTab

2010-08-20T08:43:19+00:00

Today, we are releasing SendTab, a Safari extension that lets you send tabs from your laptop or phone to your living room computer.

We live in a connected household, where laptops and iPads outnumber residents. Our living room TV is connected to a Mac Mini, which we use for all of our media consumption - we stream a lot of video from all over the web. However, we do most of our browsing and discovery on our laptops and iPads, and right now, the process of sending something from a laptop to the big screen is really annoying.

That's why we built SendTab. Now, with a single tap, the current tab we're viewing will appear within seconds on the big screen. Any page can instantly be sent from Safari, Firefox, Chrome and any iOS device to the big screen.

Of course, not everyone has a computer connected to their TV. SendTab is handy for all sorts of other things:

Quickly send a tab from one browser to another...
Send tabs from your iPhone or iPad to your laptop...
Send tabs to your girlfriend!

SendTab also has an easy to use API, so developers can send tabs from within their apps. Neat, eh?

Download SendTab

Many thanks to XOXCO's #1 intern, Damien Bell, for his hard work on SendTab, and to all of our talented designer friends who helped us design the SendTab button, and to our computer-tv having friends who helped us test. Thanks, dudes!

Vote for our SXSW panels

2010-08-12T12:39:20+00:00

Preparations for SXSW seem to start earlier and earlier every year. No matter, for we love the festival that brings the world to our door step every March. The panels featured at SXSW are chosen in part by the votes of the audience. That's where you come in.

Ben has proposed a panel called Behind the Scenes of Online Communities. Vote for this panel here. His pitch:

Join real people who run real communities to learn what it's like to run a site with thousands or millions of members. Building a loyal community is a key component to the success of your website, whether you're running a content site, a web application, or something in-between. They may not have a voice on your site yet, but the community is out there, talking amongst themselves. We will discuss the practical realities of opening the doors of your website to member participation - how, when, and why. When "users" become "members," you are sharing the ownership and management responsibilities of the site with them. Your most loyal members will be with you on launch day, they'll help you through redesigns, and they'll mourn the passing of each feature that doesn't quite make it out of beta. We will discuss the risks and rewards your community will bring.

Katie's panel, which she will theoretically moderate, is called Tales of the Future Past: Web Pioneers Remember. Vote for this panel here. Her pitch:

This year, millions of people will start their first blog. Millions of people will write their first tweet, join their first social network, or post their first picture to the Web. Welcome to the future, guys, but some of us have been at this for nearly two decades! Join a panel of industry veterans who rode the waves of the first boom and lived to tell the tales of the '90s Internet. Featuring practical stories of life lessons learned online as well as fond (and not so fond) memories of bygone sites, startups and memes, this will be a great panel for those who lived through it, and those who wish to learn from the hilarious and heartbreaking mistakes of others.

Let the beautiful democracy of SXSW panel voting begin!

Ben's "Building Online Community" presentation now online!

2010-08-10T09:24:30+00:00

The very nice folks at Web Content 2010 have posted high quality video of my entire presentation! Strap yourself in and get ready to learn about online communities!

My slides from this talk, as well as some Twitter highlights, are here.

Building and Running an Online Community

2010-06-09T12:59:57+00:00

I presented this week at Web Content 2010 in Chicago. My presentation was about the practical issues you face when building online communities.

I have been building and working with web communities for a long time. For this talk, which was to an audience primarily consisting of content strategists and web editors, I wanted to distill as many of the lessons I've learned into a few solid pointers they could actually apply to their work.

Based on the things that people tweeted during my session, these are the big ideas worth repeating:

If you have an audience for your content, you already have a community. They may not be posting on your site yet, but they're out there, talking to one another.
"User generated content" is something a drug addicted robot poops! Think of the stuff that your audience creates as "member created art."
Community isn't made up of software components - it's made up of people, and they really want to talk to one another.
You should start simple, and build community software to enhance what your community is already doing.

You can pretend you were at my presentation in Chicago by stepping through my slides, embedded below - worth it if only for the amazing user loyalty graph Heather and Jon shared with me from Dooce.com.

