Phase One Completed...

’Am presently working on the development of the online hangout for AIESECers in IFE, and before I went away attending conference in Jos last week, I was able to complete the first phase of the development process; which is coming up with the design theme for the portal:



This was done using fireworks which happens to be my favorite graphics application when it comes to interface design for the web. The next stage will find me making the design into HTML. Will also be working on developing the other functional part to the site

At the moment, am yet to make certain implementation decisions, for instance to handle Authentication, am yet to settle on which of the Identity providers I will be using, but from the way it appears guess I will be going with RPX, sine it seems to be a nice potpourri for almost most of the popular id providers out there.

The majority of the portal features are still yet to be defined, hopefully, in the next couple of weeks, all these would be sorted out.

For the Blog, I decided against reinventing the wheel, so I will be going with Wordpress, but instead of going scouting for a suitable theme, or hacking one, I would be creating my own template. Apparently, designing Wordpress themes from scratch isn’t that big a deal as long you have a good grasp of basic HTML and CSS.

Hopefully before the next months run out, I will be done and AIESECers in IFE will be able to take all their sugar cubes, ofofo box and roll calls online :)

Stackoverflow...You would love it too

I first got wind of stackoverflow sometime last year, over at Jeff Attwood’s blog; I knew it was a project he is involved in but I never bothered checking it out…until a couple of weeks back…and I think I have been won over.

So what is stackoverflow?

On his blog jeff Attwood described stockoverflow as a mix of Expert exchange slash Wikipedia slash reddit, where he said:

[stackoverflow] is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of goodprogramming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

I guess what won me over was the interface. There is this responsiveness about it. Well thought out, it feels as if your next move is already anticipated. It is clean, uncluttered and intuitive. Nice work.

So stackoverflow is now officially part of my numerous online destinations. Do check it out thyself.

Y i love Mozilla Firefox

‘Am a die hard fan of Mozilla Firefox. And for good reasons. It has a well thought out user interface, its fast, does well in supporting web standards and it is secured. But what really makes it a killer APP for me (and ‘am sure for a whole lot of others) is its extensible nature that is achieved via plug-ins. This has transformed Mozilla Firefox from yet another browser for surfing the web into a development tool for me as a developer.


If you do a lot of interface design and development, like I do, you will find, in Mozilla Firefox add-ons, a varied number of plug-ins that will prove useful to you in your everyday work. My all time favorites are listed below:

Color-zilla

Color zilla is cool. This add-on allows you access to both the RGB and hexadecimal color representation on web pages. See a particular hue on a page you like and you wish to use in your design? Just hover its color picker on the color and you have access to the color code representation. Adding the plug-in will append this to the bottom of your browser:


Now before colorzilla, the processes of getting a color I will like to use from another webpage normally involves snapping the screen shots, moving it to fireworks where I can then use firework’s color picker tool!


Find Colorzilla here

Web developer

This is a life saver! Any day anytime. It is a mini suit of different tools that offers a whole lot of functionality. You will find tools that help in getting information about a page structure to tools that help you work with CSS, Forms, Images, cookies and validation; it’s great.

Find web developer tool here

Firebug

This is the king when it comes to JavaScript debugging. No contest!
Find firebug here.


Other useful plug-ins include:GreaseMonkey, Yslow by Yahoo!, CSS validator and FirePHP.

Discover more useful Add-ons at Firefox offical spot for add-ons

It is needless to say that none of these functionality that makes Mozilla Firefox such a useful software for me is found in the bare Firefox install. They are all plug-in powered. And this is the power of an extensible platform. It is a fact that an extensible platform, open up to the community, always makes good for a winning strategy.Google knows this, and I guess that’s the reason why their next step for chrome is to enable people to build plug-in for it, as hinted at in this article.

I Need Facebook Analytics...

If you’ve a web site, then definitely you should be interested in having certain metrics measured that will tell you how well your website is faring. You would be interested in knowing the navigation patterns your visitor display on your site, where there are coming from, what they do on your site, what software they use, how they leave your site, their click patterns etc. You have a varied number of such indices that helps in measuring the level of success a site is having. You get to know your sites strong points, where it is broken and what to do to fix it. Well, it could be very possible for you to have your website and careless about collecting these data, if you are unserious about the role your website is playing towards achieving its sets goals, then you are right on course, definitely that is the road to take. But if otherwise, web analytics should be an important strategy for you.


So now I have got this Facebook account, and am finding myself wanting to bring this web analytics way of life on board. I want to measure cause and effects. Just as you might be interested in knowing which pages on your site holds your readers attention the most, am also interested in knowing which of my actions on facebook gets noticed the most. So am in need of a facebook analytics...Maybe I am taking this analytics thingy a little bit too far…or maybe not.


I want to know, which will lead to a higher rate of click through in the long run; hyperlink in my status messages or hyperlink in my notes. Ok, I write a note about a service I am pushing; can I quantify the number of people that gets to read the notes? Or maybe I should even stop posting items, since nobody in reality gets to click on them and instead, move my links to my status messages where they apparently enjoy a larger rate of click through.


Or is there a period of the day that enjoys increase congregation on Facebook? Lunch hour? Maybe it’s a better strategy to leave notes on Friday; lot of people gets to play on Facebook over the weekend?


Maybe if I've got a facebook analytics, i would be able to tell...

What if I have a company, and I send a message to a lot of my friends and acquaintances on facebook, since it’s a thread, every recipient Included in the address gets to be notified when someone else replies to the initial mail, I want to know, are people finding this annoying? This idea of getting notified about a mail thread that they weren’t even interested in, in the first place, is it bad branding for my company?


I want to know, how effective is mentioning people in my facebook notes; does it make for an increase in readership? What about this thing of tagging people in pictures they don’t even appear in? How many people even snoop around my profile? If I know, maybe I should spend more time customizing the things I leave on my profile pages instead of wasting my energy in creating a public page for myself. And ha! There are those groups you join!


Well, ever since I started viewing facebook as more than just a time waster, but as a platform for networking and personal branding, the project manager in me, has ever since then, wanted to find ways of quantifying actions on facebook, to measure level of success and to use these data thus collected in coming up with strategies and ways to customize my actions for an increase impact.


But it seems at the moment, since there is no facebook analytics anywhere in sight, I have only my intuition to rely on for guidance.

Its Been a Looooong While

It's the return of the Wild Style fashionist
Smashin hits make it hard to adapt to this
Put pizazz and jazz in this and cash in this
Mastered this flash this and make em clap to this...[Rakim Guess Who's Back]

Dare To Change The World...

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in a square hole, the ones who see things differently. They are not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them, because they change things. They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as crazy ones, we see genius, because the people, who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who’ll do it.

Apple computer advertising, 9/27/97

Gmail still BETA?

Was in school over the weekend and I was surfing the net in elect library. Logged on to my gmail account and then it struck me; gmail is still a BETA service, despite all these years…I looked over to timba and popped the “why” question at him…he gave me the look that says: “does it look as if I have a desk at googleplex?”

As far as am concerned, gmail is far from being a beta service and the beta tag should be stripped away from it. It’s a stable enough application. And if any further work is to be done on it, it should be under the guise of new features being added not refactoring of a BETA service, but once again, I don’t work in Google so wouldn’t know whatz up.

And still talking about BETA services, I recently started the BETA testing of ednutey5 and if things work out like I envisage, I should be deploying to full fledge production in the next, say, 3 to 4 years…

So far eduntey5 has been a pretty, nice and sexy service. I haven’t encountered any major bug and guess what may be required of me is just proper integration so as to ensure compatibility with other services I’m presently running...

So far it has been fun.