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Hi! My name is Adrian Liem. I’m an online strategist and web specialist located in Vancouver, BC. I’m currently on a leave of absence from my job at UBC. Here’s what I’m up to in the meantime:

Working

Playing

  • Skiing, climbing, biking, swimming, running and eating
  • Playing hockey and ultimate
  • Dabbling in design, photography, and videography
  • Spending time with my family
  • Writing about the experience
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Archive for the ‘Web Monkeying’ Category

WordPress Network Domain Mapping with Symlinks

First a warning: this post is about to get as deep into tech talk as I ever like to get. If you’re looking for anything even remotely resembling the kind of conversation you’d typically have with me over coffee, you’ll be thoroughly disappointed! But if you’re a fan of WordPress with geekward leanings, this might be of interest. Ok, so now onto the post.

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DruPress

This is a thought that has been mulling in the back of my mind for a while now. It first dated back to a time when I was involved in selecting a CMS platform for a friend’s project. As is often the case these days, two choices presented themselves: Drupal or WordPress. In the end, we opted to go with WordPress, but a thought lingered: what if there was a way to integrate the two?

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3 Drupal Tips from the Trenches

Building a new site in Drupal is always a learning experience. Whether it’s your first Drupal site, or maybe you’re a seasoned pro but now need to build out a site with some new functionality you haven’t tackled before – just about every Drupal project takes time and some careful decision making along the way. I still have lots to learn, but here are three tips from what I’ve learned so far.

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Web Directions North 2009 – I’ll Be There!

Web Directions North 2009I’ve just signed myself up for Web Directions North – a conference that always features a number of the web industry’s leading experts, and this year will be no different. Well…except for one big difference…

Unlike last year where I hopped on a bus to catch the conference in Downtown Vancouver, this year I’ll be booking a flight and hopping on a plane to head south to Denver, Colorado!

I think I’m as excited about visiting Denver as I am in attending the conference itself. Colorado is one of the few states that I’ve had on my “places to visit in the US list”, so I’m pretty stoked. My ski gear will be making the trip, and whether I go with the conference setup to Breckenridge or manage to find my own way over to the hills, this will definitely be a trip for both business and fun.

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adrianLiem – Redesigned

Screenshot: Freeheeling WordPress ThemeEvery now and then I get this sudden impulse to do the nitty-gritty of web design and development.

With my design cap on, I open up Photoshop, Dreamweaver, FireFox, Safari, IE, and iTunes, hunker down and start plugging away at mockups, screenshots, a little tinkering with PHP, CSS, and in this case Javascript and XML.

Fortunately the weather cooperated this Labour Day weekend. Overcast clouds and rain are usually the nemesis, but they quickly became my greatest ally in whipping together some new work – the product this weekend: my redesigned site!

Some Specs

WordPress as a Platform - I’ve stuck with using WordPress as the primary platform to power my site. With a strong community of developers creating new plug-ins and themes, along with the ease with which templates can be tweaked and extended, not to mention the slick admin tools, the elegance, power, and supporting community offered by WordPress can’t be beat.

Customized Theme – Using a great design/template framework from Nick La as my starting point, I’ve created new icons and applied my own look and feel.

Plugged In – Carrying on from the last iteration of my blog, I’ve kept a couple plug-ins: FAlbum to pull in photos from my Flickr account, and the legendary Akismet to fight the spam. I’ve also just added cforms to power my contact form and possibly other forms down the road.

Javascript & AJAX Add-Ons – Although you can’t see it yet, I’ve also built in an underlying framework to add some visual effects and AJAX functionality. Hopefully these will be released in the near future.

On the Horizon

There are a few areas of my site that I’ll be tackling next:

Resources & Links – I used to have a big collection of links and various resources that I managed using my own personally developed bookmarking application. Its primary purpose was to give me a way to store and easily access my bookmarks remotely (kinda like del.icio.us, only, in my picky mind, easier to use and prettier to look at). As a side effect, it also brought in some random traffic to my site. In any case, I’ll be working on getting this back up and running, and there’s a very good chance I’ll use the built-in Blogroll tools in WordPress to help this along.

