Build Up To Something

Try Snap Preview Anywhere in WordPress

Steven Choy — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 03:23:52 +0000

What is Snap Preview Anywhere? Snap Preview Anywhere enables anyone visiting your site to get a glimpse of what other sites you’re linking to, without having to leave your site. By rolling over any link, the user gets a visual preview of the site without having to go there, thus eliminating wasted “trips” to linked sites.

My testing in WordPress:

Snap Preview Anywhere Website

Find A Way in Hong Kong

All About Hong Kong Primary Schools

Six Wordpress Themes I Like Recently

Steven Choy — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 08:02:23 +0000

I record down a number of great Wordpress themes I found recently. It is for sharing and future reference.

Flickred - by WP Designer - Live Demo
Beach House - by Beach House - Live Demo
Brajeshwar - by Brajeshwar.com - Live Demo
WPAndreas07 - by Phoenixrealm - Live Demo
LivingOS-Alpha - by Living Open Source - Live Demo 1, Live Demo 2
Unsleepable - by Ben Gray - Live Demo

Use WordPress Not to Blog

Steven Choy — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 01:22:35 +0000

I did not go to here to record what I read and learned for more than one month, since I was quite busy in my day job as well as busy building a number of new websites in my spare time. Here is the first one that I would like to share as it is almost done.

Hong Kong University Departments (Chinese Name: 香港各大學學系)

I used the WordPress engine, together with the WordPress plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior and the WordPress theme Blog.txt, to build a website that furnishes a crsip overview of Hong Kong university education. The website records 215 academic departments of 7 Hong Kong universities, and tags each departments with appropriate labels. It also provides links to all academic departments of Hong Kong universities, and directs users to some relevant web search and information about them.

Yes, I used WordPress blogging engine not to blog, but to provide a directory service in a different and interesting way. The following lists useful materials that I read during the website development.

Since I used WordPress engine doing nothing about blogging, I also empty the WordPress Update Services so that the website would not automatically notify any site update services when I inputted data into the database.

Having getting my feet wet with WordPress, I am now quite familiar with it.

Deeper feeling about human population

Steven Choy — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 15:03:57 +0000

I know the rough figures about current world population (~ 6.5 billion), China population (~ 1.3 billion), and Hong Kong population (~ 6.9 million). I also know that human babies were born every second. Likewise, there are people passed away every day. However, the following websites can give me a deeper and real feeling about those statistics about human population.

Population Counter - Country Index — The world’s population according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
It presents data for the population births and deaths by country. The data was collected since January 1, 2005 and new births and deaths are checked for every two seconds. I don’t know exactly how they can do it, but it gives me a real feeling that people are dying every second and babies are born every second. For example, I can calculate that in Hong Kong there are about 132 births and 113 deaths per day since 2005.
Worldmapper: The world as you’ve never seen it before — Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest.
This website can give you various prospects about human population. To quote a few: population is very weakly related to land area; More children are born each year in Africa than are born in the Americas, all of Europe and Japan put together; In Uganda and Niger half the population is under 15 years old; In Italy, Spain and Japan only 14% of the population are children aged under 15.
Population Rank order (by CIA - The World Factbook).
This website presents rank order in population of 238 countries or regions. China comes frst and India second. Hong Kong SAR (special administrative region of China) ranks 100. The website also provides various background information about each countries in the Earth.

Convert Web page to an RSS feed

Steven Choy — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 09:01:13 +0000

I write this post in response to a query from my friend Herman on my post: Put a tag cloud in a WordPress post with ZoomClouds.

ZoomClouds takes in a RSS feed and uses content analysis tools to generate tag clouds based on the content of the RSS feed. Here is the tag cloud for your blog “Hermanland MT356 Presentation Notes“. I get it with the service of ZoomClouds.

To generate a tag cloud for some of your static web pages, you first need a way to convert those web pages into RSS feeds. Here are two websites that I know. I am interested in giving them a try.

FeedYes.com is one of the newest web service that can give RSS feeds to websites without feeds.
Feed43 (Feed For Free) is another free online service that can convert any web page to an RSS feed on the fly.

Updated: It seems that more is coming to join the game.

RSSxl converts an HTML Web Page to RSS. It generates an RSS feed from pretty well any webpage.

Put a tag cloud in a WordPress post with ZoomClouds

Steven Choy — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 15:57:10 +0000

With ZoomClouds you can easily create a tag cloud that represents the contents of a RSS feed. ZoomClouds first intakes the RSS feed you gave, fetchs the content, and generates the tag cloud using both Yahoo! Content Analysis API as well as a custom ZoomClouds content analysis tool.

ZoomClouds then provides with a necessary CSS code and Javascript code for you to place the tag cloud in your website or weblog. The following shows you an example that I got based on the RSS feed of this weblog. The tag cloud that you see at that moment is based only on the feed content at that time.

I simply extract and put the Javascript code provided to produce this tag cloud. The CSS style code provided for the appearance of the tag cloud is inserted in the CSS style sheet of this weblog’s theme. A tricky point to put a Javascript code in a WordPress post is to not to use multiple lines to type the code. That is, no line break starting from “script” to “/script”.

Via Robin Good’s New Media Picks Of The Week: Sharewood Picnic 43.

I Test Google Page Creator

Steven Choy — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 05:28:21 +0000

Google has just launched a new service called Google Page Creator. It is still in an early testing phase. I quickly spare a few minutes to give it a try. Here is what I do within five minutes:

My first page made by Google Page Creator and hosted in a Google’s Web server

Create your own web pages, quickly and easily.

