Lots has happened in the past few weeks in which I have not blogged here so I’m back with the latest news out of my life. The biggest event in my life to date occured September 21st when I married my girlfriend Maike in Hamburg. It was a wonderful celebration with many great moments. My sister-in-law Tami and my brother Chris were at the ceremony as well. Tami is pregnant and the baby and her “decided” to lose some fluid and get taken to the hospital. And the baby will be born here in Hamburg so I have been meeting my brother a lot more

Now on to the the updates about my work and projects:

Europeskate.com

Raise the Dead video contest has been running for three weeks now and we’ve received 35 entries, 8 actually followed the rules! New video contest page is going up today. Yesterday we had the most visitors ever with 785 unique visitors! New layout and navigation is around the corner to help gpush the page views. The interest in the site is growing in the skateboard industry with possibilities for working together with companies coming in daily!

Del Mundo Clothing

Still working on the basic set-up, lots to do. Advertisement needs to be layed out and new designs created. Shop is set up and online banners need to be made.
Bailgun.de

I have six articles to translate for issue 6 which is coming out this month.

Socialbitz.com

Working on getting at least one article out a day to keep up with social networking news and other creative new start-up sites and widget programming. New graphics are being created on the side as well.

Give Earth a Hand

Site has been put on hold. The original idea just has not worked out so I am working on a new direction to keep people informed about environmental protection around the world.

And to top off the cake with a big cherry I am working together with my mother (yes, my mother *hehe*) to set up a blog for her about celebrities around the world. So there is a lot to do, but I am always looking for new tasks so if anyone interested in working with me on something hust get in contact!

Well, this site is still around even though it is being used a lot less than before. All of my extra work is still flowing into Europeskate.com, Give Earth a Hand and Socialbitz. Currently a lot of that was based on Europeskate as the feedback has been enormous and you have to keep up with the mails to get things rolling.

Just this morning I went back into Give Earth a Hand to start some of the badly needed changes and that is moving along again so please stay tuned to the site as it gets redone yet again. And Socialbitz had to wait a week as I was down in the south of France helping my mother move and get accustomed to her new life on the Cote d’Azur - yeah, I really feel sorry for her.

At my day job I am working double, filling in for my colleague who’s on holiday while developing new content and controlling the site quality. So yes, my days are full at the moment but I’ll be able to jump over to the skatepark this evening for a session in the bowl, getting ready for the local contest this coming Sunday!

I’ve been working a lot on growing the Europeskate site and feedback has been coming in, now even from people at the local skatepark which is good sign. Still planning on geting the community larger, integration of videos and a gallery and new sections about music, people and companies/stuff. So that will continue to grow in content and I’ll be watching the visitor numbers. They are growing at an exponential rate at the moment…

Socialbitz.com has been growing as well. I am working on creating a schedule for getting news and integrating it into the site. It takes a bit more work than other sites as I have (and want to..) do more research and test websites or applications.  At the same time I am learning a lot about the Joomla CMS which takes time as well. But it is moving ahead and it is a lot of fun!

And last but definitely not the least is Give Earth a Hand which is still the main development I am constantly working on. I am getting back to including news, hopefully on a daily basis and I am rescheduling my time to be able to work on the backend and design issues at least 3 times a week.

Oh yeah, since a lot of people are getting interested in Europeskate, I will be opening a small shop online for shirts and hopefully a new line of clothing as well will be coming out soon. The idea isn’t new but due to the interest it will be worth it. Parts of the money madde will be reinvested in Give Earth a Hand, more on this real soon!

I have been investing a lot of time into getting my new project (SocialBitz.com) up and working. The Joomla CMS is very interesting to work with and there are many plug-ins and quirks that have to be looked at, integrated into the back-end and tweaked to fit in to the working site. It is exciting at the same time as it is helping me learn a new system and keep up-to-date about many great applications and websites which are out there.

Europeskate.com has been moving forward at a good pace and I have been receiving good feedback for the site which is always rewarding when you spend a lot of time on a project. Europeskate is built on WordPress and currently I am updating the skatepark mapping area and changing graphics in order to integrate a small shop which Europeskate products. Anyone buying from our shop will help support the Give Earth a Hand project.

Good way to introduce the next part of this blog today: i have been collecting bug fixes and new ideas for the “Give Earth a Hand” project the last couple of weeks and this weekend is blocked for pushing new changes live finally. I am looking forward to the new look and feel of parts of the site and especially how the users will take to the changes!

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It has been yet again a while since my last update but this is probably the first time I am not coming up with ideas about why I haven’t been blogging here.

The reason is that I have been working hard on my three main sites: Europeskate.com , Give Earth a Hand and SocialBitz.com

It goes without saying that it takes a lot of work to get a site started and even more to build up a community around a site and I have been working hard to get these site up and running. Give Earth a Hand (start April 2007) and Europeskate.com (start March 2006 with relaunch this year) have been around for a bit. Europeskate.com is a Wordpress based blog system with a Google Maps app integration. I am currently adding news, tweaking the user interface and working on new graphics. Also I am working through a Google Maps book in order to rebuild the mapping application.

Give Earth a Hand is a social community which supports non-profit organisations and their projects. The major part of the site is a Google Maps application as well. This is sort of buggy still to be quite honest, but after investing lots of time into trying to contact organisations, building the community functionality and reading and collecting information about the environment, I have decided to rebuild major parts of the site to improve the usability.

