A friend sent through the link below - hours of fun for those true geeks at heart ;)

http://arianeb.com/dategame.htm

Comon lads, its fun, but not as fun as the non virtual kind ;)

Love it!!!

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/0,39029477,49292857-2,00.htm

And check out the other ads - some classics!!!

:)

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1775925

Next Digital sponsored the Alfred Hospitals 'Buy a Day for Dad' fund raising campaign by delivering a fantastic web site. Built on Umbraco, it's a great initiative:

http://www.buyadayfordad.com.au/

Made from a heap of old CPUs...

http://matttovey.blogspot.com/2007/08/in-march-2007-project-to-upgrade-one-of.html

Nice :)

OK - last post for 3 weeks, so see you all on the flip side...

Saw this though a Slashdotpost, but Umbraco, our favorite open source .NET CMS is in the Codeplex Top 25 projects. More details here:

http://www.plentyofcode.com/2007/08/most-active-open-source-projects-in.html

Nice work Niels and crew!

PS - off to Italy for 3 weeks, so don't expect many posts in the coming weeks!

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22272046-663,00.html

Missed this one until now, but we recently launched the new Melbourne Docklands site:

http://www.docklands.com.au/

Build on FatWire, we have developed a platform to help rapidly deliver sites like these to market in rapid time. Nice work team!

Nice punt Sav :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cerDBOd_zlg

Funny - coped a cheap hit afterwards, but bounces up and keeps walking! All those tough NFL guys with all that padding and those helmets!

Come play AFL - we'll show you how its done!

Just launched from the Next DigitalBrisbane office...

http://www.procurement.riotinto.com/

I didn't!!! VERY interesting and well worth a watch!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U

Looks OK to me, liked the previous one better though...

http://www.theage.com.au/

Fabian and the guys in our Shanghai office did a fabulous job getting our first Chinese site up and live:

http://soulfire.cn/

Nice work guys!

As the business end of the season begins in the REAL footy (the AFL :), Next Digital has just relaunched 'The Oval' site:

http://www.theoval.com.au/

From the Simon...

"As part of The Oval Phase II implementation for Ford Australia, the team has just launched the 1 Vs 18 footy game. The game is based on a TV commercial where Barry Hall plays a game of football Vs an entire team of kids."

Next Digital just launched the new Mazda 3 MPS site for Mazda South Africa...

http://www.gotbite.co.za/

Based on Umbraco, Mazda wanted to attract some user generated content, so people are free to upload videos and text messages, and after approval, they get published for the whole world to see :)

A few sites are a little dubious in their presentation of data to browsers (like the NY Times and Experts Exchange for example) and show full page contents to GoogleBot, but not to normal browsers. Someone blogged about having the same problem:

http://www.rustyrazorblade.com/index.php/2007/07/30/experts-exchange-should-be-removed-from-google-search-results/

I find a lot of interesting info on EE, but have never wanted to pay for the membership. So I found this neat way to change the User-Agent of Firefox to more 'accurately' view content on EE ;)

http://lifehacker.com/software/featured-firefox-extension/mask-your-browser-identification-with-user-agent-switcher-277458.php#c1859352

Since Microsoft bought Deep Metrix, I wondered what they would do with it. Well, some details have eventually come to the surface

http://www.liesdamnedlies.com/2007/07/microsoft-gatin.html

Gender based metrics could be very kewl! We currently use Google Analytics for many of our clients requiring basic analytic services, and we have a full blown WebTrends hosted solution for our large clients, so it will be interesting to see the end result of this project...

In my last post I mentioned a caching technology called Akamai. We use it for a number of our global clients to help (significantly) improve performance, especially when we host multiple country sites on one core set of infrastructure.

They literally have 1000's of servers all over the world, and these servers cache data and have special DNS servers that choose the physically closest server to deliver the content. Works a treat with pre fetching of cached data, shortest path, multiple failover paths and routes etc. Very kewl stuff.

How big are they? Check out some of their stats here:

http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz3.html

• 250,000 active streams
• 21,000,000 vistors / min globally
• 1,600,000 hits / sec globally

Very nice ;)

I have used a tonne of tools to help me debug web sites on the client side. Even 4 years ago proper HTTP debugging was very difficult and the tools very simple, but a number of tools have come to the rescue. I used to use Firefox Web Developer Toolbar as well as the IE Web Developer Toolbar. But today, I had an issue with a large flash site we deployed for a client in China (http://www.excitechina.com.cn/) running REALLY slow even though its hosted on a heap of servers in 2 separate data centers and has Akamai on top to cache the whole package. Both the Firefox and IE Dev Toolbars fell way short, so I went hunting for something better ... and found it :)

Hello Firebug! This little ripper of a plug-in helped me track the contents being pulled in by the Flash container, and debug a configuration error with Akamai - one happy client (and an even happier client ;)

PS - Been at the Next DigitalShanghai office this week - we're really building a great team with some awesome skills. Took some digi pics and hope to post them next week...

We design, build and deploy web sites and web applications at a rapid rate, so I thought that I would post our work here as we release it!

This week we turned out two new Umbraco sites:

• Supercheap Auto (http://www.supercheapauto.com.au/) - built on the fabulous open source CMS, with a great design and some nice flash elements (like the online catalog)
• FleetPartners (http://www.fleetpartners.com.au/) - I love the clean user interface of this Umbraco site. Also fully integrated the lease calculators with Umbraco data - nice!

