Design & Development Digest : feature

FB.WALL - jQuery for Facebook Lovers

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 19:00:00 GMT

Wouldn't it be nice if you could display the activity occurring on your Facebook wall directly to your website visitors? Now you can with a great jQuery plugin called FB.WALL.

The jQuery plugin, which uses Facebook's Graph API, allows designers and developers to display the Facebook wall of a user, a page or an app on their own website. As you might imagine, the potential uses are numerous. For example, you could opt to replace your weblog with the plugin (to showcase all of your social activity) or the plugin could be used within a sidebar of your weblog.

The design of the wall matches near perfectly Facebook's own look and feel and can be customized easily via CSS. A fair amount of control is provided through the use of the available parameters - comments can be turned on/off, avatars can be set to a default image, and the number of posts to display can be controlled.

The code itself is relatively lightweight:

SSL Trials from Symantec/Verisign

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 17:36:00 GMT

If you’re in the market for a SSL Certificate – check this out. Symantec this week launched a free trial of all its VeriSign Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificates, including a free trial of a fully functional Extended Validation (EV) SSL.

Site owners and developers will be able to try out any of the Verisign SSL on their websites for a period of 30 days free. Excited? Wait, it gets better. If you don’t have a website/business that requires SSL encryption you can even try the Verisign Trust Seal free for 60 days. The Holidays have come early for the Web. Hooray!

Along with the VeriSign Trust Seal, VeriSign SSL and EV SSL Certificates authenticate the identity of the site’s operators. And, all VeriSign trusted sites are scanned daily for malware and are emblazoned with the VeriSign seal when their links appear in search results on participating search engines and online marketplaces, which ultimately helps increase traffic to those trusted websites.

“Even just a few weeks after engaging VeriSign SSL and EV SSL Certificates, online businesses frequently measure impressive uplifts in conversion rates, orders and revenue,” said Tim Callan, head of Trust Services product marketing at Symantec.

“This is because consumers look for reassurance online, and nothing reassures them more than the sight of the world’s most recognized trust mark. Add the increased confidence that comes with the EV SSL green address bar, and businesses have a powerful toolkit for building trust. With this free trial for all of our SSL, EV SSL and Trust Seal products, Symantec is offering businesses the opportunity to measure the real-world return they get from these products at absolutely no risk.”

Facebook's Hacker Cup

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 17:55:00 GMT

Do you have what it takes to win Facebook's Hacker Cup? In light of all the negative attention surrounding hackers the past week (with all the Wikileaks chatter), it will be refreshing to see skilled developers solving problems instead of causing them.

The contest asks competitors to solve a number of alogorithmic based problem statesments quickly and of course correctly. There will be 3 rounds, and the 25 hackers making it to the end will be flown to Facebook headquarters for the final round of competition. The prizes include $5,000 USD and title as "world champion" for the top hacker, $2,000 for 2nd place, $1,000 for 3rd, and $100 for the rest of the top 25.

Registration opens December 20 and the first round will take place in early January where competitors will have 72 hours to work on 3 algorithmic problems. You need to solve just one question to advance to Online Round 1 - do you have what it takes?

iRise Developer Network Unveiled

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 17:15:00 GMT

If there is one trend that will stand out for large enterprises in the coming year it is that software development will be changed forever as tools that enable anyone to "visualize" applications come to market in a big way. Those companies fostering the transformation stand to gain the most.

Enterprise visualization software provider iRise announced its iRise Developer network today which aims to do just that by encouraging the use of its iRise iBloc and iConnect APIs.

The iRise iBloc API enables the creation of widgets, events and actions from pre-built components for the assembly of complex visualizations, and the iRise iConnect API supports integrations and extensions to the iRise platform. With it, developers can create custom reporting tools, integrations to testing tools, extensions to the iRise platform and other new products that use and/or modify iRise data.

“Establishing an active developer community is an important next step in enabling innovative third-party solutions that extend the iRise portfolio,” said Maurice Martin, president, COO and founder of iRise. “The iDN is all about accelerating innovation to our customers and partners with a collaborative ecosystem of creative thinkers that develop complementary and value-added solutions on top of the iRise platform.”