Mash it up! Your site a friends site, blog site, myspace, or any URL your little XMash heart desires. Upload your face to become 1 of 4 XMashers. And get your mash on at www.merryxmash.com

It has arrived, the third, in a trilogy of three, Christmas promos that started back in 2006. But this year we decided to throw out all the stops. Make a smash hit! Our goal was to do something that had never been done before. Not by us, or anyone else for that matter.

Our researchers got busy finding the technology we needed to accomplish our crazy goals. We found it. Buried–hidden in the cyber-world. We pounced on it.

We combined it with a couple other sources and—ho, ho, yeohoza—we had something new an d completely proprietary to Ninthlink.

In tandem with the technical gurus, here at “The Link”, our creative guys got fired up with the Christmas Spirit. Characters were developed and given personality, photo shoots captured the various costumes needed, the online “stage” on which all the pandemonium would take place was created, story boards and copy were perfected, and the long task of building the thing was lovingly and painstakingly undertaken.

So what do you do? First grab and upload any homepage off of any website. Customize it with characters and action. Place you and your friends’ faces on the characters. Then invite your friends to view the “Xmash.” Share it. Give it as a gift. Have fun mashing away.

So how do you get started? Get your mash on at merryXmash.com, if you dare, and stomp away!

Merry Xmash from Ninthlink.

Music to Design, Develop, and Market by? Maybe. All I know is that the goal was to create a killer mix, Alex’s Best of 2k8, comprised entirely of songs that came out this year. Everybody’s doing it. NME, Rolling Stone Singles and Albums (i especially like that that last url is “…albums_of_the_yea”), Spin Magazine… even Dave Brown at Holiday Matinee made a mixtape for Sanctuary143. Well, this one is mine.

1. Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros - Flight of the Conchords feat. Rhymenoceros and the Hiphopopatomus. New season starts in January! And this is just rad.
2. That Green Gentlemen (Things Have Changed) - Panic! At The Disco. A crowd pleaser with a message. Things have changed. Ha. Was that lame? Who cares.
3. You Don’t Know Me - Ben Folds feat. Regina Spektor. With a video directed by Tim and Eric, how can you go wrong?
4. Believe - The Bravery. We hear this one on the radio so frequently, it is not officially “our song”, but it might just be our radio song. Or something. Anyhoo, the music video youtube‘d by Universal Music Group is ridiculously bad quality, but the music itself is not.
5. On Top Of The World - T.I. feat. Ludacris & B.O.B. … the album has other singles, but I like this one, and it’s my mixtape. Also, I realized that by using rap/hip hop songs by artists featuring other artists, I could squeeze like 9 people into 4 tracks. Mixtape Optimization (MTO) is the new SEO for the upcoming 2k9. You heard it here.
6. Goddess of Death - The Roman Spring. I wanted to get a healthy sampling from some of my favorite local bands as well. The Modlins and The Roman Spring toured together in April of 08, out to the ABQ and back. This is one of my favorite songs of theirs. Represent.
7. The ‘59 Sound - The Gaslight Anthem. So hot right now. Also, the very end of the song ends similarly to how the next one starts.
8. Cath - Death Cab For Cutie. I missed them openning for Neil Young a few months ago, and will never be forgiven. But this is what it is. Oh, if I could write lyrics that descriptive…
9. Human - The Killers. San Diego’s own Ray Suen is the official 5th Killer these days, and this one makes Arlene dance. Double whammy.
10. Universal Mind Control - Common feat. Pharell. The future is now!
11. Creeper - Islands. Creepy! I wore a shirt to their concert at the Epicentre, and it was the only time I got a comment about it other than a woman telling me it should be colored in. I guess thats a sidenote to how great the show was, but still. Crazy Canadians.
12. The Kids Are A Drag - Swim Party. I got so excited about this one, I almost forgot to post tracks 10 and 11! Featuring the Modlins’ Matt and Eric on some backup vocal support as well, this is definitely my favorite song off their debut full-length Pixie Dust on the Blood Range. They even took this song further, breaking it down for Sezio.org’s interview session at the Luce Loft in July of this here ‘08. It still gives me goosebumps.
13. Salute Your Salution - The Raconteurs. The Kills physically hurt as their opener at SDSU Open Air a few months ago. Maybe I’m getting old, or maybe the bass really was too loud. Either way, the Raconteurs killed it thereafter. Yea, you like that transition?
14. What It Is - The Cool Kids. Caught them at SF Outside Lands fest. One of my only regrets of 08 is that I didn’t buy their tshirt, which did in fact have a cat on it. Check them out, performing this one on the Jimmy Kimmel show.
15. Tessellate - Tokyo Police Club. Math references in awesome songs? My mommy would be proud. Also, Street Scene 08 and openning for Weezer? Yes now. Video!
16. White Lightning - Hot TV. Still trying to lure Mark down to San Diego on the permanent length. But in the meantime, he is helping produce the next Modlins album, due out sometime in Spring 09. Hot TV is his baby, and we Modlins helped sing and clap along to this one when we played together at Glendale’s The Scene at the end of May.
17. Georgia - Jaguar Love. Formed by remnants of The Blood Brothers and Pretty Girls Make Graves, rumor has it that I mostly went to see these guys play at Beauty Bar SD because their tshirt has a cat on it. Well, um, here they are performing in Portland last June. Yea.
18. Coldest Winter - Kanye West. One of the final tracks off November’s 808s & Heartbreak, there is no music video yet, but you can find the audio all over the internets, if you want.
19. Help Me - Alkaline Trio. I’m not sure what about this song has to do with riding the train from Will Smith’s Wild Wild West, but whatcha gonna do?
20. Chuck Norris - Apes of Wrath. The last song off their debut EP, Plastic, Fake and Frozen, this is another one of my favorite songs by another one of my favorite local bands. Insert Chuck Norris joke here. Good? good. Archive.org has a whole show, live at the Beauty Bar on June 13, 2008.
21. I’m Yours - Jason Mraz. Yes. If you don’t agree, you can put together your own Best of 2k8 cd. But this one is mine.
22. A Milli - The Roots feat. Lil Wayne. Performed live together in Miami 10-08-08. It is my understanding that ?uestlove has a drum machine that is making the “a milli a milli” loop. Is there anything he can’t do? Also, reinforces that tha Lil Weezy is everywhere in ‘08.

