You can see their website here.

Here are the details:

Auction Alert! It’s Time for the JBBP Auction!!!

Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Scottish Rite Center on 19th and Sloat
5:30 pm to 11:00 pm
$35 in advance or $40 at the door

This year’s SFUSD budget will be incredibly tight. If we want to continue to maintain the integrity of the JBBP Program, we will need to have funds available to offset the upcoming budget cuts. Our annual Tomodachi Auction is our best opportunity to raise these necessary funds.

Come to the Auction!!! It’s going to be INCREDIBLE!!! Click here to learn more about our auction.

Feel free to follow us for all the updates here at Tigre Group.

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JUST A GENTLE REMINDER TO SIGN UP FOR OUR MOCK INTERVIEWS. WE STILL NEED VOLUNTEERS, SO PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD TO ALL YOUR COLLEAGUES. FOR MORE INFORMATION AND DETAILS, SEE BELOW!
________________________________
Dear Community Partners,

I am reaching out and asking for your help, please volunteer one or two shifts, 9:00 am – 12:30 pm, or 12:00 pm – 3:30 pm on Saturday, February 27, 2010 or Saturday, March 6, 2010.

Career Technical Education (CTE) is looking for160 volunteers (80 per date, 40 per shift) to perform mock interviews with San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) students in preparation for their summer internships. Students are placed in a range of professional settings, giving them a work-based learning experience and 21st Century learning skills.

Our 11th grade academy/pathway students are working very hard, (as are their teachers) preparing for their interviews with their potential internship providers. One way CTE support its students, is to provide a safe and encouraging environment, where students receive immediate feedback on their interview skills, (written and oral), and later an opportunity to fine-tune their skills in any vulnerable areas. Your interaction and feedback is crucial to the student’s success now and later in life.

A complete guide and rubric rating system will be provided to all volunteers.

If you are available to volunteer or know anyone that is passionate about young people succeeding, if you are involved in a HR related field, or your company wants to give back to its community, this is a great and personally fulfilling opportunity.

Should you have further questions please contact me, Lynn Garcia, or register by clicking on the link directly below?

* SFUSD Mock Interview Opportunity http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Z6DYT2B

Interviews will be held at:
APD Cabrillo (formerly Cabrillo Elementary)
750 25th Ave. (between Balboa and Cabrillo)
San Francisco, CA 94121
Parking on site
Thank you in advance and have a great weekend,

Lynn Garcia
Parent & Community Outreach Coordinator
Career Technical Education
21st Century Learning Partnerships
San Francisco Unified School District
750 25th Ave., 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94121
(415) 379-7769 (office)
(415) 750-8687 (fax)
GarciaL@sfusd.edu
www.sfusdcte.org

As of 02/24/2010, we have a grade of 88/100. This is exciting because we have always adhered to building our website to be standards complaint in terms of code and structure. Now that we practically have an “A” with our own website in terms of search engine optimization (SEO), it makes the case that Tigre Group can consult clients on their websites with authority.

WebsiteGrader explains how they arrived at our score:

The website www.tigregroup.com ranks 257,836 of the 2,117,003 websites that have been ranked so far. A website grade of 88/100 for www.tigregroup.com means that means that of the millions of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 88% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

If you would like a free consultation on how Tigre Group can improve your websites rank, please let us know. We provide many levels of SEO services for our clients. We prefer to build new websites correctly the first time, but are also available to improve upon your existing site.

ZackNewmanBand.com was built using MODx CMS. This gives Zack the ability to change his content, and in his case this includes mp3 files and music videos, as often as he wishes. It’s a perfect framework for someone who has new show listings and needs to make updates often. We also plugged a Twitter feed and Zazzle store into the site for him to use as his blog and shopping area. For his photo section, he can upload and edit as many photos as he wants into the photo gallery tool.

Take a look at the new ZackNewmanBand.com website.

