Phase One Completed...

’Am presently working on the development of the online hangout for AIESECers in IFE, and before I went away attending conference in Jos last week, I was able to complete the first phase of the development process; which is coming up with the design theme for the portal:



This was done using fireworks which happens to be my favorite graphics application when it comes to interface design for the web. The next stage will find me making the design into HTML. Will also be working on developing the other functional part to the site

At the moment, am yet to make certain implementation decisions, for instance to handle Authentication, am yet to settle on which of the Identity providers I will be using, but from the way it appears guess I will be going with RPX, sine it seems to be a nice potpourri for almost most of the popular id providers out there.

The majority of the portal features are still yet to be defined, hopefully, in the next couple of weeks, all these would be sorted out.

For the Blog, I decided against reinventing the wheel, so I will be going with Wordpress, but instead of going scouting for a suitable theme, or hacking one, I would be creating my own template. Apparently, designing Wordpress themes from scratch isn’t that big a deal as long you have a good grasp of basic HTML and CSS.

Hopefully before the next months run out, I will be done and AIESECers in IFE will be able to take all their sugar cubes, ofofo box and roll calls online :)

Stackoverflow...You would love it too

I first got wind of stackoverflow sometime last year, over at Jeff Attwood’s blog; I knew it was a project he is involved in but I never bothered checking it out…until a couple of weeks back…and I think I have been won over.

So what is stackoverflow?

On his blog jeff Attwood described stockoverflow as a mix of Expert exchange slash Wikipedia slash reddit, where he said:

[stackoverflow] is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of goodprogramming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

I guess what won me over was the interface. There is this responsiveness about it. Well thought out, it feels as if your next move is already anticipated. It is clean, uncluttered and intuitive. Nice work.

So stackoverflow is now officially part of my numerous online destinations. Do check it out thyself.

Y i love Mozilla Firefox

‘Am a die hard fan of Mozilla Firefox. And for good reasons. It has a well thought out user interface, its fast, does well in supporting web standards and it is secured. But what really makes it a killer APP for me (and ‘am sure for a whole lot of others) is its extensible nature that is achieved via plug-ins. This has transformed Mozilla Firefox from yet another browser for surfing the web into a development tool for me as a developer.


If you do a lot of interface design and development, like I do, you will find, in Mozilla Firefox add-ons, a varied number of plug-ins that will prove useful to you in your everyday work. My all time favorites are listed below:

Color-zilla

Color zilla is cool. This add-on allows you access to both the RGB and hexadecimal color representation on web pages. See a particular hue on a page you like and you wish to use in your design? Just hover its color picker on the color and you have access to the color code representation. Adding the plug-in will append this to the bottom of your browser:


Now before colorzilla, the processes of getting a color I will like to use from another webpage normally involves snapping the screen shots, moving it to fireworks where I can then use firework’s color picker tool!


Find Colorzilla here

Web developer

This is a life saver! Any day anytime. It is a mini suit of different tools that offers a whole lot of functionality. You will find tools that help in getting information about a page structure to tools that help you work with CSS, Forms, Images, cookies and validation; it’s great.

Find web developer tool here

Firebug

This is the king when it comes to JavaScript debugging. No contest!
Find firebug here.


Other useful plug-ins include:GreaseMonkey, Yslow by Yahoo!, CSS validator and FirePHP.

Discover more useful Add-ons at Firefox offical spot for add-ons

It is needless to say that none of these functionality that makes Mozilla Firefox such a useful software for me is found in the bare Firefox install. They are all plug-in powered. And this is the power of an extensible platform. It is a fact that an extensible platform, open up to the community, always makes good for a winning strategy.Google knows this, and I guess that’s the reason why their next step for chrome is to enable people to build plug-in for it, as hinted at in this article.