Portfolio – One of the items on my “to-do” list has been to put together my professional portfolio. I have a vision of how I’d like to integrate this into my site – first step was to re-skin my site with my own design – so next step will be some tinkering with my WordPress installation, a little tinkering with different “assets” in my site (Hint: see note above about Javascript & AJAX Add-Ons), and hopefully I’ll be good to go in the near future.

A Peek at Yahoo Finance

Yahoo FinanceIf you do any sort of investing and take the time to do your own research, at some point in your decision-making process you probably look at a technical chart. In the last couple years there have been some major advances in the information and tools made freely available to the public. Thanks to companies like Yahoo and Google, the personal investor has access to aggregated information that previously would have taken infinitely longer to compile, or would have been available only as a paid-service.

When Google came onto the scene, they pushed the envelope with their use of AJAX and syndication – really bringing a Web2.0 element to the whole user experience of analyzing a stock. Google Finance offered a slick interface that provided software-like interaction on the web.

Yahoo Finance is now in beta with a new finance tool and I’d say they’ve probably one-upped Google if not two or three-upped them, largely in terms of the ease-of-use in customizing the chart view. (Note: the beta has been in release for a few months now, but you can only access it through Yahoo Finance.com and not Yahoo Finance.ca)

Of note to web developers, Yahoo has followed suit with Google in opting for an interface that is a mix of AJAX and Flash – which could have some significance on the RIA landscape.

Using Flash as a rich-internet application isn’t a new paradigm. Back near the height of the dotcom boom there were folks building some pretty slick applications that tied Flash into a back-end database to facilitate an online interaction without a page refresh – one of the primary, if not the most noticeable, characteristics of an AJAX-driven user experience.

Amid objections that Flash was a proprietary format that wasn’t natively supported by the standard web browser, Flash as the primary platform for a website or web application never quite caught on. This sentiment has slowly changed as Flash started to come pre-installed in Internet Explorer, and recent statistics suggest over 99% of all web browsers now have a Flash plugin installed.

Much like Google Finance, what Yahoo has brought to the table is an RIA that elegantly integrates AJAX with Flash to take advantage of what the two platforms have to offer: the use of AJAX brings very scalable methods for dealing with XML data in a software-like interaction, while Flash offers a development environment ideal for designing interfaces that rely heavily on graphics.

Considering the size of their audience, with Yahoo breaking further ground here in their integration of AJAX and Flash in Yahoo Finance, web developers will take notice and I wouldn’t be surprised if a slew of new applications come to the scene following a similar model.

Problems viewing XML in IE?

I’ve been playing around with XML and XSLT and encountered problems when trying to view the XML in IE. This is a problem I’ve noticed before while trying some of the tutorials from W3Schools, and for a long time didn’t even realize it was a problem.

In short, the issue is that you should be able to view XML files in your browser but for some reason every time I tried to view an XML file in IE, the page would appear blank — this shouldn’t happen and wasn’t happening in Firefox, Firefox would display the contents fine. For an example, try viewing this XML from W3Schools. If you are using IE and you can see the contents of the page, you’ll be fine and won’t have any further problems. But if you’re like me and your page was blank, then you wouldn’t be able to view any XML files that are formatted with XSLT. Pretty major problem if you ask me.

After some searching, I found the solution here. The problem as they state is that “…after installing Netscape 8 the XML rendering capabilities of Internet Explorer no longer work…if Netscape 8 remains installed then the registry key is continually rewritten so this is an essential step if you are to be able to view XML content in IE.” Yikes! Sounds like someone goofed up.

Basically you have to uninstall Netscape 8, and then remove a registry key for viewing XML. Yes, certainly not a user-friendly scenario, especially when you consider that the majority of users won’t even realize when they are trying to view an XML file.

Again, if you have this problem go over the steps here for the fix. I’ve tried it out and can now view XML in IE.