During my senior year at Western Washington University, for a final project in my Management 495 class, I did group presentation, performing a strategic analysis of Google and the positioning in the search engine market. I posted this slideshow to slideshare and received an incredible amount of comments and messages asking for the presentation. The presentation currently has over 25,000 views and over 100 favorites.

Like I said in the disclaimer, this slideshow is a year and a half old so a lot of the information is out dated. Also, looking back at the slideshow, there are some formatting issues that I would resolve if I had to go back and do it again. The presentation, was put together using Apple’s Keynote software. This was a group presentation so I was not the only contributer. The other contributers were: Charity Thomas, Frieder Mack and Jennifer Bell.

You can download a pdf version of the presentation here: Google Strategic Analysis Presentation (December 2006)

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When deciding what the data structure should look like, I wrote some pseudo XML that we need to be able to model.

A Node has a (string) $type, (mixed) $attributes and (NodeCollection) $children. Using the above XML as a reference, our root node (let's call it $root) would have $type = 'channel' and no attributes. You would then add two nodes to the NodeCollection $children, owner and list. Owner would have $attributes of array('name'=>'testuser', 'email'=>'test@test.com') and $children would be an empty NodeCollection.

The biggest design decision made about NodeCollection was that NodeCollection implements Iterator. By implementing Iterator, you can later foreach over $children and it can loop through the elements with no problem. Implementing Iterator is a pretty cool design pattern - I'll have to write a post about it in the near future. The ability to foreach over $children helps tremendously when writing ExportNodeToXml.

Wrapping up, pseudo code to export and object to a Node that can later be transformed to XML would look like this:

Recently, I've rediscovered my love for public radio. With the trio of eclectic music from KEXP 90.9, dance and techno from C89.5 and local, national and international news from KUOW 94.9 I can always find something good to listen to. Not only am I aurally satisfied, listening to public radio often seems to put me in a civically minded mood - encouraging me to soaking up as much information and culture as my brain can handle.

On another note, I haven't posted in a while - after graduating, I started at a company called Ascentium. They are an interactive technical marketing and consulting firm. I worked there as a web developer for about 2.5 months and then I decided I wasn't really being challenged enough and I missed writing PHP a lot. So I left to start working at a startup that I had looked at during my initial job search right after graduating, Treemo.

I've been at Treemo since the middle of June and I'm loving it. We have some really cool stuff coming down the pipe in the near future. Right now, I'm working on writing an API - very exciting work. Now that I'm working back in the PHP biz, I'm going to start writing about developing PHP again. Stay tuned.

Let's look at a simple example. I have an array containing values, some are numeric, some might not be. I only want my array to contain the valid numeric entries and I want to delete the other values. PHP has a helper function we are going to be utilizing, is_numeric.

The output from above is:

Array
(
    [0] => 42
    [1] => 96
    [2] => 100.96
)

Pretty handy function. Notice how I ran my data through the function array_values, before that function was run, the keys were (0,2,4).

Another example with a user defined function. I have defined a collection of tags and I want my tag collection to only contain tags that match the criteria the user has requested.

Voila! Deleting elements from an array has never been easier.

For more information, see the php documentation on array_filter.

I put together a quick page that I can navigate to that will install a cookie for the browser. I can then check for the cookie in my standard header include so the Google Analytics tracking code isn't sent to the browser.

The code to set the cookie (and make sure it's installed correctly)

Similar (but inverse) code is then inserted in my header

Analytics is a great tool and it's going to be even more useful now that I won't be tracking my own hits.

Facebook delivered on this plugin and they delivered well. I am impressed, you can even tag your photos from within iPhoto! I hope all OSX wielding, facebook dwelling, photo taking folks enjoy this as much as I do.

Download the iPhoto exporter, you won't be disappointed.

Since I'm using Prototype for my javascript library already, I took advantage of the Prototype Window Class to make modal and dialog windows. One of the downsides to this is it adds another step of complexity to ensuring everything is properly synchronized. For example, my scheduler window has to maintain in sync with it's parent window if dates where changed at that level.

To start off, I create actions for nextDay() and prevDay(). These are simply fired onclick() on buttons with corresponding labels.

Next we'll define the updateAvailabilityChart() function. The arrayInviteUsers holds an array of user ids (this is out of the scope of this article).

The above code will make an Ajax request to get_availability.php which will increment, decrement or keep the start and end dates the same and then return some cool response text starting with the new start date, new end date and html for the availability table. I defined a delimiter of '^^;;^^' just so I can tell where data starts and stops. Below is the basic code in get_availability.php.

Finally, the Ajax request defined a function to be called when the request return successfully. This function will update the innerHTML of a div on the page and tell the parent window what the new start date and end date is.

This is a very small piece of a very large project but it's fun to share with others. If you have questions or could benefit from some more of the details going into this basic process, let me know and I can post more.

My job search has identified a couple of fun companies. I'm really looking for a PHP/MySQL/CSS/Javascript position so if you know of anyone hiring or if you are a potential employer - I'm your man. My resume is available online at: http://joshschumacher.com/resume.php.