Building and Running an Online Community

Helsinki Design Lab in the press

2010-05-19T03:04:14+00:00

The local press in Helsinki, Finland have taken notice of Bryan Boyer and the launch of Helsinki Design Lab.

From We Are Helsinki:

Designer-architect BRYAN BOYER, originally from California but now settled into Helsinki, is puzzled by the misuse of terminology. "Strategy often gets mixed up with planning. To be strategic, you have to also make difficult decisions and produce results," ponders the Harvard graduate, who has been working on Sitra's Helsinki Design Lab project since the fall of 2008.

Read the rest here.

Helsinki Design Lab Launches

2010-04-26T02:17:03+00:00

It's been a busy time here at XOXCO. I am very happy to announce our second launch of the month, Helsinki Design Lab. It was our first time working with an organization on another continent, but HDL's Bryan Boyer and his nightowl tendencies made it easy for us.

HDL's mission, in part, is as follows:

We assist decision-makers to view challenges from a big-picture perspective, and provide guidance toward more complete solutions that consider all aspects of a problem. Our mission is to advance this way of working - we call it strategic design.

HDL is collecting case studies of strategic design projects to be featured on the site and at their conference later this year. Applications for inclusion to HDL are accepted through the site.

We wanted the website to do justice to the beauty of HDL's identity and collateral, so we partnered with Andy Pressman at Rumors Studio, who did an excellent job of creating the website's design.

We're especially proud of bringing to life the special features around the site:

Subtle animation effects in the case study and around the site highlight portions of the content.
Case studies "come to life" as they are created using the submission tool thanks to tons of fancy CSS and jQuery magic.
Each time the page is loaded a randomized version of the logo appears!
"Exquisite" PDFs are generated through a custom javascript-based pagination function.
Behind the scenes, all of the editorial tools feature autosave!

Of course, PeoplePods is providing the community components necessary for running the intense multi-user creative and editorial process Bryan and his internationally distributed team use to craft the case studies they feature. Thanks to Bryan, Andy and their teams for their hard work on this!

MediaBugs.org Launches

2010-04-20T03:30:53+00:00

Today we helped launch MediaBugs.org, a website that aims to 'fix the news.' When Scott Rosenberg approached us for this project, his goal was to create a space where the average newspaper reader could submit a "bug" - or an error in reporting - that they'd spotted in their local paper. With the local news organizations participating, a conversation between the audience and the journalist responsible could then resolve the issue.

We built the site using our own PeoplePods software. It was a perfect fit for the type of interaction between readers and news organizations that Scott envisioned. Mignon Khargie designed the logo and branding, which was carried into the look and feel of the site with the help of Courtney Patubo.

For the launch, Scott and Mark Follman are focusing on Bay Area media, but eventually their plan is to expand nation-wide.

Scott Rosenberg introduces Mediabugs.org at Ignite

2010-03-19T01:22:31+00:00

We'll be launching in just a few days, but if you'd like a preview of our latest project, check out the video below.

Weeknote 79

2010-01-26T04:02:22+00:00

For New Years, Katie sent out little gift packages to our recent clients and co-conspirators. Katie wanted to make sure that we didn't just send people junk - nobody needs another American Apparel teeshirt with a dotcom logo on it. Inside each package was a Pantone 232C flash drive with the XOXCO logo LASER ETCHED onto it, and a custom postcard from Moo. They arrived last week, and Amit from Photojojo and Micki from NeighborGoods documented the contents on Flickr:

Last week, we had lunch with Todd Nienkerk from Four Kitchens, another local design and development company that does work simliar to the stuff we do. Over fancy sausages at Frank, we grilled Todd about how he runs Four Kitchens and about his experience hiring people. He gave us a ton of great advice and introduced us to a few people here in Austin who can help us as we continue to grow.

As we left our meeting with Todd, Katie and I decided that we should try to have a meeting with someone outside of our normal laptop-o-sphere at least once a week. We need to keep the external input coming in so we can learn from the smart people around us. I want to stay humble and remind myself that there is always more to learn.

Somehow, we continue to trick Kristina Halvorson to give us advice as well. We had a chat with her yesterday about the early days at Brain Traffic, and how she sets goals for the growth of her agency. We are used to setting goals for projects and products, but the task of dreaming up and planning for the future of a company like ours is a bit of a mystery to me.

