Author: earthpeople
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Place-a-pet, your animal shelter placeholder image service.
We’ve been using Placekitten.com for some time, and really love it. This service has two major flaws however: a) who are these cats? And do I really care? b) dogs are also nice. It doesn’t have dogs. The day before christmas, two years ago, we made a WordPress plugin which replaces the standard WordPress 404…
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Integrating Snapchat
A client asked us what could be done, technically, with Snapchat. You may have heard about Snapchat this fall. It apparently has millions of users and are refusing to sell out to Facebook for billions of dollars. Many of us at Earth People have been using Snapchat for a few months, and like it alot.…
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Creating a mobile event experience using social connections
Red Bull asked us to come up with something mobile and social for their Red Bull Weekender event in Stockholm. We love music, and planned on going to this event anyway, so figuring out the functionality was very fun and actually pretty easy. For non FB-connected users we pretty much show a lineup, in which…
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Working around the IE9/IE8 XDR Post bug
When creating a REST-API for a client we ran across this really weird problem. IE8/IE9 can’t make XMLHttpRequest to other domains via CORS. Microsoft invented their own solution for this problem, called XDR. The problem with XDR is that it doesn’t send a Content-type when doing POST requests, defaulting this value to “text/plain” instead. PHP…
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Preventing overlapping cron jobs
From time to time, we’re asked to fix broken sites built by other agencies. This can be extremely tricky, but if it’s technologies we know and love (PHP, MySQL, Apache, Memcached, WordPress, CodeIgniter, Laravel, Slim, etc) we usually say yes. If a site keeps falling every n hours/days, I start by checking if there are any…
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More node.js game action
This small game idea felt like fun – there is a man walking at the bottom of your browser window. Adjust the size of the browser window to make the man walk into the green area, i.e. live on. Try the game here: http://nodelab.earthpeople.se:1112 The man walks faster and faster and more green doors appear. To…
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Quiz buttons in node.js
For our recent fall party we made a music quiz, and if you’re quizzin you gotta have some buttonpressin. We looked for quiz buttons at teknikmagasinet, surprisingly we didn’t find anything. So www what do you have to offer? Nothing? Well ok, let’s build some buttons in node.js. Real time web! 5 teams, connected to…
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Web audio music game
After we did the rhythm experiment at Music Hackday we fooled around a bit more with the web audio synthesizer. It’s pretty amazing that they got a built in synth in Chrome, and if you got some knowledge of synthesizers the different audio experiments out there (googles own minimoog for example) actually seems pretty straight forward,…
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Scaling isn’t tweaking httpd.conf – our approach to high volume sites
Scaling servers is hard work, and neither of us comes from a devops background. Our approach to scaling starts well before that – with every decision a developer take when structuring the app. For a campaign site we made recently, we expected huge amounts of traffic. The site itself was one of those one-page things,…
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using social media as a cms
We recently launched andtherev.com, a new kind of bike shop/factory on Södermalm in Stockholm. The client wanted website users to be able to participate on the site, so instead of using a CMS to fill the grid with content we used Twitter and Instagram. Each page on the site contains a mix from Instagram and Twitter. The…
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beer hacking
today it’s ready: our own brew that puts “real” microbreweries to shame. this is a mere 12 bottles of what we hope is a fairly hoppy american pale ale. making it was easy. 2 pots and 2 hours. and a kit from köksbryggeriet.