There’s much talk on the superinterwebs about the future of Facebook. What I hadn’t thought about before was how big they are for photo sharing. Facebook say 60 million photos are added each week which makes them bigger than Yahoo/Flickr and MySpace/Photobucket. My money’s on Google picking them up to get into the social network market properly (Orkut? Saywhat?) which should really give MySpace a much needed kicking.
On the off chance that anyone actually reads this and is looking for work in the Web Communications field, there’s a job currently being advertised at Edge Hill for Web Communications Project Manager. Deadline is 25th May so get your skates on. More details on the Web Services blog.
Web services have finally got a blog! Well, they’ve had one before but this time it’s going to get maintained and looked after with a bit of TLC 
It’s a team blog so friends of mine, please bare that in mind before posting comments! I’ll be posting about all sorts of work related developments and technologies and I’ll reference the more interesting ones from here too.
With more sites dedicated to symfony including Trac moving to a new domain and symfony-forge coming on stream I’ve found searching for symfony things is a bit more tricky - Google’s returning results all over the place. So I’ve created a Google Co-op search engine for symfony.
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=010539329620469924541%3Aq5kvm3-tc5c
Only a few sites on there at the moment but I’ll add more as I use them. Let me know if you have any suggestions.
Ed Parsons points to the new 3D Google Maps that’s available for certain US cities and Tokyo. It would be nice to see some of the user-generated models being places on the maps because otherwise my local area might be flat for quite a long time to come! I’ve been reading Ed’s blog for a while now and it will be very interesting to see what he brings out of Google
The idea of SymfonyCamp is being mooted on the symfony mailing lists at the moment. Sounds like a good idea to me and it seems to have worked in other open source areas. It would be good to find out if any of the Sensio guys or the rest of the symfony core team are able to fit it into their diaries as I’m sure it would be good to have them involved.
Thought I’d post quickly about the joys of GNU Screen. I’ve been using it properly for the last six months or so since starting at Edge Hill. It’s a terminal multiplexer for *nix systems allowing you to connect to multiple shell prompts at once and switch between them at will. But it’s better than that - you can disconnect and reconnect later, even from a different location. If your SSH connection dies you don’t lose anything, simply reconnect and carry on from where you left off.
I use it to connect to the server to manage symfony projects. I constantly have a screen connection with the live and development sites for each project, web logs, home directory and usually a few other locations. There’s too many shortcuts and commands to mention here but Ctrl-A followed by 1-n changes screen; Ctrl-N creates a new screen; Ctrl-A Ctrl-D detaches your connection. If you’re a heavy shell user, especially remotely from Windows with an SSH connection then I strongly recommend taking a look at Screen.
So I’ve had a bit of a ‘mare with Acrobat 8 recently. The plan was to collect data via an online form but to allow it to be viewable on the original form layout by merging it with a PDF file. I investigated various solutions, mostly commercial products which allowed you to programatically manipulate PDF files until I found this very cool PHP script. It basically creates FDF or XFDF files which can be loaded into a PDF form.
I tried it out a couple of months back before getting side tracked by the Edge Hill Hi site but came back to the code recently. In order for the form data to merge back into the PDF you need to create matching form fields in the PDF and there comes the first problem. At work I have a copy of Acrobat writer but it wasn’t the full version - you could create PDFs not not add forms to them. Rubish. But all is not lost - just in time we got an upgrade to the all-singing, all-dancing Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional! So earlier this week I set about trying to load the FDF (or XFDF) files into my newly created PDF forms.
Could I get it to work? Could I heck! The FDF seemed to be valid, the PDF was valid, the forms seemed fine but try as I might every time I loaded the FDF the PDF would appear with no data in. I tried taking it back to basics and attempting to load the FDF into the PDF while in Acrobat rather than the browser and strangely the import data dialog didn’t have FDF or XFDF listed! After much digging I found a couple of references to why this might be.
It seems that FDF and XFDF are now “old” technology. Forms created with LiveCycle Designer - part of Acrobat Professional - won’t load (X)FDF files. This is anoying for two reasons. Firstly, LiveCycle is actually pretty cool - it automatically detected all my fields when converting from a Word document making creating a form a 5 minute job. Secondly, and considerably more dumb is they’re trying to force users to buy more software! To achieve the same effect as loading an FDF into a PDF you either need:
This is really stupid but kind of what I’d expect from Adobe. The solution is to not use LiveCycle and instead painfully create your form fields manually (which is still a lot easier than the last time I had to do this with Acrobat 4). Anyway, just thought I’d rant about this in case it helps anyone else who’s searching for the solution.
Brian Kelly has posted about tracking new comments. This is a topic I’ve been wondering about for a while and haven’t been able to come up with an elegant solution. For my own blog, I subscribe to the comments RSS feed and get informed of new comments by email - that’s great, but what about other people’s blogs?
WordPress provides feeds for each blog entry but I’ve not found a good solution to tracking comments on other people’s blogs. I could add the feed to my news reader but then it gets filled up with stale feeds. The solution forums use of sending an email when a new post is added would work well, but that just seems intrusive and frankly not very Web 2.0.
I did just find a site called co.mments which looks interesting. Maybe I’ll try out a couple of techniques to see what works. At least until Google figure out a better interface for time-limited RSS feeds which automatically tidy themselves up.