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1. Web Hosting and Website Design with Blog for 字 Concepts
2. Web Hosting and Website Design with Blog for Christian Family & Social Movement
3. Web Hosting and Website Design with Blog for GraphisOne7

字 Concepts believes that a good presentation is essential in business. No matter in the English or Chinese language, their aim is to help clients better their presentation, be it an advertisement, a brochure or websites.

On9 Systems helped provide the logo design and web blog setup for 字 Concepts to manage their online presence easily with Wordpress.

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1. Web Hosting and Website Design with Blog for Christian Family & Social Movement
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The Christian Family and Social Movement (Singapore), CFSM(S) is a Catholic Lay Apostolate organization. On9 Systems was approached to provide the organization with web hosting and a website that could present their ideas and photos from events. Wordpress was chosen together with customizations of the Epsilon theme to provide a website within their budget.

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1. Web Hosting and Website Design with Blog for 字 Concepts
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Link to WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.3 Beta 1

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Added to live writer’s config file “WindowsLiveWriter.exe.config”

<?xml version =”1.0″?>
<configuration>
  <system.net>
    <settings>
      <httpWebRequest useUnsafeHeaderParsing=”true” />
    </settings>
  </system.net>
</configuration>

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Client:

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1. Web Hosting and Website Design with Blog for GraphisOne7
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Client:

GraphisOne7 (G17) is a design and creative production company which combines photography in its work. It started from a humble freelance designer who has worked with several design houses, printing companies, corporate firm and professional photographer.

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1. Web Hosting and Website Design with Blog for Linda’s Education House
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Finally fixed this by modifying the code at “/wp-includes/link-template.php”

function get_pagenum_link($pagenum = 1) {
...
// insert before return $qstr
$qstr = str_replace("index.phpIndex.php","index.php",$qstr);
return $qstr;
}

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Unfortunately, GeoRSS was having a server migration so the Wordpress plugin that was supposed to make life easier wasn’t available for download. I managed to track down an earlier build at Ravi’s Blog and so added functions to the plugin that could work with my custom fields.

Had to hack wp-rss2.php in Wordpress but managed to get

<item> …
<georss:point>$lat $lon</georss:point>
<geo:Point>
    <geo:lat>$lat</geo:lat>
    <geo:long>$lon</geo:long>
</geo:Point>
</item>

to show up properly in the feed. Frustratingly, both Firefox and IE refused to format it. Banged head a few times before realizing the namespaces weren’t being recognized and so added two lines at the header and it finally worked.

xmlns:geo=”http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#”
xmlns:georss=http://www.georss.org/georss

Now that I had a good feed (looked at Flickr’s example just to be sure), it was time to create a map with the editors.

Test #1 – Yahoo Pipes

User interface upon logging in was great. It was my first time but pretty easy to understand that you need to drag a module onto the workspace, quickly configure it and drag its output onto another module. I used “Fetch Feed” -> “Location Extractor” -> “Pipe Output”. Noticed the debugger pane below and quickly looked through the data to make sure it had parsed the feed correctly and hit “Run Pipe”. The map overlay with my posts and titles popped up pretty quickly and presto, I had a mashup of Where2Makan? with Yahoo Maps. Total Time : <10 mins with practically not much to do other than configuring the feed URL!

Test #2 - Microsoft Popfly

Moving on to Popfly, you’ll notice that the user experience is entirely built in Silverlight for the editor. Cool effects like having the background change when you drop a relevant block into the workspace makes it look all rather snazzy. I initially tried to drop a RSS feed block onto the workspace and just hook it up to the Virtual Earth block but couldn’t see the Lat/Long values being parsed. Was about to give up when I realized I should should search for a GeoRSS block.

Thankfully, GisLi0 had shared the block created and I thought I was off to a good start. Configured the feed, went to Virtual Earth’s block to modify the Lat/Long mapping and hit “Preview”. A great nice map of USA zoomed into view and after scrolling to Singapore, no pushpins to be found. Hit the console to check the debug errors and seems that Lat/Long pairs were not parsed. I had to start looking through documentation to see if there was any way to edit the code of the GeoRSS block but it seemed that shared user blogs are private. Attempted to download the BlockSDK but that meant having to fire up Visual Studio, understand the SDK docs, write code and lose sleep! Total time spent : >15 min with no results to show for.

Test #3 – Google Mashup Editor

Finally came to the last editor. As usual, Google’s simplified interface and cool blue theme was in full effect. Here you don’t even get drag and drop modules to configure. This is for the power users, if you understand a bit of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, this will be the app to empower you. If you don’t, its going to look like a whole mess of a foreign language. I opened the sample “Maps Mashup” and did a test run. Looked great with the sample feed. Naively, I replaced it with Where2Makan?’s feed and did another test. Same result. Nice map of USA with no pushpins. This time, there was no debugger to view the parsing results although I highly suspect it didn’t even read the feed properly since I couldn’t see it loaded in the feed browser. Time spent : < 5 min with no results.

Summary and Conclusion

I can’t say I took a great big dive into all three editors but went into them with one purpose, to create a Map Mashup of Where2Makan? and the maps provided by each company. Based on the initial experience and my goal, I would say Yahoo Pipes has a definite edge with a slick UI, intuitive modules. It is slightly lacking in the customization of modules area but the fact that I practically only had to paste a URL in for the mashup to work just gives it extra points. 

Microsoft Popfly with its Silverlight offering feels a bit bloated and although it offers some customizations at the block level, creating a block definitely takes a fair bit of understanding and an IDE! Also, not being able to output results like Pipes makes it a little short on reusability.

The latecomer Google Mashup Editor has a bit of catching up to do with its rather simplistic UI although I think it might be the most powerful of them all with what its samples look like (Calendar, Tasks, Map Wikis). Look forward to evaluating it again when it matures a little more. For now though, shall look into how to use Yahoo Pipes to create some other interesting mashups.

Final Notes

Yahoo announced samples for Maps Mashup couple days ago. And with Google’s announcement that GeoRSS and KML feeds will be supported by the Google Maps API, this is going to another interesting way to show map overlays.

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1. Thanks Aaron for the Popfly invite!
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