But the advice we've been getting from everyone is inspiring - and made me realize that I tend to over think some of these issues. Todd warned us about the bureaucratic requirements for hiring people in Texas, but he also told us that there's a good pool of talented people here in Austin who are hungry for good work. Kristina told us to stop worrying about numeric metrics and goals, and start figuring out what kind of life and environment XOXCO is supposed to create for us. It seems that our plans can be a lot squishier than I thought. Which is good, because I am a pretty squishy guy.

In terms of actual CODE WRITTEN, which is really how I measure the success or failure of a week, I am ON FIRE. We are getting ready to release new versions of NeighborGoods and dooce Community with a bunch of cool new features and updates. I am slaughtering Basecamp tasks on the MediaBugs and HDL projects - both of which should be wrapping up in the next month. With design and functionality at about 90% on both sites, we are just a tiny bit behind schedule. I am totally impressed with the work everyone has been doing on these projects.

We're travelling to San Francisco again at the end of this week, and we'll be there through Tuesday of next week. We're hoping to schedule a few face-to-face meetings with our VIPS - if you want to see us, email Katie!.

Weeknote 77

2010-01-15T02:59:24+00:00

As Week 77 closes, we are hosting the one and only Matt Haughey in our offices. He is sitting behind me right now moderating spam users on Metafilter. I challenge you to find another person as experienced as Matt who still does the dirty work of running a community every day.

We were up to our eyeballs in design this week. We started the week evaluating the first round of MediaBugs designs that CourtneyP created, and we're ending the week with the very exciting second round of design that Rumors did for Helsinki Design Lab. Both of the sites are coming to life quickly, and it looks like we're on schedule for February and March launches.

Jesse Keyes, our frequent partner in crime, has been kicking out revision after revision to an all new, all awesome homepage for SMITH Mag's Six-word Memoirs. Larry Smith sent us his last little chunk of feedback today, so the new design will hopefully go into production some time next week.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Katie and I put together a report on our session with Bryan Boyer last week. It was an intense few days featuring lots of whiteboarding and pages and pages of notes and drawings. We pulled it all together so Bryan has a clear record of the things we looked at, the decisions we made, and the next steps we all have to take towards finishing the HDL site and moving onto the next phase. I love creating these kind of documents - thoughts and processes made concrete! Here's a zoomed out version of the document we sent to Bryan on Wednesday:

One of my early 2010 goals is to spend some time redoing all of our XOXCO document templates. Some beautiful PDF files have crossed my desk recently, and it makes me jealous. This is just another item we need to add to the agenda of our upcoming (and as yet unscheduled) XOXCO retreat. I love reading about BERG's internal processes and the efforts they are making to define the culture of their studio to themselves and to the outside world, and THAT also makes me jealous. We are so busy being externally focused, we haven't spent enough time focusing internally, defining our own goals.

We can't wait much longer to tackle these internal issues. My goal is to set aside a day or two during January to sort ourselves out, and to give ourselves the full XOXCO experience that we normally reserve for our clients. I want to draw some stuff for myself!

Another thing I want to spend more time on is doing pure research. It occurred to me the other day that I very rarely get lost in a chain of Wikipedia articles anymore, or find myself having spent hours reading about a new technology or API. This week I had cause to learn all about (and implement) an oauth consumer, and it was really refreshing to learn something new. If only I had a clone.

Random Reruns: Netflix Edition

2010-01-07T09:30:45+00:00

We've expanded our web tv channel surfing tool, Random Reruns to include movies from your Netflix Instant Watch Queue.

If you've got a Netflix account and use the Instant Watch feature, you should try it out! Instead of wasting time browsing through endless listings, let Random Reruns pick a movie for you!

Play here: Random Reruns: Netflix Edition

It looks like this:

One day, I'll find enough time to finish up the protoype I built that takes a feed of video URLs and turns them into a "lean back" experience, complete with interstitials and "Coming Up Next" teasers. Til then, you can still get random reruns from Hulu or random reruns of classic Star Trek.