And last but not least I have been working with the open source CMS Joomla to create a new community website reporting about social communities, mash-ups, start-ups, widgets - basically, anything moving the Internet at the moment. I tried using Joomla 1.5, but  it is not ready for a live site currently. So I have moved back to Joomla 1.012 and I ma moving forwards quickly. It is intensive to read about new sites, try them out and write interesting reports (hopefully), but it is what interests me daily so I am looking forward to pushing this site as well.

Oh yeah, and I am working full-time on a lot of new projects for work so yeah, I’m busy So stay tuned, I’ll be keeping this blog as a basic updater about my current life.

Google Gears is an open source browser plugin which allows users to work with applications bothe offline and online. Developers will be able to use the API to create applications using the Javascript API. The plugin is supposed to be around 700 kb large and it will work with Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+.

There are three different APIs involved here:
- one for the creating data objects to store application information locally on the user’s computer
- one is a SQLite relational database for searching the data - the final part will enable asynchronous JavaScript so applications can sync data in the background. This will hopefully keep the downloading time to a minimum.

To find out more about this development, have a look at the offical Google Gears site.

EMI Music and YouTube have reached a deal to allow for EMI music videos to be place legally on YouTube. The videos will be tracked through YouTube’s reporting system in order to be able to pay the artists. EMI already went through a deal with Apple in April which allows for music to be sold withough copyright protection.

Real Networks have announced a new version of their player which will allow users to save and organize video files in many major formats including Flash, QuickTime, RealMedia and Window Media and will also support video ripping. The new version will onyly be available for Windows until later this year.

MyBlogLog, a blog community interface system which was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year, has introduced a tagging functionality for their users. If you have signed up, you can list your blogs which you run and meet other people who have blogs. The tagging allows the user to describe quickly what the main focus of their blogs is. At the same you can search for other blogs which follow the same subjects.

MyBlogLog is asking its users to tag spam oriented sites with the word “Schmoe”. These tags will be analyzed by the company itself and if necessary they will take appropriate actions.

This new feature is based on a Yahoo development called tagsona. Yahoo workers used it internally to tag other collegues.

And I thought that mony was being thrown around in the years before the Internet bubble burst. When you read about the acquisitions going on by companies like Google, News Corp or Microsoft it almost makes me dizzy. Take a look at these facts and numbers:

- Microsoft acquires aQuantive for 6 billion dollars

- Yahoo is supposedly thinking about taking on Bebo

- Yahoo previously was said to have bid up to $1.6 billion for Facebook

This remains a very important market to watch when you start to realize what the numbers really mean. It seems  that some marketing people are going to have a lot of fun working these market areas. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pretty funny that his name translated from german means “sugar mountain”) continues to follow his line and states that Facebook will stay independent. We’ll see about that one

As I becoming more interested in learning about possible integrations for my own social network system, I keep on finding new and old tools and widgets which can be used. The question to be answered is: are they worthwhile and will the community take up the possibility to integrate these widgets in their page. That remains to be seen. I’ll be taking a closer look in the next few weeks into this subject area.

The first widget of the day comes from Favorite Thingz. They have been around since the middle of 2006 if I get my facts correct and this is how they describe their product:

FavoriteThingz.com provides a simple, fast, and reliable service that enables publishing a badge/ widget of a user’s favorite bands, movies, teams, stores, services, and brands.

FavoriteThingz.com helps users promote brand awareness and brand loyalty of their FavoriteThingz. The FavoriteThingz.com badge/widget can be directly linked from to any site that accepts our badge/widget, including popular sites like MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga, Friendster, Tagworld, Typepad, Blogger, and hi5.

Sounds to me like a good way to get community members to participate more in pushing their own page in a community forward.

Another “gadget” of sorts is a flash-based virtual world/space called MyMiniLife in which you can create a character and the space in which the character lives. You earn your money to buy items to place in this space through daily logins etc. You can interact with other users, chat, leave messages and supposedly more. It’s a big business at the moment creating these widgets and mostly targeted are the teenager groups.

A new slider window application based on Prototype and the effects.js from Scriptalicious can be viewed and downloaded here. I like the slick movement of the windows and the possiblities to navigate easily between different content areas. I’ll be looking at this for a possible integration into the homepage over at Give Earth a Hand.

DoJo Javascript Toolkit version 0.9 just came out last week and it has undergone some major changes.

• Dijit has landed and it is supposedly really fast. Stay tuned for themes and more widgets.
• Layered builds. Slice and dice your builds any way you like to achieve maximum performance
• Style code is now even faster
• Lots of new modules, bug fixes, and quality APIs

I am trying to download it but it seems that the DoJo site down right now. I’ll be checking back to be able to report more on this development.

Fabio Zendhi Nagao has created iCarousel, an open source javascript tool for creating carousel like widgets. It is built on MooTools version 1.1 and gives you the choice between horizontal and vertical scrolling of graphics and text.
So, I better stop while I am ahead or else I’ll never get any work done. LivePipe is a website which offers tools for web publishing. While I was looking through what they have done, I found the famous lightbox.js with the possibilty to open a working i-frame in it: great, just what I was looking for! I’ll be trying it out as well in the next few days so stay tuned!