geekAbyte

So what is Padly?

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 22:48:00 +0000

Padly is a side pet project- I have been spending some of my time on.

When building a web application that requires user login, it could be quite a boring and repetitive task to always have to code the user management functionality for application you work on, over and over again. Just as every developer fast realizes, getting this functionality handled by someone or something else is the way to go. Services like Facebook, Google and other federated login services/standards like openID have risen to handle these needs; and they work.

However, it is not every time you would want to build your application using Facebook or any other login service. But on the other hand, having to code the user management part of applications from scratch, is not something you may want to spend valuable time doing. This is where Padly could help.

Simply put, Padly is going to be a simple User Management System that handles the processes of user/account creation, password retrieval, profile management etc. It takes care of these tasks such that you can easily focus on developing the other parts of an application.

And it is easy to integrate. You just need to drop Padly into your application, make some configurations, your application then hooks into the User Management part, and that’s all. It is as simple as that.

Am almost done with it, in fact, I can say that 90% of it is already done. As such, it can be used as it stands, but some rough edges need to be polished and some features need to be tweaked.

Some of the things I’m looking at adding before final release include: adding of Upload Form Fields, Review Security, Client Side Verification for Radio, Checkbox and Text Area, etc.

The Project is going to be open and everybody can use and contribute to it. You can find the development branch here on github https://github.com/dadepo/Padly/tree/dev and instructions on how to integrate it into your application can be found here https://github.com/dadepo/Padly/blob/dev/README

Feel free to give it a spin, feedback any issue you have and do follow the project for updates.

The Love for Data is The Beginning of Wisdom

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:30:00 +0000

I’m in Stockholm, and would be here till the end of the week. I would be busy for the next couple of days in a Strategic meeting . Asides many other results, one of the anticipated outcome of the meetings I would be part of is to build IT tools that would enable the organization I work for make sense out of the Data it has, spot patterns; opportunities and capitalize on it.

Data is interesting. It is interesting because it conceals stories. And the process of extracting the information from the Data, extracting the story being told by the Data itself is an exciting task; because you never know. You never know you have so much information to work it and make strategic decisions with. You never know you have a trend, a pattern, a window of opportunity, a threat until you pay attention to your Data. There are a lot of Information out there. We are swimming in an ocean of patterns and trends but you never know until you get down to Data analysis.

Thing is this: The love for Data is the beginning of wisdom, there is no way an organization can become intelligent without capturing and analysis the Internally and externally generated Data which affects its operations. This realization, although simple, is quite powerful and it made me reflect on realities back home in Nigeria; asking myself exactly how intelligently are the public sectors in the country being run?

Data is king. If you have ever read any of Malcom Gladwells books, you would appreciate the power of analyzing Data and connecting the dots. From the Outlier to Blink, he usually, often or frequently delivers an exceptional essay which provides an excellent insight into the captured Data, showing the trends and telling the hidden stories.

So in Nigeria, I ask ; can I easily access and analyze trends in the National Budgets of the last 10 years? Can I see how spending has changed and the effect of this in the development of the country? What about common occurrence like Accidents? Where is the Data on this? And how can I utilize these Data to see what region, sex, age group are prone to this issue. What about Data being generated around health issues in the country? How much of it is even been captured? What’s the correlation between a particular tribe and the occurrence of twins? You never know, what interesting patterns lie hidden within Data until you pay attention.

It is a stupid institution that won’t bother about Data because, really the tools to capture and analyze data abound! So there is no excuse to not make Data Analysis a strategy and practice: Per country, per State or per organization.

One of the areas Information Technology can easily be leveraged on for Development in the country is via capitalizing on Data. And the fact is that using Information Technology for development need not be fancy in every case nor does it need to be the implementation of cutting edge and cool and geeky stuffs. Simply applying existing data visualization tools in the country to capture and analyze trends and patterns and making this information available, might just be one effective step towards the attainment of intelligent institutions and applying IT for development.

So my candid Recommendations:

Capture Data
Simply described as Record Keeping. Make use of easily accessible tools like our good old Microsoft excel to capture the data.

Make it Open.
Don’t just stop at capturing these Data. Make it available in format that can easily be accessed, make the Data public, build API’s, release Data in CVS. Make it available! One of the Data sources I would be working with is http://data.un.org/. Data made open for everybody to access. This is the way to go.

Analyze/Visualize it
The power is in the visualization and analyzes. Make use of available tools to do this. Like I said, you do not need to build any fancy tools; there are existing IT tools that can be leveraged on.

