While creating web applications we often encounter strange problems. Sometimes we spend hours trying to solve them and we don’t want you to have to do the same, that’s why we put the solutions on a blog. And, of course, sometimes we just have a crazy idea we want to test out and tell you about our findings.

We want to extend special thanks to Kevin Kalle of qlear for his inspiring, pioneering and already classic design.

Andreas Creten, our project-manager, will also do his part. However still doubting about his subject – or a presentation about his latest ski trip or something with value creation- it probably will be the last. After theory, you can taste value creation in practice over lunch. Madewithlove sponsors the sandwiches and just like our services, they will be customized and right on time. You can still register for this edition of barcamp. Don’t forget to tweet your favourite sandwich to @madewithlove so you can follow the #sandtweets.

View the job description on our jobs mini-site or on JobChoy

The new version, code-named Adam Link, launched a month ago at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam. The response on Twitter, Get Satisfaction and in real life was huge. On top of that we won The Rising Sun Startup Rally a day after the launch! While the guys from Postmachina were receiving the price we were monitoring the service and fixing bugs and problems as good as we could. We’re excited about the progress we’ve made since the first version and hope you are too.

Last week we deployed Marvin, another update, which adds widgets for your website and an easier way to connect. The next deploy will include a number of new services and some little tweaks. We plan to add features to the service frequently to keep it growing. If you have any suggestions, please post them on Get Satisfaction.

We want to thank everyone who made all of this possible by voting for us or sending in feedback, problems and praise! And of course we would like to thank those who payed our beers and entertained us during our stay in Amsterdam.

Are you on E?

With all this new space we had to find extra people to fill things up a bit.

Awsome dutch webdesigner Jonno Riekwel, who made our current website, joined the madewithlove team on the 16th of march. He will be designing, slicing and coding stunning web interfaces. Welcome Jonno, we are pleased to have you on board!

But that’s not all.

A couple of months ago we received an email from our partners in Amsterdam about a webdeveloper from Paris looking for a job in Belgium. We immediatly got in touch and now, some phonecalls, emails, interviews and a lot of red tape later, we are thrilled to announce that Wahiba Khadri is joining the madewithlove team on the 1st of April. So that makes 4 and new offices nicely filled up!

Meanwhile we did some client jobs, worked on Pongo and Bakso (our new framework and CMS) but most off all we readying the new version of mynameise.com for launch in mid april.

We are thrilled with all these new developments. Stay tuned for more announcements in the next few weeks. Huge thanks to everyone who helped us make this possible!

The view

Our company name is mentioned multiple times in the book, the author kind of liked it I guess.

"work with love! Work because you love doing it, not only because you have to."

"A young entrepreneur translated his vision into his company name: Made with love."

The pictures in the book are by Jan Locus, Andreas is the guy in the black hoodie.

Op weg naar werk - On the road to work

Eigenzinnige ploegspelers - Opinionated team players

Andreas's personal profile page, on paper this time

You can buy the book for 15€ in De standaard boekhandel, ISBN number 97 890 81350204.

E is a service that integrates all your existing social services into an E•ID, which you can share with anyone in the real world. To exchange E•ID’s, you just need an internet-enabled mobile phone like an iPhone or Blackberry. When you exchange your E•ID’s, E makes sure your contacts get added to your other social services like Netlog, Twitter, Last.fm, Soocial, automatically.

We had some problems during the first days, but since two days our error reporting system is quiet. Our mailboxes got overwhelmed with feedback and great responses on the product. Thanks everyone!

E is still in beta and very basic, we have a lot of things in mind which will be added in the future.

E is a joint effort of Postmachina and madewithlove.
We had a lot of fun building it and we had a great time with the Postmachina guys.

The E team

A lot of websites have a login form without labels, they let the value of the field indicate what you need to fill in there. It’s very clean and a neat solution if you have limited space for your form.

This is what it looks like:

But if you are not in a lack of pixels you should absolutely don’t use this technique! In that case you must use a regular form with fields and labels like this one:

When a user wants to change the value of field from the first example, he will first need to clear the field. Some people do this by selecting all the text and start writing, but I can imagine people pressing the backspace till the field is empty.

Our solution
To fix that problem, I wrote a jQuery plugin. You just need to include the plugin and define which field should empty onclick.

Adding such a behaviour to a field is quite simple if we take advantage of the onclick and onfocus event:

You click on the field and its empty, that works! But type something, leave the field and then click again on the field … it’s empty again. That’s not what we want, to fix this we could simply check if the field value is different from the default value.

if(this.value == 'Field label') {
    this.value = '';
}

There some other problems I faced when adding such a behaviour to a field: What to do on submit? What to do on reset? Can I add a focus class? …

To do this you need to specify the behaviour for every field. When you are working on huge projects that’s not an option. So I wrote a jQuery class so I could use excellent jQuery selectors (thank you so much for that John!).

So the plugin does a lot more then you would expect. You can enable it by including jQuery and my plugin. You can define the fields te emptyonclick manually, like in this example:

$(document).ready((function(){
    $('#username, #password').emptyonclick();
});

But by simply adding this line of code, every field with the ‘emptyonclick’ class will empty onclick:

$(document).ready(function(){
    $('.emptyonclick').emptyonclick();
});

Download the plugin from our server. Or visit the jQuery project page.

You can see the plugin working on the E website and Jonno’s contact form.

Hi there! As you can see we have a blog now.

What about us? We had a little reorganisation going on in the company. Everything runs fine now, we have the team back together and we are working on some cool really exciting projects.

We spend a lot of our days with Postmachina, wich are the guys behind E. We are building the E website and the E service for them. We are currently testing a release candidate and hope to launch a private bèta soon.

Beside that we are working on a new php framework called Pongo, wich will be used for every website we will build from now on. We even use Pongo to build a new cms, this new cms is going to replace our flashcms in the near future.

Last but not least, I would like to thank Jonno for building this blog. ]]> http://www.madewithlove.be/talk/our-first-post/feed 0