Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week YouTube Rolls Out End Screens Feature for All Creators: YouTube launched End Screens, “a new mobile-friendly tool that lets you [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
At a recent conference in Bulgaria, there was a hackathon for which Andrew Carter created a PHP console version of the popular "snake" game.
I thought it was a really interesting concept, and since Andrew has a history of using PHP for weird things, I figured I'd demystify and explain how it was done.
The original repository is here, but we'll build a version of it from scratch in this series so no need to clone it.
As usual, I'll be using my Homestead Improved box to get up and running instantly. You can use your own environment, just make sure it has a decent version of PHP runnable from the command line.
The snake game we're replicating has the following features:
Note that the game doesn't work in native Windows - to run it on a Windows platform, use a good VM like Homestead Improved.
To launch a CLI (console) game, we need something similar to an index.php file in traditional websites - a "front controller" which reads our command line input, parses it, and then launches the required classes, just like in a traditional web app. We'll call this file play.php.
Continue reading %How’d They Do It? PHPSnake: Detecting Keypresses%
10 years ago, I taught myself Ruby on Rails and spent six months developing a local job board. I seeded the site with jobs from Craigslist and paid my local news station $3,000 to run a month-long ad. Unfortunately, all that time and money only brought in 50 visitors a day. I ended up selling just one job post, becoming discouraged, and shutting the site down after a few months.
Needless to say, I didn’t know what I was doing, but you’d be surprised how many well-capitalized startups proceed along those same lines today and do even worse than I did back then. It’s because the answer isn’t in spending large sums of time and money. It’s in running cheap and measurable tests that provide the market feedback you need to keep cranking on your ideas. Here’s how my latest project Old Geek Jobs made $2,000 in a month and a half by running cheap experiments.
On September 15th, I read Tim Bray’s "Old Geek" post about ageism in tech. It struck a chord because I experienced what I felt was age discrimination interviewing with a startup run by 20 year olds. I registered the domain name OldGeekJobs.com for $9, fired up a $10 Digital Ocean instance, and uploaded a Google form embedded in a static site.
My site was posted to HackerNews and collected over 500 upvotes. The next day, Quartz wrote a piece followed with another from Evil HR Lady. Employers started submitting jobs, and I copied and pasted them from the Google form to the static site. I wasn’t making any money because the job posts were free, but in less than a few days, I had the feedback I needed to move forward on my idea.
Over the next few weeks, I began developing a more robust version of the site using jQuery, Python, Flask, and Postgresql. I broke out jobs by city and state, added real-time keyword search, and added an innovative quick preview feature. Here’s what the site looks like now with that quick preview feature activated:
I also made it $50 to post a job. In exchange for the $50, jobs are posted for 45 days, highlighted in green, and display above other jobs aggregated from StackOverflow. I bring in jobs from them so there’s enough good jobs on the site to keep bringing visitors back. I also put a notice on the site that explains how it all works:
Continue reading %How I Made $2,000 in 1.5 Months Starting with a Google Form-Based MVP%
Unicode characters can be really handy for adding little symbols and icons to your HTML or in your CSS via pseudo elements' content property. Here are a handful of tips for using unicode characters.
[author_more]
If you want to use unicode characters in your CSS file, ensure to set the character set for your CSS in addition to setting the charset meta tag in your HTML document.
[code language="html"]
<!-- in your HTML <head> -->
<meta charset="utf-8"/>
[/code]
[code language="css"]
/* in your CSS at the top of the file*/
@charset 'utf-8';
[/code]
When needing to knock together a quick demo site or a video screencast for a responsive tutorial, I often use the love-it-or-hate-it hamburger icon for a mobile menu. There are lots of icon solutions out there and there are many non-raster approaches to the hamburger icon but often the quickest and easiest for me is to use the unicode character called "The Trigram for Heaven" which looks like this: ☰.
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Continue reading %AtoZ CSS Quick Tip: How to Use Unicode Characters%