One example is Tableau, a cool data visualizing tool which by the way, would be one of the tools I would be working with these coming couple of days. Capitalize on these tools and just use it.

Finally, I know all these won’t go anywhere without a culture that supports paying attention to Data, but really it would really be inept of us to continue in such direction as a country or institution.

Is Google Making Me Lazy?

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 16:55:00 +0000

Is Google turning me into a Lazy programmer? Something tells me no, that it is just a tool that aid my productivity. There is no way having at your finger tips, the access to almost the entire index of the web, make you lazy; it is a good reference I can fall back on when my memory fails me. Right?

Right. It should not be a problem only that I just feel as if my memory now fails me more often than before. Not that I am getting amnesic, I sure do remember stuffs, the general concept of things, the procedures, but when it comes to stacking in my memory the exact syntax or steps of an algorithm or a procedure...well I sort of outsourced that functionality off to Google.

I don’t even make the effort of remembering the idiosyncrasies of frameworks or tools I use, since I know with a Google Search, the docs come up.

Is this in itself a bad thing? In fact has my productivity not increased with the help of Google? And wasn’t Albert Einstein credited to have said he does not know the numerical value of the speed of light; that why should he stack up such information in his head, when he can quickly retrieve it from an encyclopaedia.

So is the question warranted? Is Google making me Lazy? I would have to say no. My heavy reliance on Google's Index of the web, I would say aids my productivity. There are tons of things I have been able to achieve and achieve in a shorter amount of time because I was able to make a Google search.

So I guess my fears are just unwarranted.Right? But something tells me “what if I get thrown into a civilization where I have no access to the internet”? Well again, I think that thought, that very thought itself is unwarranted. :)

So why then did i write this post? I guess am not convinced :(

Looking for The Next Cool Thing After Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 22:52:00 +0000

I have stopped tweeting. Ok not totally stopped, but the frequency in which I tweet now has drastically reduced. And it is not as if I would be deleting my twitter account soon to never tweet again, it is just that...well...Twitter to me doesn’t feel cool anymore...like it used to be in those early days.

This is my present sentiment or Phase, regarding twitter.

And to appreciate my sentiment you might need to understand where I am coming from and how I got started with twitter and the prior phases I have gone through.

I got on twitter 2007. Sure, i was an early adopter. Back then the user base of twitter was still in the thousands. It was around 400,000 to 500,000. Compared to the whopping 145 Million plus user base the service now enjoys. It was Tim Akinbo that brought twitter to my attention and the reason why I got on board was simple: It was just the latest geeky thing to play around with. It was fun and elitist in a sort of way.

So here i am now, some couple of years down the line, and twitter is feeling noisy. But before getting to this present state, I have actually gone through other phases in time past, using twitter. Let me outline:

The WOW Phase. The Really Really WOW Phase:
In the early days of twitter, If you are following someone and they tweet, you get their tweet sent, free of charge, to your phone as SMS. Yeah right. That was back then. A lot of folks do not know this, but that made twitter really really cool for me. I remembered vividly, taking a bike from INTECU to Fajuyi Hall and my phone was abuzz with SMS all from tweets I was getting from following CNN, BBC etc on twitter. I felt connected to the world. But then twitter started growing; growing to that level where sending free SMS was not sustainable. So they pull the plugged on it and all of a sudden it became...well a little less useful. Because having to browse to twitter.com every time to read my tweets felt unnatural. So I eased off twitter.

The Third Party Application Phase
Then I discovered the Firefox pluggin: Twitterfox, which has since been renamed to Echofon. It marked a twitter revival for me. Like I said in my previous post, the very nature of twitter makes accessing it via the website a little awkward and unnatural. Consuming twitter requires a non intrusive user notification paradigm. and that was exactly what the Firefox Plugin provided.

With this firefox plugin, my usage of twitter soared. But then again, this particular phase had it own limitations: which was the fact that I had to be seated by my PC, connected to the internet before I can use Twitter.

Mobile Internet Phase
Then I got on mobile internet and my usage of twitter just sky rocketed; It just went off the roof. Having twitter right there in my palms made it possible for me to consume and create tweets just anywhere and at anytime. I was abreast of all happening in the tech community. I had access to useful tips and pointers to resources thanks to the community of twitter following I had. It was cool, really cool. But it did not last forever. I was pushed unto the next phase:

The Crowded and Noisy Phase
Then all of a sudden twitter became noisy and crowded. I think this was due to the fact that a lot of regular Joe started getting bored with facebook and unfortunately twitter was getting a lot of mention in mainstream media, so the natural thing started happening: folks started flocking to twitter.

