dangerouslyawesome

3 months of hard work has paid off, we just launched Comcast’s FEARnet.com. If you’re a comcast subscriber and watch ANY tv, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen the commercial teasers for this thing. Its pretty big news, and a huge victory for my team.

We’re currently streaming 10 full length classic horror flicks + tons of supplimental clips and trailers, running a community including a built-in chat room, have a database of almost 8000 movies browsable by name, popularity, tag, and our fancy dancey relationship browser “Web of Fear”.

Don’t forget the News and Reviews section, or the Games and Downloads (including some sweet myspace skins).

Speaking of myspace, the teaser myspace page has had over 800 friend requests over the past weekend…and I’m about to launch the full blown version very soon. I’ve figured out some pretty sweet tricks for building myspace pages, more to be documented soon.

Check it out, register, poke around, and get scared.

the fearnet myspace profile is live and in teaser-mode…full version going live on monday with the rest of the site!

ill be feverishly approving friends all weekend…ive approved 40 in the last hour!

i kinda cant believe how cool that page turned out…see myspace doesnt have to suck!

About a month ago i took a stab at really whipping myspace into shape. Currently, my employer has me riled up to build a crazy-custom myspace page…somewhere between the full overhaul i did for my page and the clean “skinning” style that others have adopted.

So i was talking to a friend of mine about the obscene amount of money some people are charging for corporate myspace pages…you know, the banner-less ones with all kinds of product placement, etc. etc. $10k + monthly maintenance fees + hundreds of thousands (yes, you read that right) in ad spending to get a banner free page for yourself. its a disgusting, commodity-based market that is 100% fabricated. But its working for some really good sales people, so good for them.

My friend got this crazy idea in my head that it might be valuable to create a myspace “IDE” of sorts. I told him it was impossible because there wasn’t an API for myspace. I really need to drop “impossible” from my vocabulary because every time i think there’s no way i can pull something off, someone proves me wrong.

Turns out there is an API…sort of.

1-2-pimp (translated from german for your convenience) runs on the pseudo api created by imagelooop. Effectively it takes whatever code you provide it, and along with a user/pass for myspace authentication, it posts it automagically into your “about me” section (the technique used for myspace customization).

So with that available…all i need to do is document what myspace allows/disallows code wise, build up some neato drag and drop flash components (for rss, music playing, etc), and build up a cute little IDE so that you can, in theory, build the holy grail yourself: a myspace page without the suck.

im VERY against WYSIWYG. It belongs NOWHERE near professional web development. But wouldn’t it be nice to have myspace pages that aren’t so blindingly painful to look at? a nice intermediate step between those $10,000 corporate myspace pages and things like this.

right. like i needed something else to fool around with. ::rolls eyes::

it’s no secret, the most popular site on the internet is composed of some of the ugliest code, and even uglier page layouts. Some claim this is by design. Others spend all day whining about it (and anything else they can think of).

And then, there are some, who hook a brotha up. Some coding genious (or boredom) has struck some individuals, inspiring them to hack apart myspace’s rats-nest of tables, and turn their myspace page into something classy. Taking Eston Bond’s myspace hacks kit, and some of my own time, I’ve turned my myspace page into something a bit less cringe-worthy.

some sweet features also hooked in: an open source flash based mp3 player, so that I can play some of my own awesome tunes (make sure you at least check out the 2nd track).

also, a handy flash-based RSS reader, posting a snip of the latest blog post i’ve made on here, on my myspace page (instead of the stupid myspace blogs that i NEVER used.

And of course, everything is hard coded to MY specs (heh, myspec), putting whomever I want in my top 3/5/8/16/256 (ok i dont have that many friends). Currently my layout is a modification of Eston’s original template, but now that I’ve got a hang of what myspace will let fly, I’m venturing into designing my own from scratch.

Warning: this is NOT for the faint of heart. Even with Eston’s well written walkthrough, you need a VERY solid understanding of CSS (though you can throw standards out the window) to make this work. But yeah. Dont run my page through a validator, cuz it just ain’t happening.