Franky Arrigo just made the front page of Digg.com - nice work Franky ;) Link is here:

http://digg.com/microsoft/Microsoft_Accepts_it_Ignored_the_Web_Standards

We are a creative agency (as well as being highly technical) so I love seeing the work that comes out of our very talented team!

Here is an interesting view on what some other agencies are doing ;)

http://jezebel.com/gossip/photoshop-of-horrors/heres-our-winner-redbook-shatters-our-faith-in-well-not-publishing-but-maybe-god-278919.php

Read it first on /.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/10/0012209

I do like the concept of rating a site's 'importance' by the time spent on the site rather than page views. Would be interesting to see if there is any correlation in the two. Hopefully, will stop news sites from splitting news articles into multiple pages just to bump the page views ;)

If this is the way forward, Googles addition of DoubleClick is even wiser - their more 'intelligent' page ads (flash, java etc) are more than capable of delivering ads based on page view duration...

I'm a keen observer of security patterns and practices, and I truly believe Microsoft is getting it right. I subscribe to Michael's blog religiously, and read it with a passion. He is interviewed here:

http://howsoftwareisbuilt.com/2007/06/24/michael-howard-microsoft-interview/

It reads like so many of his blog posts, so its well worth the read....

Franky is off to the US of A:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/FrankarrOnMSDN/~3/131754430/from-little-things-big-things-grow.aspx

When I traveled there earlier this year, I got an understanding of how different the US is to the Australian market, and can totally understand why he would get excited by the idea ;)

Good luck Franky, keep in touch!

LOVE IT!!!

http://www.davesdaily.com/pictures/908-mischievous-aussies.htm

Over the last 10 years, the digital landscape has changed dramatically, and so have we. We now have 5 separate business divisions, 180 staff in 5 offices covering 3 countries.

As such, the 'WDG' name no longer reflects the large range of services we offer, so we have decided to wrap up all of our businesses (WDG, SMSi, ResultMedia, Alfresco and Advantric) and rebranded ourselves as:

http://www.nextdigital.com

We strongly believe that the new name and brand essence will assist us for the next 10 years of growth in this cutting edge industry.

Very exciting times :)

While catching up on the news, also noticed that News Corp was looking to swap MySpace for 25% of Yahoo!:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/Business/News-Corp-to-swap-MySpace-for-Yahoo-grab/2007/06/20/1182019185485.html

Consolidation may be a wise move truly challenge Google. Will be interesting to see how this one pans out...

Also, if my email was anything to go by, Facebook is rapidly becoming more and more popular. Wonder who may snaffle that ;)

The gunman who shot 3 people, killing one, right in front of our office has surrendered:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/gunman-surrenders-to-police/2007/06/20/1182019184872.html

This is good news! I was at my desk when I heard the shots, then walked up to see the 3 people shot on the ground. All very scary stuff...

Well, had my shinny new MacBook Pro for almost a day now, and I must say IT ROXS! I love it. Such a sexy, solid lappy!

Things achieved day 1:

 - Played in Mac OSX land for a while - its nice, just different, will try and get used to it a bit more

 - Installed Boot Camp - allows you to dual boot OSX and Windows / Vista.

 - Installed Vista - this is my first full time use of Vista, so will be interesting. Install went off with out any issues at all (SWEET!!!)

 - Installed the Boot Camp drivers for Vista

 - Installed Office 2007

So what are my thoughts?

 - This thing is AWSOME! Windows Experience score of 4.8 (Processor = 5.3, RAM = 4.8, Graphics = 5.9, Gaming graphics = 5.5, Hard drive = 5.2). I'm waiting on a RAM upgrade to 4GB, so this score should increase. I also picked the fastest drive (160gb) and I'm glad I did.

 - Keyboard layout takes a bit of getting used to and to right click, you need to put 2 fingers on the touch pad and click. Hard at first, but getting used to it.

 - THE SCREEN IS AMAZING. 1920 x 1200 BABY!!!

 - Its blindingly fast and for all the power packed in, very light

 - Keyboard backlight is unreal!

A few issues that I hope to resolve in time

 - Couldn't get wifi working (WAP-PSK) at home - authentication time out - will need to look into that.

 - Built-in iSight camera drivers are not yet working

 - Boot Camp only has 32 bit drivers - would love to run 64bit on this thing!

 - Power usage in Windows was a bit poor, but just installed this so we'll see.

 - Can't access Mac OSX partition yet, but apparently drivers exist, so will play with those

All in all, a absolutely amazing machine, I can't express how happy I am. Nice job Apple ;)

Its taken a long time since I lost me laptop (link) but I eventually ordered and received my new laptop! An AppleMac Book Pro! 4GB RAM. 17 inch HD screen. Very exciting! Native Vista with DirectX 10 is top of my list ;)

Most people will have already headr about Microsoft Surface. A good demo is seen here:

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/sticker-shock/video-of-bill-gates-showing-off-his-expensive-table-264453.php

I saw this last nite and was thinking for sometime 'What is this actually useful for as far as consumers are concerned?'. Sure its nice to show pics and movies, but its only a little wow factor on XMbox 360 + Media Centre.

But then it hit me - DJ decks. This thing would ROCK as a DJ deck. Come up, put yr wireless device (like Zune) on, drag songs, scratch mix, do all yr crassfading and equalisation - VERY KEWL!

Now I want one ;)

This is unreal! Check out these links to Google 360 degree street view on Google Maps:

LA

San Fran

No idea how its useful yet, but it looks awsome!!!