Archive for October, 2007

City of London consultation

Alex Pitkin - October 30th, 2007

We are extremely happy to announce the launch of an innovative consultation website in association with The City of London. The site allows members of the public to comment and respond to matters under The City Together partnership.

Shipped by: Delib.

Pardo and Perkins site

Andy Parkhouse - October 29th, 2007

Announcing the new website for the talented animation duo Pardo and Perkins.

Shipped by: Team Rubber

Happy Bristol Day

Andy Parkhouse - October 26th, 2007

I am working today (who takes their own advice?), but most of our staff have the day off for our ‘not-quite-statutory’, self-declared unofficial bank-holiday, Bristol Day.

Britain has not enough official holidays in our view. We can’t change that across the country (Gordon Brown could, if he chose to), but we can give Team Rubber people one extra ’statutory’ holiday. So we did, and our staff looked frankly gleeful as they left the studio last night. They’ve got a range of things planned: pleasingly, quite a few are taking a long weekend to see friends and family (which is what we hoped as that’s supposed to be a GENERALLY GOOD THING), but really we don’t mind what they do, that’s their business.

Our business of course is running Team Rubber: our income comes from billable time, so the cost to us is around £6000 in lost billings, but we think it’s worth it. One way to look at it is that £6k is less than the typical recruitment fee for a graduate, so if we can attract (or retain) just one person through this kind of thinking about our employment culture, that’s a winner. Or we can look at the health and productivity benefits of giving our staff a break between August and Christmas, just when those dark days come in and everyone gets a bit under the weather. And if that doesn’t convince, then it’s still a great story that’s got us good PR and is a nice thing to talk about.

Why is it Bristol Day? Because we thought it up in Bristol – the city that brought you an extra day off. We’re not the only ones doing this either, thanks to the magic of Pledge Bank, Bristol Day has been adopted by a bunch of other businesses who are imaginative about their employment culture. We’ll be doing it again next year, same time (October), same place (Pledge Bank).

So happy Bristol Day. Will you join us?

Rubber Republic offers free flash stats for agencies and creatives

Andy Parkhouse - October 26th, 2007

Through Rubber Republic’s Viral Manager tracking service, we track millions of viral campaign interactions and collect huge amounts of data on the users who interact with our campaigns. Our team use this info to develop great campaigns.

Slowly over time we’ll be open sourcing this information to help other marketers plan and commission the most effective campaigns.

The first bit of information we’ve opened up is on the usage of Flash versions amongst web users. If you’re commissioning a flash-based viral campaign, you need to know what flash version to specify, otherwise people may not be able to see your viral.

You can use our handy free stats to help you plan your viral campaign. » Check them out at ViralManager.com.

Team Rubber Team Hug

Alaric King - October 25th, 2007

team small Team Rubber Team Hug

Great looking people make great work. Its an honest fact; Ken Dodd and Anne Widicombe are living proof.

Wahey for Bristol Day!

Andy Parkhouse - October 25th, 2007

“Brizzle iz gert lush innit bled?” I think what the Carling scented and Lonsdale attired individual is implying is that Bristol is in fact, well good.

And for the many companies who choose to occupy Bristolian offices there will be an extra bank holiday, aptly named ‘Bristol Day’ on the 26th October. That nice chap Andrew Parkhouse from media coolkids ‘Team Rubber’ thought to himself “There are no bank holidays between August and Christmas. How silly,” and an energy efficient lightbulb illuminated and Bristol Day was born.

Well, nearly. Naturally he didn’t want to look foolish and so he set up a pledge asking ten other companies to do the same. There’s even a campaign group of Facebook devoted to Bristol Day which gained 133 members. And Andrew has great enthusiasm for the name of his annual holiday. “Because we thought it up in Bristol – ‘The city that brought you an extra day off.’” Better than Vicky Pollard putting us on the map, eh?

By Joanna, the Bristolian coolkid.

Cookin’ with traverse_subpath

Matt Wilkes - October 21st, 2007

I’ve heard a few people mention this, so I thought I’d post this recipe. We’re using a simpler version in Vice to prettify some URLs, but it was so easily generalised I knocked an example together.

The idea is that the traverse_subpath variable from Script (Python) was a nice recipe for getting information from URLs. You might have a URL http://127.0.0.1:8080/test/traverse_subpath/a/v/121/a/a/a/ 1213 and want the list ["a", "v" "121", "a", "a", "a", "1213"].

It turns out that as z3 views are based on their own traversal mechanism, it’s really easy to override to get something to emulate this behaviour.

So, set up your view as you usually would, but note the subtle differences from the boilerplate:

traversesubpath.py

from Products.Five.browser.pagetemplatefile
import ViewPageTemplateFile
from zope.publisher.browser import BrowserPage

class subpath(BrowserPage):

 def __init__(self, context, request):
     self.context = context  # Use Martin's aq_magic
     self.request = request
     self._path = []

 def publishTraverse(self, request, name):
     self._path.append(name)
     return self

 @property
 def traverse_subpath(self):
     return self._path

 __call__ = ViewPageTemplateFile('traversesubpath.pt')

traversesubpath.pt

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"
    xmlns:tal="http://xml.zope.org/namespaces/tal"
    xmlns:metal="http://xml.zope.org/namespaces/metal"
    xmlns:i18n="http://xml.zope.org/namespaces/i18n"
    lang="en"
    i18n:domain="plone">

  <ul>
  <li
 tal:repeat="pathitem view/traverse_subpath"
 tal:content="pathitem" />
  </ul>

</html>

With the URL I gave above, I get the following page rendered:

  • a
  • v
  • 121
  • a
  • a
  • a
  • 1213

It’s that simple.