Nobox Media

Girl I made in Photoshop

admin — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:17:10 +0000

A while ago a friend asked if I could design a female character for her. It was to be used as a mascot for a site she was developing. In the end the illustration was not used and odds are I will never used it. So rather than leaving the design tucked away on my hard drive, I thought I would share it with you. It took about 4 hours of layer building (Hundreds of layers) and tweaking in Photoshop. I built it up from a scanned pencil sketch. What you see below is the final product.

I now work for the Avusa iLab

admin — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:25:00 +0000

Well, I have left my comfy spot at a local digital media agency and joined the Avusa iLab team. Over the past few years I have built up a decent rack of skills and experience, working with great A-list brands and leading online publications. However, working with iLab on Avusa Media products will most definitely hold the most exciting and intimidating challenges so far. The purpose of iLab is to to create online, offline and mobile innovation within Avusa Media. Taking the various Avusa Media brands into account, iLab has the unique oportunity to innovate on a powerfull distribution platform and make a huge impact on the local online media space.

I will be working with Colin Daniels, Justin Hartman, Gregor Rohrig and Ian Barnes as the multimedia desginer. It’s a challenging and stimulating role, which I hope will bring great value to the teams efforts. I also have a strong PHP development background which I am sure will come in handy on more than one occasion.

I’ve been working with the team since Monday and all I can say at this time, is stay tuned - Tons of exciting things happening here!

“Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress.”
– Ted Levitt

Media24 goes opensource with Drupal?

Robin — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:34:09 +0000

It’s not too often we see large media companies embracing Open Source technologies, so it is really great to see one of South Africa’s large media houses embracing Drupal, an Open Source CMS.

This morning I read an Aricle on bizcommunity outlining the launch of gotravel24.co.za. In general the site promotes travel in and around South Africa. GoTravel24 also allows users to create travel blogs (Using their existing blogging platform),book hotels, rental cars, flights and find specials etc.

What got me really interested in the site, was the voting feature - A Drupal module! At first I thought it must be the script from which the Drupal voting module was based, however upon further investigation I found references to Drupal in the source.

I am not personally a fan of Drupal. However I must say it is great to see it feuling a Media 24 site. Media24 have done a great job at modifying what I believe is the newsflash theme.

Google launches Code University

Robin — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:20:21 +0000

Well perhaps it is not so much a launch as a re-launch. Mid 2007 Google launched an educational program. At the time it was called ‘Google Code for Educators’. Google has now re-designed the site and re-launched as the Google Code University. The site is aimed at helping educators and students alike become more familiar with the technology behind Google and the internet in general. It is a repository of computer science educational material including tutorials, lecture slides, and videos.

The Google Code University Course Materials

Most of the course materials are Creative Commons licensed, The Google Code University encourages educators and students to reuse and build upon them. The courses are divided in to the following sections AJAX Programming, Distributed Systems, Web Security and Languages. The site covers various topics from ‘What is mySQL’ to ‘Concurrency Management’.

Many of the somewhat aloof concepts associated with key backend functionality found behind many of Googles products, are carefully explained. The sites provides code samples, Linux commands, diagrams etc to help explain these concepts.

CS Departments Search

The Google Code University provides a facility for searching teaching materials that have been published to the web by faculty from CS (Computer Science) departments around the world. You can refine your search to display just lectures, assignments or reference materials for a set of courses.

Looking back at my education in computer science, The Google Code University covers many important aspects of web development and administration that are often neglected my main stream educational institutes. All in all I think this is a fantastic offering.

Also visit ITWeb for preview of a local e-education development - e-Skills Academy takes off for.

Two local blogs get a face lift

Robin — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 06:14:59 +0000

I recently updated NoboxMedias design. I don’t want to go on too much about my design, however, Nobox is not alone.

Along with my new design I assisted TechMongrel.com and TheOpenSurgery.com in jazzing up their blogs. We got together one night for a few drinks, a braai and look at their blogs. We quickly put together a new logo and changed the color scheme of TechMongrel.com . TheOpenSurgery.com needed a new logo and theme. We soon found an appropriate design, put together a fun logo, changed the color scheme and presto, a fresh new look. Please take the time to check these sites out, they have some great content and a written by well informed individuals.

Pull meta and title from a page using PHP

Robin — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:25:28 +0000

This is a simple PHP script I compiled for a little side project.

The script returns the title and meta data of a page by using a function called ‘get_meta_tags’ and a string search for the title.

I imagine it is similar to what many social bookmarking sites and content aggregators do to pull information when registering a site or submitting a link. I rate this coupled with an RSS aggrigator and the image pulling script could make the basis for a good content aggregator (I have never made a content aggregator so I don’t know too much about this). I would love to know if Afigator.com or Amatomu.com would be interested in pulling images along with posts (I belive technorati does this.)

Anyway, thought this was a useful script and might come in handy.

