OurTraction

One of the fun things about with working with a team of really great people is finding new ways to keep them challenged.

We tinker with new things all the time but we were looking to do something different this week. After a bit of discussion and brainstorming we decided to do a code blitz. The idea is to take the whole development team and throw them into something for a single day with a single purpose. Ideally we would come up with a project that would strengthen their teamwork, develop their skills, give something back to the community and deliver a working product at the end of a single working day.

We discussed a number of cool projects (some of which we’ll come back to at a later date) and in the end all agreed on a cool little app that we’d all like to have available for London. When we’re out with our friends and family and want to know what’s going on right now what would come in handy?

We’ve worked with Thomas Czermak over at LondonFuse on a couple of small changes to the site in the past so we called him up and pitched development of an iPhone application for the site.

After a quick meeting to discuss the possibilities (and there are a lot of very cool ones) we narrowed things down to a narrow v1.0 feature set. The next morning we jumped in. We’ve done a few little things on the iPhone (including developing an interface for our open source Compost package) but this was going to be new for a couple of our guys.

The day was very productive and we learned a lot of great things but more importantly we came together as a team like never before.

We’re still polishing but we have a functional v1.0 app. We’ll be tacking on a few new features before it hits the App Store but we’ll have something ready to go in the next few weeks.

We’ll have an announcement on this blog and on Twitter (http://twitter.com/rtraction) when it hits the store.

Here’s a little eye candy for you in the meantime:

Yesterday Twitter CEO Evan Williams gave a keynote interview at South By Southwest Interactive and as expected released a new feature on their already wildly successful platform; Twitter Anywhere. This feature is very similar to Facebook Connect, it allows you to pull info from a Web site to Twitter but also use your Twitter credentials to sign in to various places around the web. Now the connections that we make on Twitter can now be extended to many other online properties.

While it is still early and all the details have not been released there are a number of positives to look forward to:

• For new users the barrier of entry has been lowered; it will become easier to discover people and interests.
• Relationships are strengthened as users find more people and businesses to interact with.
• However there is a lower signal to noise ratio as you only connect with people relevant to your interests.
• Contextual data can be easily added to websites, applications and online services to facilitate these connections.

With this release Twitter is working to position the service as an information network where people can easily share content and learn from each other across a variety of different websites.

Recently events have illustrated Twitter’s ability to easily and safely bring people together; Iranian elections, the Chilean earthquake and conferences around the world. With today’s announcement they have extended this functionality to everyone and both users and businesses of all sizes will benefit.

I had the benefit of being able to attend the e-marketing conference at Fanshawe College last Monday. It was a great day to connect with other Londoners who are all striving to understand social media and apply it to their business.

The day started with the keynote presentation by Mitch Joel of Twist Image in Montreal. He delivered his Six Pixels presentation in which he reiterated the need to understand that we are facing a radical shift in the way we communicate. One of the great things I took away was that with social media, customers still have the same amount of control as they always have. However now there is a greater amplification of their voices. Its easy now for anyone to become a competitor of a traditional business and to succeed.

Mitch delivers a rich and engaging presentation and it was a great way to start the day because it got the attendees all riled up and excited. He provided the groundwork to the day that allowed many people to start on an equal footing.

Following the keynote there were a number of breakout sessions. I attended Brady Murphy of Vortex Mobile’s session on mobile marketing and was able to connect with him about a few interesting things I’d experienced in the space. Brady talked about many of the challenges that mobile developers face when dealing with multiple platforms and service providers. I’ve mentioned before that I believe mobile to be the future of social media and 2010 will be an important year towards that development. This session reiterated that belief, and introduced a lot of new people to the concept.

However, the highlight of the day was the release of PolicyTool. David Canton presented on the legal issues surrounding social media and at the end unveiled the free social media policy generator. David was also asked to present PolicyTool at the final wrap up, so all the attendees were introduced  to it. We’ve written about this already, including the resounding success that it has been.

