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Category: Technology

Dear Professor,

Published by ianjennings on July 21, 2016

11/26/11

Professor,

Attached is my business week paper summary.

As I mentioned in my note turned in when this paper was intended to be submitted, I have been very busy starting a company from the website I showed you in class. I am taking trips up to New York more than twice a week; sleeping over friends houses or offices where hacakthons are thrown.

Also note, because my final project proposal has changed so drastically from the beginning of the course, I have included a cover page with an updated proposal to provide context for articles relating to my proposal. Some of the articles I’ve read in Business Week have proven to be invaluable to me during this time. One article in particular got me very excited as it validates our business plan.

Although I have been slacking in class, I have been gaining real world entrepreneurship experience.

Best,
Ian Jennings Jablonowski

—

12/3/13

Professor,

Thanks for cutting me some slack a couple years ago.

The company I mentioned above sold to Intel today.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/03/hacker-league-mashery-intel/

Best,
Ian

Mobile Group Chat with One Line of JavaScript

Published by ianjennings on June 5, 2014

One of our first and most popular blog posts is Chat in 10 Lines of Code. In my constant quest to outperform PubNub founder and CTO Stephen Blum, I decided to challenge myself to create a mobile group chat demo that was responsive and ready for mobile in just one line of JavaScript.

mobile group chat

Yes, that’s right…with one line of code you’ll get a mobile group chat app that looks like this:

mobile group chat

Today, I’m happy to announce the release of the PubStrapChat jQuery plugin. With this library you can add mobile group chat to your site, mobile or otherwise, with a single line of javascript:

The chat box drops right into any div on your page. It’s fully responsive and will look great on any mobile site with Bootstrap. Or, you can ditch Bootstrap and style it yourself.

You’ll first need to sign up for a PubNub account. Once you sign up, you can get your unique PubNub keys in the PubNub Developer Portal.

All the code you need to get started and an example is below:

See the Pen PubStrapChat by Ian Jennings (@ianjennings) on CodePen.

The PubStrapChat plugin can be extended to use your own PubNub API keys and even your own user authentication system. You can configure the plugin by using an options object.

Check out the documentation to get it working with your custom user system. You can even set it up to use third party authentication systems like Facebook.

Concerned siblings

Published by ianjennings on March 21, 2014

Because margins collapse, the elements need not be concerned with their siblings.

Whenever you work with CSS, it is important that the properties and values you assign to a class are only relevant to that specific class and never in relation to a sibling.

For example you never want to add more margin-top to an element because it is “too close to the header.” The correct approach would be to add more margin-bottom to the header.

Hack together Stripe after work

Published by ianjennings on September 11, 2012

This post is about my new experiment: http://rooster.am

I’ve heard a lot of Hype about Stripe. I have monetized two websites in the past with the infamous Paypal buttons. 

Both of those sites have shut down since, but I did learn a lot about installing Paypal buttons. It’s probably the most terrible part of any website I’ve ever built. 

In one case, I resold ventrilo servers. The worst part of this was rigging a Paypal button to a server cpanel. I might have been 15 or 16 when I resold them. It’s a terrible idea. 

Anyway, today I decided to install Stripe after work on a two year old hack called rooster.am. It’s a two year old winning HackNY hack that uses Twilo and various APIs to give you an awesome wake up call: http://rooster.am/

I have been paying for rooster.am for nearly 2 years, making no money just because I thought it was fun. It turns out that’s not really a good investment.

So today I spent the afternoon installing Stripe. I’ve been learning a lot about Google Analytics while working at the Hype Machine and was inspired by Bingo Card Creator guy.

It was really simple. I was able to use their Javacript API and PHP library and paste something together in an afternoon.

Whats impressive about this is that I haven’t really modified this code since NYTM in 2011. I’m at least a version outdated of everything, including CodeIgniter and jQuery and Google Analytics.

I used their extremely simple libraries, stripe.js and php-stripe (in CodeIgniter mode). I only had to add one field to my database.

Everything worked as promised. Stripe has a cool “test mode” where you can try out your payments with fake credit card numbers that always return some kind of error on your app. 

I did this on a server that has no staging environment, no build or deploy scripts, no nodejs backends, no tests or mongodbs.

Strip makes it super easy to do one of the most daunting tasks in web development. Making integration simple is really important and a genius business model. 

Next I need to do some front end updating. Site isn’t even responsive :/