Category: Web Design

A List Apart strongly opposes United States H.R.3261 AKA the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an ill-conceived lobbyist-driven piece of legislation that is technically impossible to enforce, cripplingly burdensome to support, and would, without hyperbole, destroy the internet as we know it.

Read More

• Wikipedia
• WordPress
• Stop American Censorship
• SOPA Strike

20th November 2011 was the first ever Wordcamp in Singapore. It was actually quite good as the speakers all knew their stuff quite well. I always find the way to judge a good session would be how much notes I make and this time, I made lots. I won’t try to cover everything in this post.

Philip Arthur Moore

The session started with Philip Arthur Moore from Automattic. For those who don’t know, Automattic is the company that brought us WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, Polldaddy, etc. They even did the WordPress iOS app.

He focused his talk mainly on best practices for debugging and the following were some good plugins to use especially for theme development:

• Debug Bar
• Debug Bar Console
• Regenerate Thumbnails
• Reveal IDs
• RTL Tester
• Theme Check

Really cool stuff.

Update: His post here.

Ric Shreves

Next up was Ric Shreves from Water & Stone. He seems to be THE man who knows best about Open Source CMSes in this region. His company even does a yearly survey and latest would be the 2011 Open Source CMS Market Share Report (Nov.11) which is free for download.

Ric shared a few insights of the data and the following were my main take aways.

• Concrete5 can compete with WordPress in terms of its admin interface.
• EZPublish is good for multilingual sites.
• Liferay is good for enterprise use.
• Magento is tough to use, but very strong.

Mingfei Yan

I was extremely impressed by Mingfei who shared on HTML5. She really knows her stuff and have even have a HTML5 demo site. Do check it out and see what HTML5 can do.

You can check out worldsbiggestpacman.com to see the powers of what HTML5 can do.

Mingfei works at Microsoft and this being a web meetup, some in the crowd poked fun at Internet Explorer and mentioned how other browsers are better, etc. I do feel its kinda childish. Her sharing was totally unbiased, that I really respect her for.

CS Ling

I’ve heard of CS Ling for a long time and finally get to meet her in person. She shared on creative ways to use WordPress. She showcased some of her sites such as lifelistchase.com, lifelistling.com and cslingphotography.com. All pretty nice sites running on WordPress.

Murray Bourne

Murray runs Interactive Mathematics and he shared on Analytics.

• Quantcast
• Google Analytics now real-time
• AXS visitor tracking
• ClickTale heatmaps
• Browsersize by Google Labs is pretty cool too.

Forum

The last session of the day was a forum where user group representatives from Joomla, Drupal and WordPress took questions from the floor and had a lively discussion.

There was a question that why locals were usually not as involved as expats. Preetam made a good point where locals had commitments, hence its harder for them to take time out. This also seems to be the trend in the region as he do travel alot to such meetups, so i’ll take his word for it.

Overall, I would say the event was pretty good and I did learn a few new things. I do hope the next one will be even better.

I was at the first GovCamp Singapore earlier this year and am glad and went for the second one on 18th November 2011. You can see the full agenda here. Was slightly late, but managed to catch the Keynote by Jane Fountain. Her role is super cool, she is the Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Director, National Center for Digital Government. Anyone’s title that have the term “Digital Government” is super cool.

There was a lot of talk about social media and from her sharing, she have clearly studied many countries and how Governments use social media. She made a good point that in the 1960 Presidential Elections between Nixon and Kennedy, television was a new technology and it was also the very first time a live televised presidential debate was held . Without a doubt, how the candidates looked on television was apparently how the public judged their capability to govern. Its quite superficial, but thats reality. This draws a very good parallel on how our current politicians in Singapore are judged by the way they use social media.

Following that, there was a panel discussion by Jane Fountain, James Kang (Assistant Chief Executive, IDA), Prof Ashish Lall (LKY School of Public Policy) and Dr Pallab Saha (Institute of Systems Science at NUS). There was a lot of talk about data privacy and its good to know that there will be a new data-protection legislation in Singapore come first half of next year. Yay, no more random sales calls.

That was then followed by food and beer. If I don’t recall wrongly, they were actually serving Schneider Weisse beer and I have to say its pretty good. Then came the main event which was the breakout sessions. There were quite a number of good one and the first I went to was Prof Ashish Lall’s session about Society 2.0.

It was quite an intellectual discussion carried out in plain simple english. Basically, everyone was challenged that if we wanted change, we should do something about it and not wait for someone else to do it.

A few cool sites he shared:

• Give a Minute! – An suggestion platform that asks the public what would make them use walk, bike, but or train more. Over a period of 13 months, there were 3000 suggestions and 97% of them were on topic.
• Public Insight Network – A site that connects Media to experts. Experts not by the title of where they work or paper qualifications, but real experts. Even experts from super niche fields.
• InnoCentive – Where it aims to matchmake people who have a problem to people who like solving problems.
• The Billion Prices Project @ MIT –
• PriceStats – A site that collects prices of products available on the net to try and measure inflation.
• The Finland Phenomenon – A documentary that reveals the surprising factors accounting for Finland’s rank as the #1 education system in the world.

I then managed to catch a few other interesting sessions as well. Yin Shanyang shared on data visualization and his work on the Melbourne transportation which was really impressive. Robin shared on Using Social Media which led to some good discussions about how local politicians used social media in the last general elections. Preetam then led the next discussion around Social Tool for Emergency Preparedness which was an open brainstorming session.

This session gave me 2 ideas:

1. Why not have a website to allow commuters to volunteer their commuting habits. Where they live, when they travel, from where to where, what do they use. If there is a sizable sample size, this publicly collected data could allow the authorities to better plan public transport?
2. Local developers at GovCamp mention that most data available at data.gov.sg is not really usable, hence not possible to use or create anything. However, I think why think about just Singapore? Why not use available data overseas to create the app ideas and just show the relevant authorities locally and tell them if the data is available in a particular format, then the application can immediately be used in Singapore as well. But the assumption is of cause the application is a good one.

Overall, I really enjoyed this GovCampSG and hope that it will be even better next year with even more breakout sessions and constructive ideas exchanges.

Jeffrey Zeldman – The Medium Comes of Age from Codeworks Ltd on Vimeo.

Happen to be at my friend Dezzo’s house recently. He knew I was into web stuff and knew who Jeffery Zeldman was so he shared with me this video.

I’ve blogged about him since 2000 and have read all his books. Its amazing how relevant he was back then and how he is still so relevant today.

In the video, the book Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences with Progressive Enhancement was mentioned and I bought it online the very next day.

I’m still currently reading it and I think its really quite amazing. The web have progressed so much since 2000 and building a website now means for any device.

Lets all look forward for a semantic web.