The other thing that happened, i think, that led to twitter growing to become crowded was that “Who to Follow” feature twitter incorporated. It was just like the “Suggested friends” feature in facebook. All of a sudden a lot of folks I know started following me...and I started following back...and before I knew it, my timeline...well... became unrecognizable!

I hardly get to catch @takinbo or @dfasoro’s tweets. Or @budzeg tips on security. I follow @jeresig and @gvanrossum but I can’t remember the last time I caught their tweets.

Why? Because all of these useful tweets are now getting swamped and buried in the slew of RT’s RETWEETS and mentions of folks who have taken the liberty to use my timeline as the medium for their conversation; conversations I have no iota of interest in.

O! how I missed the useful tips and pointers to useful resources on mobile dev and UI design @barbietunnie shares. How I missed Guy kawasaki funny and sometimes out rightly useless tweets via @alltop not to talk about @jason. @mashable used to be one of my favorite pointers to interesting articles and resources, but not anymore.

So right now am in that phase where I spend little time on twitter because it just feels too noisy. I have been thinking of things I could do:

Create another account which would solely be used to consume tweets I consider useful. But then again, I don’t really like the idea of managing multiple accounts so I really don’t see myself going down that lane.
Start unfollowing people.
Create a list of followers whose tweets am interested in.
Or just go find/create the next cool and geeky thing to play with.

One of my girlfriends commented on the fact that I am no longer active on tweeter: my response? I told her it stopped being fun. That it feels as if every tom dick and harry is now on twitter, and that it has stopped being cool and geeky, like it used to be.

Or well, maybe it’s because I’ve just got geek coy? Whatever! Twitter just feels *arrrghh* right now, and i am just on the look out for that next cool thing to play with, together with my techhead pals.

My Presentation at WordCamp Nigeria 2010

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 18:51:00 +0000

I am pro wordpress but not the kind to consider the usage of any other content management system as sacrilegious. If I have to handle a project in say Joomla, Plone or Drupal I would gladly dig into it. In fact I have had some couple of dint with Drupal and I think it is very powerful, but all the same wordpress still remain my personal favourite.

And the reason is not farfetched. I personal find wordpress fun to work with, it is intuitive, it is simple yet powerful and it is easy to tweak, bend over, and extend.

And these were the exact things I talked about during my presentation at the first ever wordcamp that held in Lagos a couple of months back. Apart from introducing wordpress and the concept of wordpress being more than a blogging system, my talk also did a great deal in communicating the fact that wordpress is quite powerful, yet simple and a joy to work with.

Here is my presentation

View more presentations from Aderemi Dadepo.

And if you are considering digging into wordpress, there is no other resource I can recommend than the official wordpress codex. It is an exhaustive resource, and a very handy reference. And it is just as simple to use: but then again am not surprised: it is wordpress!

Setting Up Code Completion on Komodo Edit for Google App Engine

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 23:32:00 +0000

I have been using Komodo Edit as my main code editor for over 2 years now. And it works for me! :) It gives me just want I need in a code editor. Basic Debugging, Project management, intellisense etc.

In fact the code-completion was one of the sterling features that made me pick Komodo Edit and drop my previous editor. That and the facts that it is free and Open Source.

As regards Code Completion, it supports a varied number of languages. From C#, Matlab, C++ to haskel, ada, lisp, tcl and Django, Ruby...Just name it! Even our dear fortran is supported.And adding support for languages that don’t come by default is a breeze.

So recently, when I started working with Google App Engine, one of the first things I did was to configure Code Completion for GAE on Komodo Edit. And it was very easy getting Komodo Edit to provide just the code completion I need to get comfortable with the WEBAPP framework.

Find below the simple procedures to follow to set up Komodo Edit to work with GAE.

Click Edit > Preference
From the dialog box that pops up on the left collapse the Language link and Click on Python:

Under the Additional Python Import Directories you can add additional path you would want Komodo Edit to pass to the Python Interpreter.

To Integrate Google App Engine, browse to the directory where the GAE SDK is installed and add the PATH.

And that is all! You are done! It is as simple as that. Code Completion should now work.

So there you have it. And if you are interested in trying out Komodo Edit, you can read more and download it from the official site

Firefox meets Myaiesec.net!

