Recently, I spent around 20 hours of hard-working in my spare time and sleep time to build a new website titled “Mentions of Hong Kong Universities”. I built it to demonstrate the usefulness of some public Web services, to prove myself adept at building a meaningful website with the valuable resources from the open source community, and to test the power of individual in the big wave of Web publishing.

The Idea

The website Mentions of Hong Kong Universities (MHKU) has a simple and clear theme: what the rest of the world is saying about Hong Kong universities and their people.

Hong Kong has eight universities. It is quite frequently that local media and newspapers report on what is happening in these universities. While local media mentions of them are frequent and abundant, how about a worldwide mentions? Are there any people in the rest of the world mentioning about Hong Kong universities? What are they saying, why do they interest, and what are their viewpoints and opinions?

The Technologies and Services

The website is built with the uses of the following technologies and public Web services: LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) as the software infrastructure, Wordpress as the web publishing platform, Google News and Yahoo News as the news sources services, RSS as the interface, del.icio.us, Technorati, FeedBurner, and Flickr as the helper services and enrichment of the website.

What’s Next?

Thereafter, I will spare around 2 hours per week to maintain the content and usefulness of this website. I will also use it as a playground to experiment with some other useful public Web services and APIs (application programming interfaces) around the website’s main theme.

Comments are welcomed and appreciated. You can use the commenting form or email me via this Google Mail account