Sabil Ardie - Carpe Diem! ( Seize the day! )

I have been working on id-mac website for a week or so. We, the core team members, have decided to use WordPress as the management system for the new site considering that none of us have the time to develop and maintain a custom solution. The new website is sponsored by OrionNet.

Since id-mac is looking to update it’s logo, I had a plan to launch and announce the new site to id-mac on the last day of the new logo submission date, June 14. But I forgot that id-mac has its email system hosted by google apps and the person who has the access to google apps configuration page is another core team member, Yuza. So, I have to wait for him to set up the email system before we can redirect the dns information to the web host. So then the planned date passed by.

I took advantage of the delay today to make the logo voting system. I was planning to have a survey at polldaddy.com for members to vote. But the only problem with polldaddy.com is that a free account can only have 100 people responding to the survey. So if 100 members already voted, I would have to make another survey. The voting system I created is set up within the WordPress system as pages. I use runPHP plugin for WordPress and set up a MySQL database. The database keeps the members’ email, the votes, and the time the voting occured. This way, not only all the 3700 members of id-mac can all vote within the same system, but I can also make sure only the members can vote and they can only vote once.

It took me about 4 hours to develop, and I really like it. I hope the new site can be accessed soon, because the new logo was supposed to be chosen by the end of this month. I want to give members 7 days time to vote, so June 20 is the deadline for the new site to be up. When the new site is up, it can be accessed at http://www.id-mac.org

Since Netscape introduced JavaScript in 1995, this scripting language had its user based skyrocketed. Back in the days, many of us had to write the script by ourselves. In the Web 2.0 world today, most of us simply click and drag to have JavaScript embedded on our sites. It used to be a good thing, but nowadays JavaScript has become an annoyance.

I have to clearly state right now, so I won’t be misunderstood, that I have nothing against the language itself. But I have a major problem with the way it’s being used in the real world.

As a former web developer (though I still develop websites, I don’t do it professionally), I have a track record of developing JavaScript free sites. The reason for this is that I believe that a visitor has to be able to navigate a website whether they have a JavaScript enabled browser or not.

Why anyone in this day and age would be using a non JavaScript enabled browser, you say? Well, where have you been?

Firstly, JavaScript is the one helping sites popping up those unwanted ads (Annoying). Secondly, if you are on Microsoft Windows, JavaScript can and will inject a Trojan into your computer. Thirdly, mobile web is the trend. I’m not talking about people on the move with their laptops, but people who are accessing sites on their mobile phones. The last and the most significant of all is that data mining is on the rage. Do you know that those ad banners you see and many websites help companies like doubleclick to keep track on what sites you are visiting?

The way I see it, a visitor should be able to get whatever they are looking for on a website regardless the medium they are using to access it. Would it be a text based browser like lynx, an old Internet Explorer on Windows 98 (Honestly, people are still using these!), web browser on a Blackberry, or a Safari on the latest Macbook Air. Don’t you think so? Or are you going to discriminate some of them?

Of all the bad decision you can do as a web developer is to have your navigation bar a JavaScript bar. I know it’s pretty to have a menu slides down as a visitor hover on it, but if a non JavaScript enabled browser used to access it, the visitor won’t be able to navigate properly or at all.

If JavaScript is unavoidable, you are responsible to create an alternative, non JavaScript version of the site. That’s what Gmail has been doing quite well. As soon as Gmail detects some problem, it would offer a HTML only version.

Also, if you are on Firefox, you may want to check http://noscript.net/. It’s a plug-in that will allow you to choose whether to enable JavaScript on given websites.

I have been a fan of Improve Everywhere for a while. I like their creativity in creating scenes everywhere. I wish I was still in Philadelphia, so I can join one of their missions. That would be an experience to remember.

So I had nothing to do this late at night, I checked their website to see if there is anything new. As I glanced over this video, a thought passing through my mine.

What makes it funny watching this video is because people do not go to Starbucks carrying their desktops. We have laptops for that. These days, laptops are so popular. People using them everywhere. But I can see in the future that laptops are considered antique and too big to bring to cafés. Imagine in the future the above mission is carried out with laptops, and people in the future think it’s funny. I hope I can join that mission, even though I may will be very old by then…

Another task on my hand is finally close to finish: recreate the Positive Movement website.

I’m involved with Positive Movement since the middle of last year. Positive Movement is an NGO based in Jakarta, working to spread positive values. I was first involved in Bridge of Youth 2007, Positive Movement program held in Bali last August. Few months after the program, I joined the organization as the Public Relations Officer. I’m in charge of the website, of course, along with designing reports and stuff.

In July, I created Positive Movement’s website. Back then, I had no time to create or customize a content management system for them. So I created a regular static site using Dreamweaver and set up a Contribute site. It was a typically a good plan, but I didn’t factor in one thing: the internet connection from the Positive Movement’s office is so unreliable. The office uses Telkom Speedy DSL service, which should have been a good connection. But for some reason, the connection is really slow during office hours, and couple of times stops working during the rain.

Now, if you’ve ever been working with Contribute before, you would have known that before you can edit a page, the application would first download a copy of the page from the server — often along with the images. You cannot work off a local copy and then upload it to the server. With such a bad internet connection, editing just one page often took up to 20 minutes just to download. That was just simply unacceptable, since our secretariat is only manned by one person.

So I decided to give the website an upgrade. I contacted my friend, Subhan Toba, around December and started to talk about doing it. What I had in mind was a simple CMS that has a news management, an events management, and a picture gallery. The only extra feature I wanted was that the picture gallery needs to be connected to Positive Movement’s flickr account.

I left Toba alone to create the CMS, since at the time I had some projects to manage. I trusted him to build me a working system with the said requirements.

Well, apparently, few weeks after I talked to Toba for the last time, he told me that he was about to propose his girlfriend, and planned to get married not so long after it. This of course, resulted in some delay to the project. Fast forward to 2008, the website was not yet finished. This of course got me a bit uneasy since my friends at the Positive Movement keep asking about the progress of the website every time we have a meeting. So I contacted Toba by late January, and thank god he was close to finish. He already made all the modules I requested, and was testing out the picture gallery.

I jumped in and helped him testing out the new website. The news and events parts was working alright to me, but I found the picture gallery is a bit buggy. I found out that he used PHPFlickr to build the gallery, and displayed the pictures using Lightbox. For some reason the Lightbox won’t display the gallery pages correctly on my mac. I use Flock as my main browser, so I tested the gallery on Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Still the gallery would gave me some weird problems like unnecessary scroll bars, non-working navigation buttons, etc.

Feeling that the website should have been done a month ago, I decided to start editing the code myself. But since I have no idea how to customize the Lightbox part, I decided to start a whole new gallery with no javascript involved. I started that day around 7pm, and finished by around 6am the next morning. It was quite challenging since I have never worked with PHPFlickr before.

But the finished page worked ok for me. I tested it on mac and on my Windows copy on Parallel. The next day I presented the website in a Positive Movement meeting, and they gave it an okay sign. They didn’t actually say the liked it, but since no comments whatsoever, I assumed it was okay.

So I kept working with Toba this pass week to ironed out some little quirks on the website, I also asked Toba to train the secretariat on the new website. After around 4 monts or so, the new Positive Movement website is ready for prime time.

I moved the old website to a new server by Webhostingbuzz.com, since my previous server’s performance was not up to my expectation. I hope WHB’s server would be able to serve it better. I was just finished updating the DNS entry of the domain to point to the new server, and I expect by tomorrow the new website will be up.

Now that I’m finished with Positive Movement’s website, I can start working on the next project, the Puan Amal Hayati’s website.

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