LibMob, the mobile book research solution, is back in business after a revamped mobile template and updated back end.

Amazon changed their product APIs recently, forcing us to swap in latest PEAR's Services_Amazon class and write a custom wrapper to integrate it into the existing LibMob engine.

WikiWorldBook, the global address book, got a huge facelift recently. Seriously huge. It's sporting a cleaner, better, slicker, more user-friendly interface, and is faster to boot. Big thanks to Obox Design for their design chops, and kudos to the DevNow team for all their hard code-slinging work!

We're proud to announce the launch of a new social network for brides -- Style Circle. It's a social network built for our client Style Me Pretty, allowing brides, wedding planners, vendors, and wedding enthusiasts around the globe to learn, plan, share, and socialize.

It's built using BuddyPress and WordPress-MU, and a lot of work was done to make sure the user experience was not only friendly, but pretty. Plus, it features a very cool Inspiration Board Builder tool, allowing users to assemble thousands of professional-quality wedding-related images into boards and collages for their own exploration and inspiration.

The Microsoft Local Impact map launched this week. It's an interactive rich UI application allowing users to click and drill down in a world map to see demographics, technical statistics, and stories of Microsoft and technology impact around the globe.

Big kudos (and judos?) to Stimulant for handling the RUI aspects, allowing the DevNow team to focus on web services, business logic, data mapping, and deployment.

You can now find old friends and learn more about people using Twitter using the new Twitter FreeSearch Bot we built for WikiWorldBook. To use it, just follow @freesearch and send either a reply or a direct message to freesearch followed by the name of the person you want to know more about.

e.g. @freesearch Barak Obama

You'll then get back a tweet with information about that person's social network profiles around the web, powered by the people search engine at WikiWorldBook.

Nice article on Axon Flux about scaling a Rails site. Some helpful tips on monitoring processes and queries, using S3, search engines, and how so many Rails articles and plugins get out of date so quickly. I guess the article is more of a "helpful tips" post. But it was still handy.

Incidentally, New Relic looks really nice. I assume it's not totally free, or else a paid version will come out soon enough (a la Hoptoad, which I liked before & lost interest in).

After spending a ton of time in Ruby on Rails we're getting back into some more PHP projects. And ASP.NET. :) Granted, it would be nice to only stick with one language, but a lot of our projects tend to involve solutions and packages instead of a lot of ground-up coding.

Anyhow, this is mainly a link for me to check out later if we need it: Tyler Hall's Simple PHP Framework.

http://code.google.com/p/simple-php-framework/wiki/ExampleWebsites

http://groups.google.com/group/simple-php-framework

 

 

We recently launched sites for PromoAid. They hired us to build them not only a sharp corporate web site, but also a fully custom marketing directory platform for their business model.

PromoAid provides continually-updated detailed metrics and reviews on marketing companies around the world, and makes that data available to their clients. Clients can add their own notes or reviews, bookmark agencies, and browse, search or compare agencies in a matrix.

It was an involved project with a nice mix of standard data metric features and social features, and we are honored that PromoAid chose us to build their flagship product.