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:42:00 +0000

Last two weeks saw me visiting Benin (Edo state), For an AIESEC conference: (AIESEC National Training Seminar), where i was opportune to be part of the conference facilitating team. Trust me, as a Mozilla Firefox campus representative, i found a way of making sure i evangelized Firefox during the course of the conference. Apart from spotting my cool firefox T-shirt, talking to delegates about the cool features of Firefox, i was also able to address the delegates (albeit short it was) on the general features of Firefox and how, using Persona plug-in, a branding campaign for Myaiesec.net could be carried out...

Find below the slides for the presentation

And for the Persona i designed around myaiesec.net, do pick it up here. If you hap. to be an aiesecer and you are reading this, make sure you get your myaiesec.net persona!

Getting Twitter!

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:04:00 +0000

In Recent times, Twitter has been enjoying massive adoption.It has moved from a service that appeals to only geeks; the early adopters to one that celebrities now flock to. People are signing up in multitudes. Between Feb 2008 and Feb 2009, twitter grew by 1,382%. Presently its user base exceeds 10 million.

But despite this huge adoption of twitter, a whole lot of people still don’t get it. A lot of people don’t see the utility in the service and they wonder why the Buzz. And this is why we have a lot of people signing up on twitter only to abandon the site after a sparing interaction with it. There are quite a lot of dormant accounts on twitter; according to Neilson Online More than 60% of Twitter users stop using the site one month after signing up for the service. Even amongst my circle of influence, I see this trend. I know an ample amount of people who get on twitter, wonder what the big deal is, leave a couple of tweets and then just abandon the site for the next couple of months.

The issue is that Twitter is so d*mn easy to sign up for but far much harder to figure out what to do on it and how to get benefits from it. It is in the figuring out “the benefits” which is seemingly not that apparent, that a lot of people miss it. I will quickly outline why I think this is so.

It Starts from having the right expectations!
Getting twitter starts from knowing what twitter is not. Twitter is not a social networking utility. A lot of people brand Twitter as a social networking site, but that is not the case. And this is where the problem starts. We have people moving to twitter with the expectation of getting the social networking experience sites like facebook,hi5 or MySpace provides but only to be disoriented when all they see is a “what are you doing” sign, with a slew of twitter lingo: hash tags, @ replies and shortened urls.

An analyst once described twitter as “a broadcast medium rather than a [medium for] intimate conversation with friends”.

I know folks who wouldn’t have taken interest in Twitter if not for the fact that access to Facebook has been blocked during office hours. So they move on to twitter expecting the same user experience they get from Facebook...

But Twitter is not a Social Networking Utility!

Then who do you follow on Twitter.
The quality of utility you derive on twitter is directly related to the quality of tweets of your twitter following. A lot of people have express sentiments similar to this:

“I don’t care that someone is going to take a shower, eat a sandwich, or go workout. That doesn’t make a difference in my life. Twitter is just a time waster”

Well, what are you doing following folks who only tweets about eating amala for breakfast? And what happened to following “stock quotes, project status, thought leaders, breaking news etc”

For example, my interest tilts more in the direction of technology, so if you check out my followings on twitter, you will see it is made up of people who largely tweet around technology. This is where I get to discover new tools, read interesting articles and generally stay on top of what is going on where technology is concerned. As previously describe: Twitter is more of a Broadcasting medium, so if I want to enjoy it, I tune my receiver to channels that broadcast contents that interests me. That is, I follow folks whose tweets, I find useful.

So you want more utility from twitter? Cut off the noise, find folks who tweet on issues that interest you and start following them.

How do you Access Twitter
I would say this factor is the most important factor in determining the level of usefulness one derives from twitter. It might sound kinda strange, but pointing your browser to http://www.twitter.com is not the best way to consume twitter. (But sadly, this is the first way starters get to interact with the site) But when a little thought is put into it, then it becomes obvious that using the web is not the optimal way of accessing Twitter. To enjoy twitter, I would, instead, advise the usage of third party applications.

The thing is this; the very nature of a service would dictate the way it is best consumed. Twitter by its very nature which is centered on tweets, calls for a non intrusive user notification paradigm.

Compare the ease between having to go to www.twitter.com every now and then in other to see your tweets, to having a third party application do the checking for you.

So I’ll say, sign up on twitter and then go find one of these third party applications. Since I am a die-hard fan of Firefox, I have found TwitterFox as my Twitter client of choice. It is a Firefox extension that brings my tweets to me via Firefox as I surf the web, meaning I can go ahead with being busy on the web, doing other things and on having new tweets, I get to see it via a pop up; very non intrusive.

