the cloudspace blog

I’ve been on a quite a Javascript kick lately. Firefox extension coding has gotten under my skin, and since Firefox extensions are mostly Javascript, the whole of JS has my attention. So, I was quite pleased to find this article from Lifehacker, delving into some good details of the upcoming Firefox JS engine — Tracemonkey.

This article does a great job breaking some of the more technical details down into bite-sized portions for non-JS coders. But, there’s also tons of good solid tech info — look midway through the article. I’m definitely going to give this a shot. I’ve been noticing a tendency for FF2’s JS engine to just die sometimes, with no reason.

Tim and I are just about to head out to the Orlando Ruby Users Group meeting.

This month Matthew Williams will be talking about Ruby Rad (using Arduinos to control electronic in Ruby). So if you ever wanted to build a robot, or maybe just your own personal electronics, you won’t want to miss this meeting. Matthew will have live demos of his electronics in action which should be fun to see.

Exciting!

In case you forgot, or have been under a rock for a very long while, BarCampChaos in Orlando is *today*. You can still get a registration if you want. You should come out and say hi, watch some great presentations, and….sign up to present one?

This BarCamp event is piggybacking on Create Chaos,  which is a creative/artsy conference being held at the Orlando World Center Marriott. They’ve generously donated some space for our BarCamp event. We should thank them and send them good karma waves. ~~~~~ (those are ASCII karma waves)

Cloudspace would like to congratulate Sayfie Review on being awarded the 2008 ITFlorida Award for Excellence in Web 2.0. Sayfie Review has an press release with the details.

The Award for Excellence in Web 2.0, recognizes the Sayfie Review for not only their excellence in the redesign of SayfieReview.com, but also for the development of cutting-edge features such as the Blog Ticker, the Press Release Ticker and the Campaign AdTracker. The Sayfie Review’s execution of new media and social networking tools such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Purple Florida were also cited as leading reasons for their selection for the award.

There is even more great web 2.0 stuff going on behind the scenes. Sayfie Review uses a custom Firefox extension to save interesting pages or links to their “link bank” and a drag and drop application to organize the day’s links and add photos.

Tim Rosenblatt, our Director of Applications Development, has just put the finishing touches on a hot new firefox extension for Twitter users called Tw-autocomplete. The best description possible is the one from the extension’s page:

“An astonishingly simple add-on for Firefox that adds autocomplete support for @-messages and d-messages to Twitter.com”

It really is just that simple. You install and it starts working right away. Just type @ (or “d ” for a private message) and start typing the username of one of the people you are following and an autocomplete drop down should appear. Tim has an even more complete description of how to use Tw-autocomplete on his blog. So if you are a Twitter user, go install this extension and start saving yourself some time!

FlashReport, the place to go for California political news has just expanded their audience. We’ve just launched a new mobile version of FlashReport site so that users on the go can access their daily links, blog entries, daily commentaries, and special columns. They’ve even got a cool new Blackberry application so that Blackberry users can launch the mobile version right from their application menu.

RubyConf ‘08 is on! One of the nice parts of being in Orlando is that conventions come to you. Vacationing family members also come to you, and that’s usually a good thing. Usually.

Michael and I already picked up tickets to the conference.  The very awesome Gregg Pollack of Orlando’s own Ruby User Group will be giving the very first presentation of the conference. Tickets are gonna go fast, so if you’re in the Ruby/Rails scene, sign up soon. And, if you go, look for us. We’ll be the cool kids in the back of the room.

The opening night party for Izeafest is happening tonight in downtown Orlando. I bought a ticket just so that I could see Merlin Mann speak on Saturday morning. Oh, and the drinks and socializing tonight, which is always a good thing. I hope to see lots of the local crowd showing up — if you’re there, find me and say hi!

The first of two current ongoing redesigns has just launched. Adrian has just refreshed the look of the Greenblock site by applying a great updated look designed by Greenblock designer Bunny. The new logo and rotating tag lines in the header reflect an update in their corporate branding. We’ve also made some subtle changes to the backgrounds and updated the random pictures to eliminate flash.

Its been just over two weeks since my last blog post, but we’ve sure been busy.  Sayfie News and Heartland for Children have selected Cloudspace to do redesigns and Liberty First has selected Cloudspace to build a whole new website!

Tim and I got some great Ruby on Rails work in on a little startup project that previewed at ROFLcon and we’re hoping to have the time to finish it up shortly so it can make its public debut in a few weeks.

We’ve also got two other redesigns, a new site and a new mobile version getting ready to launch in the coming days and weeks!