I’m excited to announce that yesterday our first new hire of this type joined the company and was introduced via a video chat live over the interwebs. I’m pleased to introduce Jade, our new VP of Cuteness.

Who is Sammy?

Does Relish hire robots?

I’m a robot; can I work at Relish?

What is an SVN bot?

Alright, alright — let me quell some of the confusion by answering some of these right now.

Let’s start with the only non-ridiculous question…

What is an SVN bot, anyways?

See, when all the Relishers are all working away at our various projects and we commit some files to our subversion (SVN) repository, Sammy sends us notifications to let us know that these files have been committed.  That way the whole team is constantly kept abreast of updates to a project.

But what makes Sammy special is that you can interact with him.  After you add Sammy to your IM buddy list you can type something like “follow choicebot” to be notified of all commits made to the ChoiceBot project.  That way you’re not being inundated with loads of instant messages — you’re only being updated on projects you’re actually working on.

Unsubscribing is just as easy.  Type “unfollow choicebot” and you won’t receive any more updates.

Now, we developed Sammy for ourselves because we thought it would be useful and fun to build.  Before Sammy came along, we were constantly sending each other one word IMs: “committed?”, “committed”.  When you’re doing this every 5 minutes it gets a bit irritating.  And besides, what else do geeks do when the office shuts down over Christmas?  They write code!

When we were pulling together the various bits of code to build Sammy we were rather astounded at how user-unfriendly the few SVN bots were that we encountered during our Googling.  Sometimes I felt like I needed an advance degree in Computer Engineering from MIT just to open the readme files. Not good.  I knew we could do better.

And being the generous guys that we are, we’d like to share Sammy with the community at large. Sammy is a bit more user-friendly than the other SVN bots we found but you’ll still need a basic knowledge of PHP, FTP (specifically how to change file persmissions) and a bit of SVN smarts.  We’re releasing it under the GNU General Public License, so feel free to carve it up and make it your own.

What makes Sammy tick

There are detailed installation instructions included in the download below but here’s how Sammy works in a nutshell:

1. Sammy exists as a collection of PHP files on a web server that have been bot-ified by imified.  Imified is a really cool service that makes this all possible, but unfortunately it does go offline occasionally so don’t be alarmed if your bot doesn’t work immediately.  Imified might be on the fritz.
2. Sammy listens to the SVN repository via “SVN hooks“.  Hooks are built directly into every SVN repository and allow you to execute scripts when the repository is modified (i.e. files are added, removed, changed, etc). So when a commit is completed, the “post-commit” hook fires and runs a PHP script.
3. Sammy keeps all of the subscriptions (which is what users subscribe to with “follow” commands) in a mySQL database.  That way when a commit happens, it’s easy for Sammy to check the database to see if anybody is subscribing to that particular project and then send out the appropriate instant messages.
4. The commands that Sammy understands (“follow”, “unfollow”, “enable”, “disable”) are defined in a plugin-like method so that it’s easy to add/remove functionality.  We’ve provided what we consider to be “core”commands but we’d love to see where this can go with your great ideas.

Hopefully there are a few ubergeeks out there who a) understand what this is and b) are curious enough to check it out.  Give it a spin and tell us what you think.

And say hi to the van Noistroms for us!

Below are some before and after shots to compare the difference or you can check out the real thing online.  What do you think?

Before:

After:

…and last night I got the chance to live it in person at the 2008 Digital Marketing Awards.  The Tell Your Story site that we designed and built for Dentsu Canada was part of an integrated campaign that won a DMA Gold award for Integrated Campaign and Best in Show.  The campaign encouraged users to tell their own story by uploading a series of 12 photos to the site.  Visitors to the site can view and search the stories, vote for the ones they like and even save their favourites so that they can find them easily again later.

On a geekier note, not only is the site slick, but it’s also run by an easy-to-use custom CMS.  The CMS allows Canon to review and approve submissions as well as get a top level view of the entries that includes the most viewed, highest rated, etc.

This was a fun project to do as the whole team was involved and we were able to get our hands dirty on the design, Flash and PHP development.  Tip of the hat to our lead designer on the project John Thai.

Congrats to Michael Gramlow and Dentsu Canada on a campaign well conceived, thought out and executed.

In addition to the kudos for the Canon site, the Test Your Breath site we worked on received an honourable mention.  Not a bad night for Relish’s first appearance at the DMAs.  Looking forward to next year!

Do I get out of bed today?  Shreddies or Cinnamon Toast Crunch?  Do I shave or pretend that I’m going for the rugged look?  Ok, you get the idea… maybe these decisions aren’t too hard, but some can be.  Many choices we make require us to consider a multitude of factors – each with many options.  To top that all off, maybe some of these factors are more important to me then others – some are deal breakers, while a few probably are just ‘nice to have’.  Head starting to spin yet?

This is the problem that MyChoiceBot has set out to solve.  The folks at ChoiceBot have a nifty little algorithm that helps sort out these nasty little problems and unlike a lot of the current web tools out there, it doesn’t filter out options — it just helps me rank and see what sets each one apart.

Ok, you’ve probably guessed… I’m talking about this because we worked on it, but I really do think it’s a cool tool.  I know I will definitely use it the next time I have a hard decision to make.  This was a fun project because we touched a number of different pieces on it — not only did we design and build the Flash widget in conjunction with the talented ChoiceBot backend developers, but we also redid the logo, designed the site and threw in a bit of HTML/CSS for good measure.

Hmm, so what should I make my first ChoiceBot of…

What could be so important?  What could be more powerful than Facebook at reducing my productivity?  I’m glad you asked… my new MouseRug!  Bring the cozy comfort of your den to your office.  I have and there’s no turning back.  I decided to go with the Classic Nain from the Oriental Collection.  Here’s a photo of my new baby:

What?  You don’t think my rug quite fits your decor style?  You’re in luck!  The good folks at FiberLok have many collections and styles for you to choose from.  Maybe you’re mouse be more at home with a rug from the Native American Collection…

I for one am happy (and so is my mouse).  To quote my good friend The Dude, this rug really ties the !@#%’n room together.

Some crazy good desktops are available for download at Desktopography. Currently submissions are accepted on an invite-only basis but if you have mad Photoshop chops you can get in touch with them to see if you’re stuff passes muster.

Think of some of the possibilities –  Ford could check to see if you’ve recently visited the GM site and if you had they might put put a big ad saying “Don’t by a Ford – 5 reasons GMs are better!”.  How cool would that be? Talk about targeted messaging.