And whenever I have a thought I want to tweet, doing so is as easy as clicking on the Twitterfox icon to start tweeting away...

You can also find other interesting ideas on how to utilize twitter, here, here and here, but it all starts with having the right expectation of twitter, follow people with quality tweets, and start using TwitterFox.(or any other third party client for twitter) ;)

Your Codes Shall Live After you...

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:22:00 +0000

Prior to now, I have never worked in an environment where I had to inherit a code base to work with (well except those times I have had to peek under the hood of some open source codes I needed to tweak) It is either I write the needed codes myself or I do.

But recently that I just got a job where I get paid to play around with computers, the internet and write codes, sooner or later I know I am going to be confronted with that situation; To build on codes whose original authors have long left the company and are nowhere to be found. It is not as if am that concerned about this happening, guess am more preoccupied with the thought of the quality of codes I will be giving up for inheritance when I finally take my leave from the company.

Am presently working on a project where I am building, more or less, from scratch and with every line of code I write, that thought keeps hounding me.

Guess the saying: the good ~~evil~~ deed men do shall live after them, is also true for you as a developer. Your codes too shall leave after you. And I don’t think I would want to leave behind an arcane legacy :) so to prevent this from happening I went ahead and got myself a book on how to write quality and manageable codes. A pretty nice book on software development I’ll say.

But then again when it comes to coding style, it’s worth stressing that its sorta like Religion where you can’t claim that a particular method is the way: the most efficient. But the trick is to come up with a style based on some fundamental guidelines and adhere to it. It’s about maintaining consistency. Whichever style you decide to adopt the key is to stick to it and maintain it across board.

So guess am doing my bit in ensuring the quality of codes out there, I can only ask of you the same. Do find the following online articles on the topic helpful, like I did. They are PHP centric ;)

An article from devshed, tim kadlec on the 5s, and Reinhold Weber's tips

Sell Benefits Not Features…

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:15:00 +0000

The aim of any marketing efforts is to elicit an action and in most cases it’s to make potential customers make a buying decision. If people don’t take that action of buying then we can conclude that all our marketing hasn’t achieve its objectives.

When dealing with high tech products or services, similar goal is expected: make someone pay for your software or get someone to subscribe to use your web app. As a marketer, this involves coming up with ways to ensure that the marketing decision made by your potential customers favor your product or services.

Its all about coaxing or convincing and in high tech marketing it is not uncommon to see marketers listing features their software comes loaded with in other to coax customers to make a buying decision that will favors their offerings.

But going in the direction of features listing might not be quite a productive strategy, especially for services like software. Ideally the logic behind feature touting goes somewhat like this: “List the features, let the customers know all the cool features they will be buying so that they will know the benefits they will enjoy and how our software will help solve their problems”.

Well it so happens that things don’t normally play out that way. Customers might not necessary see the benefits, straightway from your litany of features. And this is why playing it strong on the feature listing side might not be that effective. Instead of feature touting, I will advocate Benefit touting .

In stead of strictly feature listing, enumerate the benefits offered by your software in explicit language.

Not that listing features is wrong in itself, but we have to keep in mind that our aim is to elicit an action: persuade potential customers to make a decision to buy, and this is easier done when your customers can grasp the relevance of your solution to their peculiar challenges.

The problem with feature listing is that it is not an effective means in communicating the benefits of your offering to customers.

Truth is, if you have features, you should have benefits but you have to take into consideration that half of the time, majority of your customer might not be that techie savvy, so they might not, at once connect the dots of your features to get the benefits. This is why it pays to sell to them by explicitly stating your benefits. This will make buying much easier.

One need to take into cognizance that decision making is powered by emotions, so it will make more sense Listing benefits not features since it will be a faster way to make customers easily identify what they will gain from your software, how it will make their work (or life) easier, thereby generating the necessary emotions that will propel them to sign that cheque.

Doing this makes buying easier like I said earlier on. Have you ever wondered why most people resist selling but enjoy buying? Why is this so? Its simple, buying becomes enjoyable when backed with the knowledge that the Good or Services being purchased is really the solution to a problem. List the benefits and people will find it easy to connect your solution to their problems, list the features, well….

So what is the lesson being learnt here?

“It is a better marketing strategy to design your marketing campaign around benefits listing than feature listing.”

