Google Reader has a great feature for sharing articles. It’s been a terrific way to share interesting and pertinent information affecting iofy and to give like-minded folks easy access to my favorite RSS feeds.
You can access my shared page here.
Or pull the feed here.
And with any luck, a drop of the most recent items will be on the sidebar of my blog… Sharing is caring.
Rather than letting long must-read articles interrupt my flow, I’m using Safari and tabs to keep things organized. Lifehacker got me thinking about this with their Firefox Serial Flow article, but I find it even more efficient in Safari (and I’m on the whole WebKit thing).
I simply keep a separate window and open pages I want to review later in a new tab within that window. Periodically I save the set of tabs (Bookmarks -> Add Bookmark For These X Tabs…) to a bookmark, “ToRead”, in the Bookmarks Bar. One click on that tab opens all the ToRead bookmarks when I have to time to review.
We need a PHP programmer to join the dev team at iofy corporation. This is a full-time, based in Philadelphia, position.
The corporate version of the ad is on Craig’s List (also available after the jump).
If you’ve read this far you’ve probably laughed your ass off double-taked, “Philadelphia!?” … You’re right to do so. But seriously, we’ve grown in to a fast and agile web technology company in the heart of 19112.
Our work environment makes for a great life experience. We hire intelligent people capable of solving problems and enhancing the skills of those around them. People working at iofy are treated very well, with plenty of snacks and gadgets to keep mind and body entertained. The challenges we address both answer a need to paying partners and expand the knowledge of our teams.
In case you haven’t been following my blog, iofy builds web services to deliver media on the web. We harness our own services with AJAX and client applications on nearly every platform.
Drop a note with your resume and a unique statement of talent to developer@iofy.com if you’re the right fit. We love smart people.
As promised (but late as a post), we released iofy’s RESTful documentation. This is extremely exciting for both our development and management teams. We now have an open account management API enabling others to offer iofy’s account management and access to a customer’s digital libraries of downloaded audiobooks.
I’m proud of this accomplishment.
The iofy RESTful API covers the features for partner or reseller to offer downloadable audiobooks. These RESTful web services use standard REST calls, are language agnostic, retrieve RSS 2.0 feeds and enable:
One can receive dynamic product feeds from ws.iofy.com/product/, where search parameters can include title, author, publisher, narrator, ISBN, and more. These feeds come complete with thumbnail image enclosures, MP3 audio sample enclosures, and all the metadata.
Via account management, described last week, customer accounts can be created, modified, password reset, and most importantly the customer’s prior purchases become available in a library. One can offer this digital library and account management solution without building it (or maintaining it). Just harness it.
The fulfillment API allows assignment of a digital download in a single call. We included PHP sample source code, but it could just as easily be harnessed in any other language.
JavaScript and PHP sample code is available which allows complete harnessing of both APIs. To learn more, email developer@iofy.com.
My dev team is prepping the release of our REST / RSS / JavaScript based account management this week. It marks the completion of building, then harnessing, a suite of RESTful RSS 2.0 feed based web services. The idea has been “avoid people wasting time, working on stuff they suck at focus developers on code they enjoy and excel at.”
We had problems with our 1.0 account management. User interfaces were tied too tightly to the back end. Heavy hitting framework and server programmers were working out UI kinks while artistic graphic designers were figuring out database calls. This was a huge waste. The site looked heinous and didn’t work the way we wanted it to.
Graphic designers don’t think in OO, let alone big-O. Server programmers don’t communicate visually.
It seems easy to fix, right? Just have heavy hitters do hard stuff and then have graphic designers make it look pretty? Make it look pretty first, then tie in the hard stuff? Not exactly. It requires a lot of planning and effort to coordinate and manage people’s time like that. It also requires serial development where people are waiting before they can start. All of which is a waste – this needs to be automatic and parallel. Don’t waste time trying to manage this if it can be done for you.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) came first. Dave Winer, back in ’98, grew it from XML. It allows for simplified packaging of data. One can package and list blog entries, offer an MP3 playlist, send table-of-contents information, or transport code via codecast. At iofy we use it as a container to package web service responses.
RESTful development is also based on simplicity (here’s a great doc on REST). Get things done in an HTTP packaged call. With a very simple request in JavaScript, the web service is queried and you’ve got an RSS feed as a response. Our designers have their functionality via web services. Our server coders don’t touch the front end.
The server developers make the RSS feeds. This makes them happy and gives them time to build the critical server components. The graphic designers use JavaScript to call iofy’s RESTful Web Services API (link coming Monday). We use jQuery as our base JavaScript library. It’s damned fast to dev.
This simplified my project management. Tasks became clearly defined. In the beginning I was worried the approach would put a wedge between roles, but it worked in reverse. People understood the importance of their own functions and became reliant on each other for success.
Parallel Development.
While the design team determined a desired look and feel, the back end team planned architecture and database schema. As feeds were developed and APIs took shape, so did the layout of the site. When feeds became ready for harnessing, pages were ready. Management of the nitty-gritty became unnecessary.
We launch account management this week. You too can harness it in your language of choice (we’ll provide JavaScript code which lets you do this simply by dropping some .js on your page and a script on your server). iofy’s services are controllable from your own site.
iofy’s development team builds client software, web sites, and web services powering audiobook content delivery. We move content securely from server, to client, to iPod, and SD chip.