SSL connections are a big part of web development with all of the eCommerce out there on the web.  It is essential for any website that deals in private information including banking data, personal addresses, emails, and most importantly credit card data to have an efficient and flexible system for ensuring requests are carried out over SSL.  One of the projects that we are currently working on requires purchases to be preformed on the website through a local shopping cart.  The project is being developed in symfony and has been a test bed for a few new symfony plugins I plan to release to the public soon.

One of the key systems that had to be developed for this website was an SSL redirect plugin that would look up in a config file, which modules and/or actions needed to be accessed via an https connection.  Furthermore, I wanted the system to be able to be used in “strict” mode, where it would redirect non-secure modules accessed via https, back to http.  It was also a requirement that this system execute quickly and flawlessly, as it would be invoked during the filter phase of every request.

There were a couple solutions available, but nothing quite fit.  The plugin developed by Fabien was made for lower versions of symfony, and the other solutions I found contained way too much looping.  I’m sure the plugin made for symfony 1.1 by Fabien would probably work, but I decided I should write my own.  Plus, now there will be an SSL plugin for later versions of symfony.

The way the plugin works is pretty straight forward. It looks for a declaration in the symfony application config. The plugin will attempt to see if there are modules defined in the configuration, and if the defined module has specific actions that should be secured, or if all actions should be secured. Basically, if the plugin finds a module in the configuration, but if it doesn’t find specific secure actions configured for that module, it assumes all of the module’s actions should be secure. If there are specific secure actions defined in the configuration for the module only the defined actions will be considered secure and subsequently redirected to https. There is also the strict option, which can be set to true to make module/actions that aren’t configured to be secure to be redirected to http.

Here is a sample configuration in an app.yml file:

  tg_ssl_redirect:
    #true if insecure pages accesed with https should be rerouted to http
    strict:                   true
    #modules and actions that should be https
    secure:
      #secure the index, confirm, and payment actions of the checkout module
      checkout:
        actions:              [index,confirm,payment]
      #secure all of the actions in the profile module
      profile:                ~

Using the above config file, all actions in the profile module are considered to be secure, along with the index, confirm, and payment actions of the checkout module. Also, since strict is true, any other actions accessed with https will be redirected to http.

To enable the filter, you will need to add it to your filters.yml file, like so:

rendering: ~
security:
  class:          sfGuardBasicSecurityFilter
 
# insert your own filters here
ssl:
  class:          tgSslRedirectFilter
cache:     ~
common:
  class: sfCommonFilter
execution: ~

I hope to package this as a symfony plugin soon. I just am too busy at the moment to get all of the tests written and get the markdown done. This blog post was a good start though, and you can copy the source code below into a file, name it tgSslRedirectFilter.class.php and enable it per the configuration above.

<?php
//Copyright (c) 2010 Casey Cambra
//
// Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
// obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
// files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
// restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,
// copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
// copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
// Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following
// conditions:
//
// The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
// included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
//
// THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
// EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
// OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
// NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
// HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
// WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
// FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
// OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
 
 
/**
 * Checks the application configuration to determine which modules/actions are supposed
 * to be secure and ensures they are using https.  This filter will also redirect https
 * requests to non-secured pages back to http if the strict option is set in the configuration
 * file.
 *
 * @package tgSslRedirectPlugin
 * @author Casey Cambra <casey@tigregroup.com>
 * @version 1.1
 */
class tgSslRedirectFilter extends sfFilter{
 
    /**
     * executes the filter.  This filter will determine if a
     * request should be http or https and will redirect as such
     * 
     * @param sfFilterChain $filterChain the current symfony filter chain
     * @return boolean redirect status 
     */
    public function execute( $filterChain ){
        //only run once per request
        if( $this->isFirstCall() ){
            $request = $this->getContext()->getRequest();
            //only filter is the request is get or head
            if( $request->isMethod( 'get' ) || $request->isMethod( 'head' ) ){
                $controller = $this->getContext()->getController();
                $stackEntry = $controller->getActionStack()->getLastEntry();
                $module = $stackEntry->getModuleName();
                $action = $stackEntry->getActionName();
                //get the module settings
                $moduleSettings = sfConfig::get( 'app_tg_ssl_redirect_secure', false );
                //see if strict settings are on (non secure modules must be http)
                $strict = sfConfig::get( 'app_tg_ssl_redirect_strict', true );
                //if there are settings for this module
                if( isset( $moduleSettings[$module] ) ){
                    //$strict = ( isset( $moduleSettings[ 'strict' ] ) && $moduleSettings[ 'strict' ] ) ? true:false;
                    //there are actions defined, check if this actions is secure
                    if( isset( $moduleSettings[ $module ][ 'actions' ] ) ){
                        //this is a secure action
                        if( !$request->isSecure() &&
                            is_array( $moduleSettings[ $module ][ 'actions' ] ) &&
                            in_array($action, $moduleSettings[ $module ][ 'actions' ])
                        ){
 