and there you have it. Here’s to 2k9!

On Saturday, December 13th, members of our team gathered at Imperial Beach in a clean up organized by Surfrider, an organization dedicated to keeping our beaches beautiful and the waters clean. Its amazing how many people where there to clean up! Despite the weather, individuals crowded the beach and cleaned up so much, that Surfrider began to ask volunteers to migrate to the streets and look for trash in those areas. Thanks to everyone who has donated their time to this cause, let’s keep the beaches this clean!

“Christmas, my child, is love in action. Every time we love, every time we give, it’s Christmas.” ~ Dale Evans Rogers

For the last 61 years, from October through December, thousands of companies and individuals rally together for one cause: to give the gift of Christmas to nearly 3 million children per year through the Toys for Tots program.

What does the gift of Christmas mean?

This means that despite whatever hardships these children have had to face in their young lives, every Christmas they are given a reason to believe that there is good in the world. This good comes from not only the people who donate toys to this cause, but also the people who donate their time to organize the toys after the collection, the companies who use their resources to host drives and promote this cause, the parents of these children who work very hard to provide their children with love and life’s other necessities and the Marines who collect the toys and enable a deserving family to feel the Christmas spirit.

Thanks to a supportive community and team, we exceeded this year’s goal by 150% and gave 75 families the gift of Christmas.

There have been many Toys for Tots drives this year and there are still many more going on. If you haven’t been able to donate toys to this cause and would like to, you still have time! Here is a list of San Diego Toys for Tots drop off locations. Thank you for your kindness and generosity and Ninthlink’s wish is that this Christmas mentality will last all year long because, “Every time we love… it’s Christmas.”

Yes. Quite often, good design is absolutely integral to a successful web experience. The trust and integrity a good design can convey will drive the user to a conversion. And we have proof!

With the ability to comment online, websites such as Yahoo Answers provide a platform for discussing the integrity of a site such as One Easy Fee Home Loans, a company Ninthlink had the pleasure of doing business with over the years. When a user posted a concern about their business practices, the immediate “Best Answer” reply began with “They look decent from their website”. WE WIN! If you think about it, the business practices THEY perform may not always associate with the design WE provide. But hey, that’s what we do. We get you results. And for the record, they’re a great company.

Yes, I mostly wanted to blog this because of the praise it brought, but if patting your own back after someone else pats it, on a Thursday afternoon, is wrong, then I … I just don’t know. Anyways, the above image shouldn’t have white space inside the non-white, in theory, but it does. And you should have seen it before we got the images working!

Long story short, if after fixing everything else, you still have html chunks with code like bgcolor="#ffffff" and you want the background to be NOT white, well, yea…

which resulted in:

If you’re not the man I don’t know who is! Thanks bro.

Word.

Wordpress 2.7 has been released today, nicknamed “Coltrane”. And in case that means nothing to you, where should I begin? Wordpress is a most awesome open source blogging system that has been expanded to really become a fully-functional Content Management System. With plugins to allow everything from image galleries (check out Wordpress’ creator Matt Mullenweg’s nice setup) to fully customizable Meta-data on every page and post you create (check out what Ron is doing over at the SDInteractive blog), there is something for everyone.

This latest update,  among much more goodness, throws jQuery around all over the backend, as if we were having a snowball fight, but the snowballs are awesomeness, allowing you to drag and drop to customize your blog how you want it (or how I want it…), and really making blogging, and all around site management, a lot more friendly.

And you know how much I enjoy a good jQuery now and again.

Which reminds me… I was at Hoboken pizza in PB on Saturday for lunch, and 4 people, 2 guys and 2 girls, sat down at the booth behind us. I couldn’t help but overhear the two guys immediately start talking about how they had tried out jQuery, but didn’t like it as much as prototype because, in their eyes, jQuery was good at animation, but wasn’t capable of creating new objects on the webpage they wanted. Arlene said I wasn’t allowed to correct them, so I’ll end this post just saying that I have yet to see something jQuery couldn’t do, and, young Jedis, wherever you are, it can definitely do that. Go go, Sundance Spas’ Compare-A-Spa !

Go go Wordpress 2.7!