coding for food

Being from Boston and in the technology community, I always wanted a way to connect with fellow Locals within technology, photography, film and others. Sure - we have Twitter, Facebook, and Meetup groups - but I wanted to create a simple social community that people could add themselves and show of their talents. I envisioned some like a huge billboard of Boston-area experts showing their talents and the link to their work.  And thus - weareboston.org was born.

With weareboston.org, you can add your self to the community, and tag yourself with what you do best and then set your location. Then you can browse the site for other local and perhaps even strike up a partnership or hire them to do a gig. It's all about showing the world the level of talent in Boston.

The idea of this site came from my friend, Tim Mather who got it from Chris Kalani, the original creator of the version of this site for Portland, WA (prtlnd.com). There is also a version for Nashville, TN (nshvll.org) and soon a version for Los Angeles ,CA.

So go check out http://weareboston.org and add yourself to help build the technology community of Boston!

I've stared using CodeIgniter's framework to develop all my application with intent of learning more about the MVC frame work. However, sometimes it's hard to implement features that I currently had working without using the frame work. For example - the auto_link() function in CodeIngiter. It's amazing feature that turns string URLs into "click-able" URLs. This made parsing Tweets that much easier - but what if I wanted to parse the Twitter username and Hash tags as well?

Well I wrote this small, quick and dirty script that you can add the auto_link() function inside the url_helper.php file in system/helpers. Just add it in before the "return $str" and you'll be parsing links in no time!

if ($type != 'twitter')
{           
   $search = array('|#([\w_]+)|', '|@([\w_]+)|');
   $replace = array('#$1', '@$1');
   $str =  preg_replace($search, $replace, $str);
}


// Usage


echo auto_link("@gregavola is #awesome", "twitter");

Enjoy!

UPDATE: As n0xie noted on Twitter, it is better to extend the auto_link() function as opposed to edited it directly. You can accomlish this by creating a MY_url_helper.php file inside the system/helpers folders and and override the auto_link() function by adding the text above to the orginal function. This way when auto_link() is called, it get overriden by this function you created in MY_url_helper.php.