The NBA All-Star weekend is upon us in Phoenix, AZ this week.  There are a lot of events going on, but the “cool kids” will definitely be at all the 944 events happening Thursday-Sunday at the W Hotel in Scottsdale, AZ.

Thursday night is the kickoff party and is hosted by Amare Stoudemire of the Phoenix Suns featuring DJ Vice, DJ Reach, DJ Ross One, & DJ OB One – purchase tickets here.

Friday night includes a live performance by Fabolous and features JD Webb, DJ Fashen, & DJ Jazzy Jeff – purchase tickets here.

Saturday night includes a live performance from two time Grammy award winner Common.  The night also includes Courtside Chaos hosted by Dwayne Wade of the Miami Heat, and various fashion shows – definitely the night to be at the W Hotel in Scottsdale – purchase tickets here.

Sunday night features DJ Solomon & DJ Irie with a special live performance by Nina Sky and Talib Kweli – purchase tickets here.

Its going to be a fun weekend for sure…and just in time for the NBA All-Star Weekend, 944 just released the latest issue of Game which is your best resource for Super Bowl, FBR 2009, and NBA All-Star coverage!

DateDesigner.com has been out in the wild now for a few months, and recently, I released a batch of updates to the site to not only make it easier to search for and build awesome date ideas, but I also cleaned it up a little bit as well.

Noticeably, the “ratings” system for all dates have been removed.  The ratings for each venue remained, but until Brent and I can figure out how to make the ratings system fit in better with the site, I just decided to remove them all together (no sense in confusing everyone with ratings that look like crap and don’t make any sense).  I also cleaned up the date detail pages and venue detail pages – they were in desperate need of a revised look from its early beta days!

The builder section was also switched up, completely, primarily due to making it easier to use, but also for the DateDesigner.com revenue model.  I’m actively selling the top 5 listings in each category in each market (segmented by zip codes) for $10 each per month – awesome revenue model eh? LOL  So if you are a venue that’s listed, and you want to be top 5 in that category for a particular market, email me from the DateDesigner.com contact page.  Also added to the builder was an open text box for location search, as well as having results for nearly anywhere you can think of in the United States that could possibly be on the web, and thus being able to be picked up by the DateDesigner.com builder tool…

The next biggest piece that I was working on was for SEO purposes.  Get the titles/descriptions/url’s all working together to create awesome content for web crawlers to index…and so far, its working out great – just ask Chase, he’s the SEO nerd and he’s telling me that the changes are starting to pay off…

So that’s pretty much it…oh…and we’re having a contest – “Build the Best Valentines Day Date” – head on over to the home page of DateDesigner.com for more details.

Love…Peace…and Hair Grease…

I was approached by Mike D’Elena of Reckless T’s the weekend prior to Xmas.  Turns out the developer he had working on FindMyDogADate.com (a new site idea he had come up with) totally bailed on him and the project got way off course.  Mike was in a predicament and came to me to see if I could provide any assistance with very limited time and a very limited budget.

$500 and 10 hours later…FindMyDogADate.com was reborn in CodeIgniter.  I literally rewrote the whole site instead of using what was already pieced together and produced one of the cleanest coded sites ever.

So…do you need to find your dog a play date?  You can register on the site, give your dog a profile, and find other dogs around you.  The site also uses UserVoice.com for feedback and bug tracking, so if you happen to have a suggestion or find a bug on the site, let your voice be heard and click on the “feedback” tab anchored to the left of your browser.

Well, a lot has been going on recently, so I figured I’d give you all a little update and throw a shit-ton of links your way.

I successfully launched Date Designer at the beginning of this month.  If you don’t know what Date Designer is all about, to start, it’s NOT a match-making service.  The service I’m offering is to answer the question of “what should we do?” AFTER you’ve gotten your date.  Currently there are about 40 good dates entered in to the system and the number of users registering and using the system is increasing daily.

Date Designer was recently featured in the AZ Republic with Gangplank HQ, Authority Labs, Simple Seating, and Get Whuffie.  I was also interviewed on video by the Phoenix Real Estate Guy.

I also attended PodCampAZ last weekend – talk about a fun time!  Met a ton of new people, got the word out about my projects, and discovered that Jeremy Tanner (@penguin) is all about man-hugging and Andrew Hyde (@andrewhyde) is a lot quieter than I had imagined!  You guys are welcome to stay at my house anytime you are back in Phx!  And on a sadder note…I still didn’t get a chance to meet Justine…I guess my indirect game didn’t work out so well…<sad face>…

Another project I’ve been working on, that was created out of the recent Startup Weekend in Phoenix is called Twitrratr.com.  Basically, Twitrratr.com is a search engine of sorts that searches tweets on Twitter and then analyzes the content of the tweets to determine positive/neutral/negative tones and opinions.  We’ve gotten a ton of press about the site already and we’ve only been live for about 2 weeks or so!  The Twitrratr.com team consists of myself, Chase Granberry, and Mike Luby…all of which…are full of so much awesome, I’m pretty sure if we ended up getting our asses kicked by a group of rogue ninjas, we’d bleed awesome.

Update on my relationship status…single…yes ladies…I’m still single…keep those phone numbers coming…<crickets>… :-/

And that’s about it for now…I gots ta get to bed…Nate’s wedding is in t-minus 13 hours!!!

Recently, I’ve had a few projects come up dealing with XML.  I’m a PHP programmer, and I run PHP5 on my server, so my first choice to attack XML in PHP is by using the SimpleXML object in PHP.  This has got to be one of gods gifts to PHP programmers…all you have to do is give the SimpleXML object a valid XML file/stream and it’ll put it into an object that you can easily reference like this:

$xml->customer[0]->emailaddresses[0]->emailaddress;

Makes life WAY easier by having that, however, I am currently struggling with an XML issue using SimpleXML and the XML data I am working on out of a Highrise account.  The thing is, in PHP, a valid variable can not have a hyphen in it, so if you come across an XML element named “first-name”, you can’t directly reference it using the method above.

What I’m thinking I’m going to have to do here is some PHP magic via old school PHP4 programming.  I wrote a quick and dirty XML parsing app for Brent (@iboughtamac) a few weeks back…I think I may use some of that code to scan through the elements and rewrite the element names w/o the hyphens.

Anyone else experience this issue when using SimpleXML?  Any ideas you can throw my way?