Google Page Creator is a free online tool that makes it easy for anyone to create and publish useful, attractive web pages in just minutes. Selling points: no technical knowledge required, what you see is what you’ll get, and don’t worry about hosting.

The Seven Principles of Universal Design

Steven Choy — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 16:32:22 +0000

This weblog post (dated November 13, 2005) from uiGarden reprints the seven basic principles of universal design to guide a wide range of design disciplines. They were collaborately compiled by advocates of universal design, which include architects, product designers, engineers, and environmental design researchers.

UNIVERSAL DESIGN: The design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.

These seven principles may be applied to evaluate existing designs, guide the design process and educate both designers and consumers about the characteristics of more usable products and environments.

The website design of uiGarden is also very good. It demonstrates many good features of highly usable web.

uiGarden is a bilingual on-line magazine that provides an opportunity for researchers and practitioners who work in the user interface design (including user experience, information architecture, GUI, and usability) field in the Chinese and the English speaking worlds to publish their thinking and exchange views with each other. The goal of uiGarden is to facilitate information exchange and communication between the Chinese and western user experience design communities.

Learn Web Usability

Steven Choy — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 15:52:52 +0000

If you want to learn something basic about web usability, or you want to start paving your way to joining the usability professionals, Usability.gov is a good place to start with. It is a website by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that provides and suggests good resource for designing usable, useful and accessible Websites. There you can find good articles to learn usability basics and methods for designing usable web sites. You can also learn the most important places and faces in the field, as well as other resources to website accessibility and usability. For example, I learn the following four professional organizations in the field.

ACM SIGCHI - The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI)
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) - It promotes the discovery and exchange of information on the characteristics of human beings that are applicable to the design of systems and devices of all kinds
Usability Professionals’ Association - It is a world-wide association of professionals dedicated to usability.
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) - It focuses on accessibility of the Web through technology, guidelines, tools, education and outreach, and research and development.

The seven commercial sites on web usability that it links to are also great. Check it out yourself!

Creation of Comic Strip Made Easy

Steven Choy — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 08:24:04 +0000

Thanks to Leigh Blackall’s post in his weblog, I know the following five websites that make personal creation of comic strip very easy: Gnomz, D.FILM, Strip Generator, Strip Creator, and Comic Strip Generator.

Gnomz.com - comic creator - Create your own comics and send to your friends by e-mail. You can also join the Gnomz community, publish your comic online, create your own characters.
D.FILM Movie Maker
Strip Generator - You can create your own comic strip and send it to your friends by e-mail. This flash application is extremely easy to use and you have many characters and objects to choose in your creation. However, the output is also in the form of flash. It needs your extra work if you want to save your comic as an image file.
Strip Creator - Make your own comic strips online!
Comic Strip Generator - First, pick a cartoon cel to customize. Second, fill in some comic title and some text.Third, right click image and select “save image as”. Finally, put your saved image in your website.

This is one of my initial trail on Strip Generator. The comics script is taken from my friend Andy Chun on this place. (Andy, I don’t bother you about this. Let me know if you mind.)

Design Websites with Web Standards

Steven Choy — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 17:02:51 +0000

I am interested in website design, usability and accessibility. Via wg:Bookmark: my Top 20 of 2005, I find Jeffrey Zeldman’s lecture that explains the importance of using web standards to design websites with users in mind.

DWWS lecture: Designing with web standards

It tells why and how to separate structure from presentation and behavior in designing websites. To put it brief, it promotes using CSS as presentation, XHTML as structure, and W3C DOM as behavior. The benefits of using CSS as standard presentation languages are lowest bandwidth, cleanest markup, easiest updates, and most portable.

Here are three links that I learn from DWWS lecture. They are all about websites accessibility. US Section 508 is a new term to me!

Open Access to Rich Media Presentations by Experts

Steven Choy — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 03:31:22 +0000

A US technology company called Sonic Foundry, Inc developed a product called Mediasite. Mediasite is a professional rich media publishing system that enables automated recording, managing and viewing of rich media content over the Web or across the network. The company recently unveiled an online directory (via mediasite.com) of public presentations and lectures made with Sonic Foundry’s Mediasite system.

Mediasite.com is an open-access resource site that brings together expert presentations and lectures created with Mediasite system. Via it you have a free access to a steadily growing database of online technical content created by hundreds of experts. At the moment of writing this post, there are totally 6984 presentations listed on the site.

The following are direct links to two public lecturers that I enjoyed via this site: Looking Forward: Computing & Communications in the 21st Century , Distance Education Overview.

The web has mechanisms for selecting good stuff

Steven Choy — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 16:40:57 +0000

In my reading on Paul Graham’s recent article about Web 2.0, I learnt a website called reddit.com. It is about a phenomeno that the web has evolved mechanisms for selecting good stuff. The following introduces the basic working of reddit, which I extract it from Tyrantmizar’s Blog

Reddit is set up like so: Someone submits a website that they like. It shows up on the “Newest” list, and if people like it, they click on the up arrow. If people don’t like it, they click on the down arrow. It is a pseudo-voting system on websites.

This is most certainly web 2.0 software, as there is very little site restrictions. Anyone can post anything (as long as it isn’t adult content) and people will promote it, or demote it into oblivion. The good stuff ends up on the “Hottest” page, and the really good stuff ends up on the “top all-time” page.

Reddit has a karma system. If the stuff you submit is good and people rank it highly, then you get good karma. If it is bad, you get bad karma.

In addition to reddit, the following lists a few more websites that have similar nature of social selection of good stuff in the Web. The list is not complete; there must be more websites using social networking to select good stuff and beat damping in the Web. The following websites are what I frequently use to discover delicious stuff.