The Learning Journey

I was finally able to cartoonize my photo, not bad (I think). Karl's tutorial (Family Portrait Artist) is real fun, extremely easy to follow and is making rounds (via SVN via Photojojo). Will be doing more photos of family and friends.

As for the photo making itself, I used Inkscape, didn't bother to spend time on hair for obvious reasons, and spent more than expected doing the business shirt. Next ones would be easier. What do you think?

Helping some friends put up a brochure website, I sifted through my blog daddy's
href="http://naibledesigns.com/page/nd?anchor=open_source_cms_evaluation_part"
target="_blank">Open Source CMS Evaluation and comments in which he picked up Drupal
(with positive reviews about Joomla). I decided to go for Joomla after
installing both. After ignoring some confusing terminology, Joomla's admin interface is easy and tempting, friends just
picked it up without the need of lengthy training or tutorials. Admin concepts
are easy to grasp, and everything follow a logical trend.

Here comes the but. For the simple brochure-website requirements of small businesses (I'd say 80%
of the market), I think Joomla is overblown (albeit powerful). Drupal might have
the same issue (I haven't tried it in a real implementation though - only
testing). Small businesses (at least around here) have pretty limited
requirements in terms of putting themselves online. Page CRUD, some images, cross links, simple layout and menues
and that's almost it. With simplification and the target market in mind, there
could be a market for YA-CMS.

The website is now up (Ayadco: Construction, Engineering, Electromechanical Sercies) with the marketing content fed by my
friends. It is hosted via Network Egypt with a great price tag.

Today, I'll be attending a session on Drupal administration at href="http://open-craft.com" target="_blank">OpenCraft by Manal Hassan and I'm tempted to explore Drupal further to see how it can be slimmed down and why it is the CMS of choice for many.

It's not only Yahoo! It's Google as well. Shopping never stops. The news is out that Google has bought Measure Map, a nice analytics services for bloggers that was developed by Adaptive Path. It wasn't clear in the mail I've received as alpha user how this goes.

Things are clearer at Adaptive path website: Google bought Measure Map the service, and “Jeffrey Veen, an Adaptive Path founder and Product Director for Measure Map, will make the journey to Google along with several other members of the development team. Jeff will retain ties with Adaptive Path as a friend and colleague.”

Now, Measure Map footer reads: “Measure Map is a production of Google.” - Good job Adaptive Path and Thanks.

Google has modified its homepage making it more usable and neater (as if it wasn't so already).

Before:

A selection box is now placed to the right of the search box, giving user a one click search to any of the search options (Web, images, news, blogs, groups, groogle, local, scholar, books, video).
Previously it was a two-click way, where user have to first click the desired search option (Images, news, etc…) then type in the search keywords.

Now, I could swear I've seen such modification somewhere else before. Someone has suggested this modification to the homepage, but I don't remember where I've seen it. If you do, please point it out.

UPDATE:

Didn't I tell you I've seen it somewhere? It was on the Redesigning Google post on Google Blogoscoped blog by “Philipp Lenssen”.

Here it is:




UPDATE II:

Google redesigned homepage is nowhere to be found. I wonder what happened? Was it a prototype? Was it a figment of my imagination?

From David Johnson

Web 2.0 is not about having cool software to install on your own personal web server, it's about getting locked into services provided by and trusting your data to Web sites that you do not control

I don't know, may be because now it's too easy to roll out your own Web 2.0 application in a weekend using smaller components and frameworks (a.k.a Rails)?

The Open Source / Free web (1.0?) applications were mostly about a huge code base that you can download and setup at some premises no one can argue. But, how about having the full control over the code. Not modify the ones that you download, but rather build from scratch whatever you see serve the business requirements. After all, there is a “configuration” learning curve for most of these Web 1.0 applications.

I agree that it's hard to come up with a large set of features within a short period of time (did I say weekend), but, most of the quoted/neviewed/available Web 2.0 services are very easy to implement. The success of these services is all in the idea and the usability rather than the set of features it contains. I guess Rails and such are promoting a smaller code base (with no tyring setup configurations) vs. a large feature set with a code base that becomes more of a green monster.

Web 2.0 is the era of “start-building-something”. It's the delivery of ideas rather than the delivery of code.

The first of three posts of what was keeping me busy in the past few weeks.

After being fascinated with Egypte D'antane with its loads of period images of my homecity of Alexandria, I thought of a Mash up that would put these images on their respective Google Maps locations (as I said before, it's as close as I could get to the time camera). I implemented the idea using Ruby on Rails with the aid of Cartographer plugin.

Unfortunately, it is not moving beyond just being a proof of concept. Reasons:

• Google Maps low resolution imagery of my homecity of Alexandria (despite the fact that Google Earth has a much higher resolution images of the same city). Of course, with the availability of period images, there are some other places where this can be implemented, but I won't be able to accurately map the images to the locations.
• I haven't received a reply from images-website owners to use their images off of their website directly. I can copy and upload those images to, say, flickr, or keep them on my server, but I still feel I need their approval. As for the copyright concerns, I think these images are in the public domain for a long time. Can anyone comment on that?

Some of the features that I'd get into the mash up:

• Images of the same buildings/places today alongside the old ones (for the sake of comparison).
• Putting up layers on the map representing various periods in time (say a decade each)
• Ability to search images according to Year, Type, etc…

Hisham at work has conveyed the idea to the Friends of the Environment Association, Alexandria and they are interested. I might talk about it in their next meeting this month, so, I'll see how things go.

Google Maps is a wonderful joomla component, unfortunately when I tried showing my 'international' address as a marker on the map, it gave me a blank page (with nothing shown, not even the map). After a lot of tracing, and recognizing that the lat and long of the address are not even saved, I found the bug.

commenting the following line in google_maps.class.php did the trick:

This line is there to geocode the address to its longitude and latitude - a functionality that is not currently included in the map API. Note: checkLatLong2 hack to resolve International addresses does not work, could be because of a change in the API.
A little test can be added to the function so that if it's a US address ($this->country == 'US' or ..) the checkLatLong() could be invoked.

del.icio.us was down today. It was spitting out SystemError with “raw code” into my browser.

Well, this made me think about those $40M Yahoo! have paid.

I guess a large user community is something that is hard to get, and apparently worth a little.

My Next Plan: Come up with an idea, put something together quickly, invite many people to sign up, sell to Yahoo!.

Keeping up with the flux in technologies and Web 2.0 should be a full time job. Really! I can hardly find the time for the piling feeds

This is just in (into my eyes at least) - After Flickr -
Yahoo! has bought del.iciou.us (who would've thought). Despite the fact that I don't really like del.iciou.us (usability wise), yet I'm using it for what it is, the large user-base that generates a well-functioning social tagging service.

My guess is that Yahoo's going to add much of their usability techniques into it.

Now! Google's expected move is acquiring Riya (I'm not sure what's holding these guys up. Sounds like the right strategic move; aquiring a beta photo search service with a lot of potential for growth and innovation (before other's do ;-))

Must … go … to … sleep …..

Google is redirecting me to Google Netherland (google.nl). Has someone hacked their locale directing modules?
I changed browser default language a couple of times, and it was responding correctly to those language change, I used both IE and FF but still I'm directed to Google Netherland

I got you Google!!