                            //we need to redirect to a secure url
                            return $this->redirectSecure( $request );
                        }//else: the request should be secure, and is. No more to be done.
                    //module was defined, but no actions were
                    }else if( !$request->isSecure() ){
                        //every action in this module is secure, redirect
                        return $this->redirectSecure( $request );
                    }
                }else if( $request->isSecure() && $strict ){
                    //redirect back to http, strict is set
                    return $this->redirectUnsecure( $request );
                }
            }
        }
        //no redirect necessary, continue the filter chain
        $filterChain->execute();
    }
 
    /**
     * redirects an http request to https
     * 
     * @param sfWebRequest $request
     * @return boolean
     */
    protected function redirectSecure( $request ){
        //replace http w/ https
        $url = str_replace( 'http', 'https', $request->getUri() );
        return $this->getContext()->getController()->redirect( $url, 0, 301 );
    }
 
    /**
     * redirects an https request to http
     *
     * @param sfWebRequest $request
     * @return boolean
     */
    protected function redirectUnsecure( $request ){
        //replace https w/ http
        $url = str_replace( 'https', 'http', $request->getUri() );
        return $this->getContext()->getController()->redirect( $url, 0, 301 );
    }
}

We are happy to showcase our completion of the new XKT Engineering website using our ad here.

Sortfolio is a great way to look for a website designer and we here at Tigre Group are happy to finally be listing our work on this site.

• Graphic Design
• Websites
• SEO Marketing
• Web Applications
• Logo Design
• Photography

These are now blue links at the bottom of our header that take you directly to the portfolio items that have this tag attribute.

We also added a Photo link which will take you to our flickr account. This addition is an opportunity to show our photography skills in relation to the services provided to our clients. For clients we have taken photos, we have added this images and tags. This helps get our clients more website traffic from the flickr community and image searches.

On the home page we threw in “the kitchen sink” in our list of service offerings. We decided to mention the hands-on abilities we have in relation to computers, video cameras, and servers. Need video camera installation or a custom PC built? Let us know!

One notable improvement over our site from a few weeks ago is the addition of our background pattern. This is a custom pattern Casey made using Illustrator. The great thing about this pattern (in addition to being beautiful and awesome) is that it was made in vector form, so it can be scaled both larger and smaller, without losing any quality. We wanted a classic decorative look, while being subtle, so we kept it muted with black and gray tones. This goes well with our mix of the retro-CMYK Tigre Group Logo, which seems to pop out from the header. This background also works well with the rest of the site’s minimalist design.

For our blogs we added RSS feeds and AddThis social bookmarking buttons. These tools help our readers follow, bookmark, and share any information they find valuable. We hope this applies to you going forward (wink wink).

In the footer of each page are W3.org validation buttons/links. By clicking these buttons, you can confirm that we here at Tigre Group adhere to standards with our CSS and XHTML.

I’ve also spent some time time trying to build out our Links page. Here we hope to showcase other websites we find useful, inspiring, and worthy of your time and energy.

Until next time, all the best!

They have created internal teams to cover industry trends and Tweet on them.

The break down for industries covered are:

• Auto
• Media and Entertainment
• Financial Services
• Retail
• Tech
• Travel

Follow this link to sign up for your relevant industry: Google Tweets.

Did they leave an industry out?