Republished from 60mwtgeeks

100 Best Web Developers from Nigeria

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:57:00 +0000

In response to Loy’s list of 10 best Nigerian developers (the original post has since been modified), a list which I feel is inappropriate because it included names of people who are in no way involved in web development (or other form of software development for that matter)…I hereby provide my own list of developers (desktop,mobile,web…) and web designers who I feel know their onions enough to be referred to as part of Nigeria’s Best Developers…

And I feel this is necessary because as a comment to Loy’s post aptly put it:

“Do your research before you post. I mean: the whole world is viewing your website. You could actually be limiting opportunities for REAL WEB DEVELOPERS by showcasing mediocre as Top Nigerian Web Developers...”

Am even more concerned about the inclusion of people who might not have written a single line of code in their lives!!!

Apparently, a lot of other people shared my opinion as is reflected in the ensuing comments to the post, with a lot of readers pointing out the erroneous nature of the list. Guess this fusillade of comments was what moved Loy to later put forward a clarification via a comment in which he said:

“there’ll be a real online competition that would be sponsored by companies who are interested.
That’s when we would have an online voting/ranking system built to sift the first 100 web developers that the community thinks are the best. Then, we’ll have them accessed by a panel of judges and eventually rewarded for their skills and contributions.”

That's more like it. But in the interim here is my own list of 10 Nigerian ~~Best~~ Developers who i feel will easily make the best 100 list. This is arranged in no particular order...

1.Dipo Fasoro
2.Ope Obembe
3.Temi Kolawole
4.Dipo Odumosu
5.Segun Okin
6.Tim Akinbo
7.Babatunde Adeyemi
8.Ayodeji Aladejebi
9.Toki Abodunrin
10.Seun Osewa

90% of the names listed here are, if not friends, acquaintances and hopefully in the nearest future I should have each of them over on this blog, for a chat.

Wrapping my head around logo designs

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:34:00 +0000

Still Graphics was my first love. Before I discovered the web, it was the singular thing that ignited my love for computers. That ability of being able to create such stunning and visual appealing designs was just too much temptation for my creative head. I couldn’t resist; and I had to succumb to its lure.

But in as much as I enjoyed creating still graphic designs, there was one part of it I usually find myself skipping over. And this is Logo Designing. The reason is not farfetched; its creation process is a tad engagingly than any other graphic designing process.

Logo’s are highly conceptual and the fact that you have to be able to understand the branding message intended by the logo and be able to compress this and express it conceptually into a design that won’t occupy more than a tiny portion of your screen makes it quite a task for me…

…Well until recently where I find myself spitting forth logo designs like the mint would spew out Naira notes…

Seems my brain morphed...

In the past couple of weeks I have come up with such a number of logo designs that it amazes me. Below are some samples of ideas I came up with for the AIESEC NIGERIA campaigns:

Guess I have finally wrapped my head around logo designing…cool :)

Do more, Click less

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:48:00 +0000

Good user interface design is not all about the fanciful Photoshop effects and graphical eye candies; it is about designing systems that enable users to easily achieve their aim of interacting with your application.

The true functionality of an application is tied to its user interface. If you like, you could pack a trailer load of functions into your app, but it comes down to naught if your user interface makes it so difficult that your users can’t find them, or makes it problematic using them.

And this is why User interface design is such a big deal and why it [should] occupy the front seat while planning out an application. There are a whole lot of considerations that go into the making of a good user interfaces but in this post, I’ll just talk about one: number of user’s mouse clicks.

As a rule of thumb, a good and well designed user interface should have as minimal clicks as possible leading to the consumption of functions in the application. Meaning that, you should always strive to cut down on the number of clicks a user makes in other to get things done in your application.

In application usage, one of the units for measuring user’s action is the number of clicks, and the more clicks a user has to go through the higher the probability that there would be a reduction in the usability of the application.

Throwing hurdles of mouse clicks at users was never a good idea.

For example an application that takes users 3 mouse clicks to sign up on is far more efficient and usable than a latter that requires 5 mouse clicks. The mantra should be “do more with fewer clicks”

Looking at the Wordpress 2.7.1 release, one would find that amongst the changes that have been made to the user interface is the reduction in the number of clicks needed to publish a post from signing in.

In version 2.5, in other to publish a new blog post, you have this:

Making a total of 3 mouse clicks

While in the version 2.7.1, to get your post published, you have this:

Capish!

Reducing the number of clicks down to two...Exactly what a good user interface strives to do.

As previously stated, a good user interface design should make interaction with the application as easy and smooth as possible, so when designing, do keep in mind that reducing the number of mouse clicks will go a long way in increasing the usability of your application.

