The first official round of “dot pong” (our corporate internet beer pong league) against Gawker Media was won by College Humor. I think the final score was 15 to 3, or something close to that. My partner Nick Dunkman (of College Humor and Busted Tees dev) and I went 3-0. Next up Digg!

It seems College Humor has started what can only be described as a corporate beer pong league between internet companies. We are playing Gawker Media today and there are plans to play digg sometime in the coming weeks. We were supposed to play Facebook last week, but their legal and PR department canceled the match last minute. At least they sent over some food while we played interoffice.

I wrote about Facebook talking smack. We had some custom balls from Adams Balls made up…

This post is not a comparison of CollegeHumor and Facebook. This is about a contest. Not just any contest. But a contest that will finally reveal which college site will reign all… reign all in beer pong. We should really be playing for domain name ownership. But I think they are chicken. Look how much trash they talk…

Facebook Invite

They have been targeting our news feeds

AD’s directed to CollegeHumor. This is just a scam to get us to buy ads to fight back on the digital front.

This morning at 5am Kunal Shah, Nick Dunkman, Jmo and myself launched a new version of the BustedTees website! Visually the site hasn’t changed much. Amir Cohen, one the front end developer for CollegeHumor did an excellent job recoding the front end. We spent the better part of the last 4 months recoding everything from scratch. The original version was built on the open source Symfony PHP framework several years ago (before my time). The site served it’s purpose and helped take BustedTees to a new level, it wasn’t that it was poorly programmed, it just outgrew our requirements.

(Dev Team at 5:15am)

I’m finding that a lot of the open source PHP frameworks that I have experimented with and seen throughout the community just don’t scale well. They serve a purpose and are great for average every day sites. But when dealing with a site the size of a BustedTees or CollegeHumor it really makes sense to roll your own framework, if you can. There are of course instances when writing a framework from scratch doesn’t always make sense. In the “unsure” startup setting it sometimes makes sense to get something out there quick and worry about scaling later. Scaling is a GREAT problem to have. If you are going to use open source code, not just frameworks, it’s important to really understand the underlying code. I can bet most coders don’t have a clue how the open source code they use actually works. Some of these applications are coded by excellent developers, you might learn something new by just reading their code.

Working on BustedTees has been an incredible experience and I have learned so much. I have worked on some small ecommerce sites as a freelance developer, but nothing of this size. Theres so many things I would have never thought needed to be accounted for. In future posts I will try and elaborate a bit. Right now I’m running on a few hours of sleep I got from a nap, so I’m going to pass out…

CollegeHumor is looking to fill two development positions…

Flash / Action Script Developer

PHP /MySQL Developer

Connected Ventures is cool, but what could better then working with me?

For the last three weeks at Connected Ventures, a few guys from the CollegeHumor team and myself have been working on a new site called TodaysBIGThing.com. The site is pretty simple, Every day, we find the best thing on the Internet and put it on the site. Just one thing, each day.

Yep, that’s it.

I’m up in Boston with Roddy and we were on our way back from breakfast. I got the banana french toast, it was delicious. But on the radio they were playing Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger and it reminded me of the video we made at Connected Ventures. This already had its viral debut a few months ago, if you didn’t see it you probably live in a hole. But here it is again.

Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo.