NZfusion.com

I just thought I would log on and wish everyone a happy new years! And let everyone know we are all still here in 2008. Still busy building!

Christmas is quickly approaching us, and we are busy putting together a questionnaire to gather feedback on what we are doing and what we should think about doing.

Our sharethestars project is coming along very nicely, but we’d like to get some research data around peoples giving habits. Which will help us understand what type of people are most interested in the idea and why they are interested. We started the project as a way to advertise charity organisations, helping charities collect donations, and helping people publicise their involvement with charities. we have realised that Kiwi’s give so much more than just money, helping charities by donating time, collecting on the streets and the day to day running of charities.

This indicates that some market research would be really useful, helping us to understand how our initial product launch should work. And we can always amend it a little later, based on community feedback!

Another side project we have been playing with is whizzoo. Our catch phrase for whizzoo is: “What is it?”, because with our web hosting plan we could choose a free domain name, we chose whizzoo.com, but we had no idea what a whizzoo should do. We set up a simple interface that recorded user input and allowed users to vote on their own input and others, making the site self-regulating. It turns out that this is a reasonably popular application in its own right, it isn’t in the same league as Twitter, but it has struck us that the concept is rather similar - the difference being content voting.

So stay tuned, we expect to release our questionnaire early next week and we are expecting some sort of prize!

December 17th 2007, is the bloggers day of kindness, the idea is that bloggers (that is those of us that write a blog) do something good and write about that. It is all a little “blowing ones horn”, but when people don’t write about good things, then the only news is bad news. And we seem to get enough of that these days!

So over the next month, we at NZfusion will be thinking of small acts that we can do between now and the 17th of December to do good. And hopefully we’ll get out there, embarrass ourselves a little, take a few photographs and tell the world we aren’t bad people.

Hopefully we will have our first project in some sort of testing arena by then and we will be able to concentrate on being nice to people (the act of kindness doesn’t need to be massive - just kind).

Let us know if you have any good ideas!

Yes, thats right! I have spent a little time working on a cool Ajax-PHP-MySql email register. This way we should be able to keep track of who is interested in getting the juicey details on what it is that we are doing before the rest of the world does… perhaps even before some of our direcotrs find out!

It has taken a little of playing around with to get just right … PHP and MySql was easy enough, all we are doing is loading an email addres into a table… but I had a little to learn around using jQuery and this is what I ended up with:

 /*
 * Function is run when the DOM is ready.
 */
$(function() {
	$("#emailform").validate({
		event: "keyup",
		errorLabelContainer: $("#messageBox"),
		wrapper: "li",
		rules: {
			email: {
				required: true,
                //rangeLenght Option [minLenght,maxLenght]
				rangeLength:[6,50],
				//It is an E-Mail address
				email: true
			}
		},
		messages: {
			email:
                        'Please enter a valid email address'
		}
	});
});

/*
 * The submit function for our AJAX form
 */
function submitEmail(){
	$.ajax({
		url: 'register_ajax.php',
		type: 'POST',
		data: { email: $('#email').val() },
		dataType: 'html',
		timeout: 1000,
		error: function(msg){
			$('#sign_up').html('Sorry, there was a ' +
                             msg.status + ' error saving your email: ' +
                             msg.responseXML);
		},
		success: function(html){
			$('#sign_up').html(html);
		}
	});
}

It is just remarkable how much is acheived with so little javascript code! The form is sent using Ajax supplied by jquery and is validated by the jquery validation plugin.

James studied Computer Science at Otago University and since then has been in Wellington building applications that help people manage, search and view information.

He believes that you can be technologically informed without avoiding the gym and you should have tools that help you communicate easily without missing Sunday afternoon at the beach.

In parallel life to software development, James has been rowing and coaching and is still passionate about health.