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.

Posted 2 years ago by Ben Brown. Topics include jquery-tags-input hackers jquery code peoplepods

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.

Posted 2 years ago by Katie Spence.

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

Posted 2 years ago by Katie Spence.

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

Posted 2 years ago by Ben Brown.

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!.

Posted 2 years ago by Ben Brown. Topics include mediabugs peoplepods

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.

 

Posted 2 years ago by Ben Brown.

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!

Posted 2 years ago by Ben Brown. Topics include sendtab weeknote dooce mediabugs peoplepods

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!

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

Examples

Autocomplete

Add a tag: foo bar baz

Add a tag to all lists

---

No autocomplete:

---

This is what the form sees:

---

Spaces instead of commas:

---

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.

Posted 2 years ago by Ben Brown. Topics include tags javascript jquery launching clickable

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.

Posted 2 years ago by Ben Brown. Topics include HelsinkiDesignLab hdl clients launching

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!

Posted 2 years ago by Ben Brown. Topics include sendtab launching clickable