Stranger Studios has recently launched several great new websites. Check them out!

ComiteSkin.com
Philadelphia-area Dermatologist, Harriet Comite, came to us for a total revamp of her growing practice’s (Advanced Skin Care) existing website. The site is balanced in its appeal to masculine and feminine audiences and conveys loads and loads of information in an easy-to-digest format.
Learn more about this project »

Garrett-Olsen.com
Up-and-coming Kart racer Garrett Olsen needed a web home-base for his growing stardom. The site is built on the Wordpress CMS to allow easy updating by the client and his web team. The site is also enhanced by the use of third party sites like Viddler and YouTube, and Flickr.
Learn more about this project »

LuxuryBabyBlog.com
A blog for hip parents to keep track of all that’s cool and “luxurious” for their growing families. The project includes our proprietary mailing list application (that we will hopefully make available as a Wordpress plugin shortly), as well as integration with Feedburner for email delivery of blog updates.
Learn more about this project »

VanessaPeanFoundation.org
Stranger Studios has a heart! We helped develop a web presence for the Vanessa Péan Foundation to serve as a hub for all of the foundation’s many meaningful efforts.
Learn more about this project »

So we’ve jumped on the Facebook bandwagon a bit. You can now install the Interactive 8-Ball application to your Facebook profile.

Why would you want to install I8B on your Facebook profile?
I don’t know, but if you use Facebook as your homepage instead of iGoogle it’s nice to have I8B right there. We also update your profile and mini feed every time you ask a question through Facebook. Although this last bit can get tricky; we had a lady email us to take down a question she asked about a love prospect for fear of being had. (Which only gave us another idea for a Facebook app that we might share at some point.)

And What Happened?
I8B got a ton of traffic. In three days, we got 400 people to install the new application. Traffic to I8B trippled to 800 visits a day and then… leveled out. We actually lost 5-10 users today as people have started to uninstall the application. So growth is not exactly parabolic so far.

I guess we need something more to help the spread. (This blog post? A mention at TechCrunch? Maybe I’ll resubmit I8B to Emily Chang’s eHub.) It would be nice to have the 20,000 users that the other lame-o eight ball application on there has. Of course they got there first and so are high in the app directory and have the catchy URL at apps.facebook.com/eightball. (ours is apps.facebook.com/bettereightball)

What’s next?
A WineLog app for Facebook, duh. The I8B stuff was kind of a primer for work on a WineLog application. And good thing too. It is nice to work out all of the kinks using a brand that we aren’t as invested in. This article helped me a bunch, but it also took a lot of hacking around to figure out what he meant by everything. The toughest part was fixing Facebook’s broken PHP4 client. Don’t even try messing with that unofficial one. If anyone needs help, shoot me an email or IM.

Anyway, a WineLog app would be fun. Again, I would rather just go to WineLog to see what my friends are drinking. But if you spend your day at Facebook, it’s sweet to get notifications on what people are logging. And it will hopefully introduce WineLog to some new folks. Cross your fingers.

UPDATE: Here are links to my versions of the facebook api scripts. Download them and rename them to .php. I hope to comment up the code when I get a chance, so you can see what I changed. But in the meantime, this might be a better starting place for you than Facebook’s version.

facebook.php
facebookapi_php4_restlib.php
IsterXmlSimpleXMLImpl.php

Download all of the above files, rename them to .php, and follow the tutorial instructions here (or do whatever you’re doing). The strange one at the bottom is a library to handle XML objects (PHP5 does this natively I suppose). Read here for more on simplexml44. Or here is the entire simplexml gzip file as I unzipped and installed it on my server.

We’re working with some pretty interesting clients, and our work on WineLog is anything but boring. Still, we know how easy it is to get burned out on “work”. For that reason, Kim and I are always on the look out for quick, fun projects we can use to keep the energy level up in our office.

After reading a little blurb somewhere about the recent Google Gadget competition, Kim and I brainstormed for gadget ideas. We had never created a Google gadget (or any other homepage widget) before, and thought the format would be good for our goal of finding a simple, fun side project to work on.

We tried to focus on things that would be (1) fun, (2) different, and (3) easy to complete in one week or so. Among some other great ideas, we had this: “A magic 8-ball game where other users answer your questions.” We did a quick search and didn’t find anything like it out there, registered the domain Interactive8Ball.com, and set to work.

It was soon after registering the domain that we found the official rules page for the Google Gadget Awards competition and ran into a couple snags. First, the rules page uses an 8-ball gadget as an example. That’s good because it means we’re on the right page, bad because we’d probably seem unoriginal no matter how much we change the 8-ball formula. The second snag was that entrants needed to be university students. Technically, I think we just needed a .edu email address. Kim just graduated this past spring and we considered entering under her name, but decided against it. If we did end up winning one of the prizes, I didn’t want to deal with the scandal of entering under false pretenses and trying to steal money from starving college students.

So no competition. But here is the gadget we would have entered:

Let us know what you think.

I am pleased to finally be able to write about PhotoCrank, a service that adds clever overlays to the photos you snap on your mobile phone. Since mid-August, Kim and I have been helping the PhotoCrank team with their website’s design and development. The secret is out now; their site went live sometime this morning.

If you’re still reading this, you should take a break and check the service out for yourself. (Here’s the link if you missed it the first time: PhotoCrank.com.) From their blog:

PhotoCrank is a fun and easy way for you to add entertaining graphics and customized captions directly on top of your mobile photos. There is no software required. All you need is the camera phone in your pocket, and it works at the speed of a picture message.

Cranking a photo is as easy as sending a “pix message” from your mobile phone to an email address (like try@photocrank.com). A team of leprechauns and fairies, working for minimum wage, will add the crank over top of your image and send it back to your phone. A version is also stored at PhotoCrank.com for archiving and to send mass emails later.

Your carrier will charge you their normal fee for sending a picture message. PhotoCrank will charge you an additional $0.20 to $0.30, which is billed to your cell phone, depending on the package you choose. Right now, PhotoCrank’s part of this charge is waved on the first 3 cranks you send.
Jeff and the crew at PhotoCrank are great to work with, and I’m proud of the application they are releasing this week. Kim and I thought the idea was awesome back when it was just a few sketches and a simple prototype. But now that I’m actually able to crank photos from my own Razr and browse through all the cranks on the website, I’m even more excited about things. I can’t wait for my next night out just so I can create more images like this one:

I’m also proud of the design work Kim did on this project. Take a look at how far things have come from the design for the early prototype we built back in July to the final design of the site launched this week.

Kim also did some print work for PhotoCrank, designing this awesome one-sheet they’ll be handing out at the Demo conference in California, where Jeff and the PhotoCrank team will be presenting later this week. (Be sure to check them out there if you are attending or keeping tabs on that event.)

I have a minute, so I’ll throw in a little praise for myself. The original plan was to handoff a static HTML wireframe, with just the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript components programmed. Jeff and Paul were busy jumping hoops for the phone companies and tweaking PhotoCrank’s porn filter however, so I brushed off my VB and ASP.net skills and helped out with some of the server-side programming. For a couple of weeks, I moved shop over to the PhotoCrank office where I got busy, did some .net development, ate as much as 1 1/2 cheese steaks each day, and brushed up on my devil-sticks skills.
Again, I can’t emphasize how great Jeff, Paul, Cristyn, Yoni, and the others behind PhotoCrank are. This is just the beginning for them. I know they have a lot of plans for their product, and I look forward to working with them in the future.