How To Manually Download and Install FireFox Extensions.

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:21:00 +0000

Never had the course to get Firefox extensions manually installed until yesterday when I had to get a PC that wasn’t connected to the internet up and running with my fave Firefox extensions. On a normal day the Add to Firefox button does the job:

But since this particular desktop pc wasn’t hooked up to the net, I needed a way to get the extension files off the net and then manually Add [it] on to Firefox. So how do you go about doing this? How do you manually download and install Firefox add ons?
Simple.

Browse to the Firefox add on pages, instead of left clicking on the Add Firefox button, right click on it and click on save link…

file extension should be ".xpi"
Once the file is saved, to do a manual install of the extension, Start Firefox and drag the downloaded file unto it. Capish! You will then be prompted to continue or cancel the installation. That’s all.

Another alternative to getting the extension files off the net is to browse to the Firefox add on pages using a browser other than Firefox.

This will automatically turn the add to Firefox button you normally get into a download button. You can thus easily download the extension files.

Web Marketing; Two rules not to break

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:27:00 +0000

Ever since the web evolved into a trusted platform wherein commercial activities can take place, there has been that need to get involved in marketing activities; activities that seek to persuade users to take particular actions that are in line with the sites objectives; be it signing up for a service, adding a product to the cart, or filling out a survey form etc.

But to embark on these marketing activities on the web, and be successful at it, an understanding of the web as a platform is required. Not only this, a good understanding of how users interact with the platform is also vital. A lack of an understanding of users behavioral pattern as they interact with the web and what they expect will always lead to methods that cause more damage than good. Examples of such methods, which come readily to mind, include spams and pop-ups, which, most time, end up annoying users instead of persuading them.

A couple of weeks back, while out, trying to find an appropriate provider for a service I thought I will need for a project, I experienced, firsthand the effect of a marketing (or persuasive) strategy that got the whole web thingy wrapped. They were persuasive strategies that were futile because instead of trying to convince me, they did quite the opposite, sending me off, quick, to reload my Google page, with a little annoyance to go with it.

There were 2 fundamental principles that these initiatives got all wrong that were responsible in making their marketing strategy abortive, or more appropriately, less effective. The two principles which I consider basic due to the fact that it hinges on the unique nature of the web include:

Principle 1: Do not Horde information on your site.
It is so annoying to land on a site only to find out that the detailed information you need to make your purchasing decision is nowhere to be found on the site. But will only be made available to you after you have sent a mail to the contact us email address provided on the site. That sucks! This defeats the very essence of the having a website. A website should be as exhaustive as possible.

The web is majorly a pull medium and users are used to this. users are oriented towards playing an active part in retrieving information they need. And as such, a website designed to horde information; that adds to the hurdles users need to cross in other to get information needed is automatically broken.

So while looking for this service, I found out two website that offer what I was looking for, but the sites lacked the critical information I needed to make a purchasing decision. All they had was just marketing tirade on how their services is the best I can ever find. But the information I need; like cost details, details of the API, and implementation information were nowhere to be found unless I send an email to their sales department.

Principle 2: Don’t be quick at getting too personal.
Avoid initiating gestures of personal contact too early in the persuasive chain. Or better still do not be the one to initiate personal contact, let the user do that. Just make yourself available to receive such gestures if the user does make them.

So to continue with my story, as if making their website not exhaustive was not enough, after sending emails, requesting for more details to the two sites I found, one replied that for me to get the information I needed I should meet him on Skype or yahoo messenger at a set time.

Horrible!!!

I don’t know you from Adam and you expect I would just want to chat? When you could have easily put all the information I need for my finding on your site!

At that instant I immediately removed that particular provider from the list of potential providers I will be considering. There were just too many things needed to be done before I get the information I want. And for crying out loud, inviting me to a chat was just an inappropriate gesture. That was just too early and uncalled for.

Not saying instant messaging is not a viable tool for marketing, but the approach was wrong. Like I said, let your users be the one to make such gestures, just be there whenever they do. It’s a different thing entirely if the site was as exhaustive as possible and then a link to initiate a chat is provided for me if I needed clarification.

On the other hand there was a third provider I found out along with the previous two. Apart from talking about their services on their site, this third provider went ahead to enumerate the different options I have when implementing their services, detailing the respective cost implications, and the technical details of their API. A trial access to the API was even provided. And I got all the information I needed to make a decision there and there on the site. This was a company that understood how to play on the web. And if I had gone ahead with the project, it was most certain that I would have done business with this third provider.

