Sabil Ardie

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

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.

Technorati Tags: cms, design, positive movement, website

Starting a blog a big decision to make, you know.

Sure, you may think I’m being silly — like I usually do. But I honestly believe that it is a big decision. You have to make a series of decision, and then you have to commit to it.

Let’s see… Where do we start? Let’s start from the time when you decided to make a blog and make our way down the list. First of all, after you decided you want to have a blog, you have to decide where are you going to have it hosted. I remember the days when there were only few options to choose. There were wordpress.com and blogger.com and few other ones. Nowdays, we have xanga, livejournal, typepad, and I don’t know what else. Plus, your networking sites also offer blogs. Look at myspace, multiply, friendster, yahoo360 (Is it still exist?).

Okay, so you’ve decided on one. The next step is to decide what your blog is going to be about. Is it going to be a diary, or is it going to be an review blog, or is it going to be a promotional blog. I haven’t even decided so far!

After you’ve got an idea of what kind of blog yours will be, then you have to keep writing. Well, as you may already figure out, not everyone writes well (Including me!) or enjoy writing. In previous blogs, I found writing a post felt like a chore. I know I’m not alone, because I realized that when someone mentioned it to me.

But writing is not the biggest decision of all. Many bloggers are forgetting the privacy issue. The biggest decision to make is to decide what to write, and what not to write. It is obvious that what you write on a blog gets into the internet. The INTER-NET. Inter connected network, network consists of millions of computers, phones, PDAs, etc. — And all those things are operated by people. So, after doing the math, what you write gets to be read by a lot of people. Think before you write.

By starting a blog, you are letting people know what you think and do. Those who forget this are bound to regret. Let me set an example: Let’s say you’re looking to work in a big multinational company. You are a good candidate, and the HR guy picks your cv to be selected by the decision makers. But before the HR guy give your name to the higher management, your name is being typed into google. Your blog shows up. The HR guy opens it up. The HR guy reads some of your posts and find some not-so-good side of you — let’s say about how you get cheated in a required exam. Few minutes later, your cv goes to the trash. But wait, may be you didn’t write about you cheated that said exam (You’re not that stupid). But the problem is, your friend wrote that in a comment or on his blog that was linked by your blog.

Another example: A girl wrote a lot in her blog, a creepy guy read the blog, the creepy guy know how she looks like from the pictures, the creepy guy knows her daily routine.

So wait, I just started a blog. OMG… What have I done?

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