If you have trouble reading it below, you can download the script by clicking here.

error_reporting(0);
$url = "http://www.noboxmedia.com";
if( ereg("^((http|https|ftp)://)?(((www\.)?[^ ]+\.[com|org|net|edu|gov|us])|([0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+))([^ ]+)?$”, $url) == true)
{$page = $url;


$contents = implode(' ', file($page));
if($contents)
{
if(eregi(']*>([^<]*)]*>’, $contents, $regs))
{

echo $title = trim(ereg_replace(’[[:space:]]+’, ‘ ‘, $regs[1]));
$metaTags = get_meta_tags($url);
echo $keywords = $metaTags['keywords'];
echo $description = $metaTags['description'];
}
}
}

?>

Springleap SEO competition update

Robin — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 07:03:33 +0000

Well it is the first day I have checked Google since I posted my Springleap article. I see Bandwidthblog is still holding strong, however, viralmarketer and imod slowly creeping up there. I also see Nobox up there in 8th place - whoohoo! When I posted the Springleap article we were initially listed on the fourth page, should you type springleap in Google. I have my doubts whether anyone will knock springleap.com off first place, but we will see…

The Springleap web based image manipulation bundle

Robin — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 18:53:07 +0000

For a while now I have been wanting to share a few scripts to help visitors with image manipulation. Only thing is I did not want to list out all the tricks I have learned without any context. Recently, a South African site called Springleap launched. Springleap allows visitors to upload t-shirt designs. Visitors then vote for the designs and the winners get paid - good old cash prizes. They have now opened a SEO competition to help create a little hype around the local blogging community. Whoever gets the highest ranking for a post about Springleap wins R2500. So this got me thinking. As far as I can tell (I am no SEO guru), the best way to get a good ranking in Google, is to have allot of well recognized and established sites linking back to my post. The best way I know how to do this is to write a good scrip/tutorial and submit it to the hundreds of script sites. So, this is the plan - this article will use Springleap as a case study to explain the practical implementation of the following scripts. This will give me a chance at winning, provide a little support for a local start up and most importantly, help you with image manipulation.

Uploading an image to Springleap

Springleap, like many other sites requires the user to upload a few images. Springleap requires a thumbnail, larger image of 600×400 and a psd or fla template file. The developers have done as most would and implemented three file upload form elements. This is fine and works well in most cases. However, it could be a tedious process should you have more than one design to upload - four designs = 12 uploads. Hence the multiple file uploader. I have used ElementITs MultiPowUpload1.7.3 a few times and find it to be stable and robust. As can be seen in the screenshots below, it works much as a upload form shoud. The user can select multiple files, and click one button to upload them all. Most importantly, the user can track the progress of a large file by way of a progress bar supplied at the bottom of the form. If you would like to add a record to your database or resize the image when uploading simply add your code to the file processing file (FileProcessingScripts/PHP/uploadfiles.php).

MultiPowUpload1 works with PHP, ASP, ASP.net, ColdFusion, JSP and PERL.

Click here to download

Click here to visit the creators of this script

The screenshots are an adapted version of the script. I was using it for a photo gallery. It is pretty straight forward an should not be too difficult for Springleap to customise.

Ok, it is pretty obvious what you need to do.

The cool thing about this script is you can select mutiple images. Facebook uses a JAVA app to do the same thing.

The script lists the files you selected. At any time, before or after uploading you can add additional files.

Once you are happy with the files, click upload and watch the progress bar.

Upload complete, click the continue button and proceed to the next step (Cropping, resizing perhaps

Additional multi file upload scripts

UploadForm - Ext JS Extension

An Ext.form.BasicForm extension for easy upload of (multiple) files to a server.

File upload progress bars with PHP

Using file upload hooks in PHP 5.2.x to generate a progress bar while uploading.

File uploads using ajax

Uses a hidden IFRAME to post the file and AJAX to check the progress, like gmail.

Image rotation

In the case of Springleap most users will know how to rotate an image in Photoshop. However, this is not always the case. Most visitors do not know how to rotate an image, so a simple script which uses PHP and GDLibraries may simplify the process a whole lot for many users.

I have written about this before so I wont delve to deep into it.

Click here to go to my previous post about image rotation.

Click here to download the script.

Image cropping

I have also written about this, problem is after a long day coding away - I deleted my database.

So in an effort to recap, I will go through image cropping aging.

So this is my thinking. It would be cool if Springleap allowed users to upload a design, rotate the image and then crop it to the appropriate size. This would save the designer of the t-shirt design a whole lot of time and also ensure consistency across the site.

The most comprehensive cropping script I have is a PHP class I found on phpclasses.net. It was created by Andrew Collington and really gets the job done. It is very similar to the cropper used on Digg and adds a sophisticated and user centric taste to the site.

By default the script does not save the cropped image. If you download the file and view the source of ‘class.cropcanvas.php’, under example uses, you will see the following example code for saving the image:

$cc->loadImage(’original1.png’);

$cc->cropBySize(100, 100, ccBOTTOMRIGHT);

$cc->saveImage(’final1.png’);

View demo

Download page

I made the following version of the script for a pet project. The layout and design is CSS based, so you shouldn’t have much trouble implementing it into your design.

This is what the original design looks like.

Additional resources

A simple image upload script

Simplified Image Resizing with PHP

Image Uploading and Resizing with PHP

All the best to Springleap, may you grow from strength to strength.

Pull and save an image on your server from any site

admin — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:09:59 +0000

This is a little script I’ve been playing with. I’m using it on my pet project GoGuide.co.za, a social bookmarking site. The plan is for the site to pull a thumbnail image of a submitted URL’s page. The script scans specified sites for the first image with a width greater than 200px. I suggest 200px as in most cases blogs and news sites will not have any images with widths greater than 200px other than in their content.

The script is simple. It grabs the HTML source of a page. Scans for HTML image tags. Grabs the path of an image and copies it to your server.

Download source - ZIP
Download source - RAR

Nobox first time SABlogAwards finalist

admin — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:02:09 +0000

Wow, I’m thrilled to be nominated as a finalist in no less than two categories of the SABlogAwards!

I launched Nobox in November last year and as such this is my first time as a nominee.
I must say it is quite an honor to be listed with some of SA’s coolest blogs, however, it would be a really insane honor to win - So vote for Nobox!

Good luck to all the finalists and may the most worthy win!