i9 Conference

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If you haven’t seen yet there is going to be an awesome conference for startups and entrepreneurs (builders, makers, hackers) happening in Lisbon in October. i9 Conference speakers include so far:

  • Brad Feld (feld.com)
  • Clint Nelson, Director of Startup Weekend
  • Bill Liao, co-founder of Xing.com
  • Alex Farcet, co-founder of Startupbootcamp
  • etc.

I must say I’m particularly attracted not so much by the talks themselves but by the workshops. Rather than having the normal conference talks, in the first two days the program includes workshops such as:

  • Stone Soup – “how to create something from nothing”
  • The Art of Customer Development
  • Making Open Innovation Work
  • From Innovation To Cash Flows
  • Social Media Tools and Open Innovation
  • (more to come)

Definitely worth checking out, hope to see you there!

Jeditable and admin-ajax.php in WordPress

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Jeditable is an awesome in-line editor plugin for jQuery. I was trying to use it with WordPress the other day and I had a little trouble that went like this.

A basic invocation of Jeditable is for example:


$('.edit').editable('http://www.example.com/save.php', {
"callback": function( sValue, y ) {
alert("callback");
},
"submitdata": function ( value, settings ) {
return {
"action": 'edit_item'
};
}
});

The first argument is the URL or function to send the edited content to. The problem when using this with WordPress is that you will end up with a separated file (the save.php) that will be isolated from the WordPress environment. Wouldn’t it be better to run this as a normal WordPress AJAX call?

To use this with WordPress you just need to use as a target the wp-admin/admin-ajax.php and have the action name in the submitdata, e.g.:


$('.edit').editable( '/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php', {
"callback": function( sValue, y ) {
alert("callback");
},
"submitdata": function ( value, settings ) {
return {
"action": 'edit_item'
};
}
} );

Then you can define that AJAX action and access everything on the WordPress side (database, etc).

Getting into the Habits

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It’s been a while since I write something here. It was been a bit busy at work and very busy in general. I’ve been reading ‘the 7 habits of highly effective people’ and before the title puts you off let me share one or two things I liked about the book:
1) It’s not about the superficial stuff – writing todo lists, having a schedule, etc – it’s about the deep underlying complexities of humans and human relantionships.
2) It’s not about one particular tool or one particular way of doing things. What works best for me might suck for the next person.

I highly recommend this one if you want to know yourself better and if you want to have a chat about it afterwards let me know.

Driving Farrusco

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In between working till late hours and living in an old Monastery I had a really good time at the AZResidency this year.

On Saturday Mayur even cooked a lovely curry for dinner that had chicken curry, lentil dhal and other goodies.

The project I’ve been working started off as a Web interface to control a robot, more specifically a Guibot which we call ‘Farrusco’. This was the follow-up of the SWARS project, that started last year at this same residency.

Even before we started working on it we had another idea which was to develop an Android app and use the accelerometers to control it. For the communication we decided to use the open protocol XMPP and Google Talk. This allowed us first and foremost to control the robot via messages in GTalk which was pretty awesome :)

After that we started working on the Android app to send the messages via XMPP to Google talk using the Smack library. At this point we had the mobile app working already and controlling the robot.

Once we got the Android app working we quickly moved on to other ideas. We had a Kinect lying around and so we starting working on controlling the robot through simple gestures in the air, kind of “use the force Luke”.

But the initial goal was to allow a person to visit our Hackerspace site and through there drive Farrusco and see through his camera. With that in mind we did a web interface and hosted the whole thing (web interface and web service) on Google AppEngine because 1) it’s free and 2) using XMPP is dead easy in there. You won’t be able to use it straightaway because well.. we don’t have a Farrusco 24h available for you just yet. But I’m thinking in a future session at AltLab to have Farrusco on and let you control it in realtime.

Architecture

I won’t bore you with any more of the details, just check the video:

Last Assignment

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This is the final week of the P2PU WordPress Development course. Read on..

We don’t want you to have too much work this week. After all you’ve already reached this point and that’s uber awesome. However we do want you learn something new. So here is what we have planned:

Client X has called. He is having a blast watching the statistics for his new photography site.He started thinking how hard would it be to start selling his photos via his website. In this final week you will help Client X to turn his photography site into a online photography shop.

The goal is to have a new page on Client X Website where he has listed all is photos with an associated price and possibly a link to some payment gateway (e.g. PayPal). Don’t worry, it’s not that complicated since you can use one of the availble e-commerce plugins for WordPress:

As usual for approval on this assignment you will need to provide a link to my e-mail at nuno.morgadinho@gmail.com with your p2pu username.

Cheers and don’t forget, always Enjoy!