I enjoyed my time at the conference and was glad to connect with lots of other people over the course of the day. Hopefully this is just the start to many more social media conferences in London.

In the week since we have released our free social media policy generator and the PolicyTool website, we have been blown away by the excitement and interest thousands of people have shown. Since March 5th, over 10,000 people have visited the sites and 1500 different companies have taken the first steps in creating a social media policy.

We never would have gotten the traffic and the interest we did without the help of our social media friends. Mitch Joel sent several tweets out to his network and we are thankful for his interest in the tool and the role he’s played in promoting it. PolicyTool has also been mentioned at numerous conferences including the Great Ideas Conference and the NL Conference in Amsterdam.

From there hundreds of people have re-tweeted messages and shared the tool with their friends and coworkers. In fact as of today our PolicyTool was mentioned every 14 minutes on average. It also looks like people will be continuing to refer back to the site since hundreds of people bookmarked it on delicious.

But it wasn’t limited to Twitter. Lots of people have written blog posts reviewing the tool, sharing their policies, and discussing the overall need for a social media policy within any organization. Simon Fodden wrote a post for the legal blog Slaw.ca reviewing the policy generator.  Beth Kanter used PolicyTool as a springboard for discussion around Not-For-Profits and Aaron Robb for wrote about our incentive for releasing the Social Media policy tool for free.

A big thank-you to everyone who has taken the time to share their thoughts through various social media channels. We’ve heard your comments and are working to make the changes you’ve proposed.

CodeIgniter is a great little PHP framework that allows you to rapidly build MVC web applications. Without getting too far into Model View Controller ideology, this post will explain how to extend CodeIgniter’s Controller class to achieve site-wide authentication checks.

Not long after starting your fancy new webapp, you will start to realize that putting

if (!isset($_SESSION['isloggedin'])) {
  redirect('/login');
}

in every single controller function is very tedious.

You can create an extension of the Controller class and put the common code in there. Here’s how.

Create a file in /system/application/libraries called MY_Controller.php. The name of this file is important. If the prefix “MY_” doesn’t do it for you, go into /system/application/config/config.php and change

$config['subclass_prefix'] = 'MY_';

to whatever you want. Don’t change the “Controller” part though! You can also extend Models and Helpers.

Start with the following code in MY_Controller.php:

class Authenticated_Controller extends Controller {
  function Authenticated_Controller() {
    parent::Controller();
    session_start();
    if (!isset($_SESSION['isloggedin'])) {
      redirect('/login');
    }
  }
}

Go ahead and add any common controller functions to this class. Feel free to change “Authenticated_Controller” to whatever you want. You can also have multiple Controller extensions in this file.

Note: If you only have one controller extension, it is standard to name your class MY_Controller (rather than Authenticated_Controller).

Important Note: If you find yourself creating a bunch of controller extensions, take a step back and consider what you are doing. Is your extension being used by only one controller? If so, just put your code in that controller’s constructor.

Now it’s time to start using your new controller extension!

In every controller that requires authentication (don’t do this for your login controller!) rather than the traditional

class Manage extends Controller { ...

use this instead:

class Manage extends Authenticated_Controller { ...

Do you have CodeIgniter controller extensions that could be useful to others? Let us know in the comments.

As more and more companies have started to build their online presence using social media tools, it has become important to have a policy to guide employees on what they can and cannot do online.

So in order to fill this need rtraction and technology lawyer David Canton are pleased to announce the release of our first PolicyTool, a free social media policy generator.

After answering a few short questions about your business and your employees roles online, you are provided with a full social media policy. We have worked with David Canton to review other social media policies, and relied on his legal perspective to build a strong and reliable tool that we are excited to share with the community.

This is being released as a free resource because we hope that it will encourage businesses of all sizes to start engaging in online conversations and feel safe doing so.

If you would like to see other policy tool modules, or have suggestions for improvements to the Social Media Policy Generator, then please submit them to our feedback form.

To learn more about social media, and how your company can take advantage of the many different technologies available, please check out services with specific questions.