True, the web has come a long way, and to do successful marketing on the web, there is need for that nature which this evolved platform has taken on be understood; including the ways its users interact with it.
This, I hope to enumerate more on, in upcoming posts.

Phase One Completed...

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:06:00 +0000

’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

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:48:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:10:00 +0000

‘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.

I Need Facebook Analytics...

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:56:00 +0000

If you’ve a web site, then definitely you should be interested in having certain metrics measured that will tell you how well your website is faring. You would be interested in knowing the navigation patterns your visitor display on your site, where there are coming from, what they do on your site, what software they use, how they leave your site, their click patterns etc. You have a varied number of such indices that helps in measuring the level of success a site is having. You get to know your sites strong points, where it is broken and what to do to fix it. Well, it could be very possible for you to have your website and careless about collecting these data, if you are unserious about the role your website is playing towards achieving its sets goals, then you are right on course, definitely that is the road to take. But if otherwise, web analytics should be an important strategy for you.

So now I have got this Facebook account, and am finding myself wanting to bring this web analytics way of life on board. I want to measure cause and effects. Just as you might be interested in knowing which pages on your site holds your readers attention the most, am also interested in knowing which of my actions on facebook gets noticed the most. So am in need of a facebook analytics...Maybe I am taking this analytics thingy a little bit too far…or maybe not.

I want to know, which will lead to a higher rate of click through in the long run; hyperlink in my status messages or hyperlink in my notes. Ok, I write a note about a service I am pushing; can I quantify the number of people that gets to read the notes? Or maybe I should even stop posting items, since nobody in reality gets to click on them and instead, move my links to my status messages where they apparently enjoy a larger rate of click through.

Or is there a period of the day that enjoys increase congregation on Facebook? Lunch hour? Maybe it’s a better strategy to leave notes on Friday; lot of people gets to play on Facebook over the weekend?

Maybe if I've got a facebook analytics, i would be able to tell...

What if I have a company, and I send a message to a lot of my friends and acquaintances on facebook, since it’s a thread, every recipient Included in the address gets to be notified when someone else replies to the initial mail, I want to know, are people finding this annoying? This idea of getting notified about a mail thread that they weren’t even interested in, in the first place, is it bad branding for my company?

I want to know, how effective is mentioning people in my facebook notes; does it make for an increase in readership? What about this thing of tagging people in pictures they don’t even appear in? How many people even snoop around my profile? If I know, maybe I should spend more time customizing the things I leave on my profile pages instead of wasting my energy in creating a public page for myself. And ha! There are those groups you join!

Well, ever since I started viewing facebook as more than just a time waster, but as a platform for networking and personal branding, the project manager in me, has ever since then, wanted to find ways of quantifying actions on facebook, to measure level of success and to use these data thus collected in coming up with strategies and ways to customize my actions for an increase impact.

But it seems at the moment, since there is no facebook analytics anywhere in sight, I have only my intuition to rely on for guidance.

Its Been a Looooong While

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:49:00 +0000

It's the return of the Wild Style fashionist
Smashin hits make it hard to adapt to this
Put pizazz and jazz in this and cash in this
Mastered this flash this and make em clap to this...[Rakim Guess Who's Back]

Dare To Change The World...

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:35:00 +0000

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in a square hole, the ones who see things differently. They are not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them, because they change things. They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as crazy ones, we see genius, because the people, who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who’ll do it.

Apple computer advertising, 9/27/97

Gmail still BETA?

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 17:59:00 +0000

Was in school over the weekend and I was surfing the net in elect library. Logged on to my gmail account and then it struck me; gmail is still a BETA service, despite all these years…I looked over to timba and popped the “why” question at him…he gave me the look that says: “does it look as if I have a desk at googleplex?”

As far as am concerned, gmail is far from being a beta service and the beta tag should be stripped away from it. It’s a stable enough application. And if any further work is to be done on it, it should be under the guise of new features being added not refactoring of a BETA service, but once again, I don’t work in Google so wouldn’t know whatz up.

And still talking about BETA services, I recently started the BETA testing of ednutey5 and if things work out like I envisage, I should be deploying to full fledge production in the next, say, 3 to 4 years…

So far eduntey5 has been a pretty, nice and sexy service. I haven’t encountered any major bug and guess what may be required of me is just proper integration so as to ensure compatibility with other services I’m presently running...

So far it has been fun.

Yeah, the web isn't the desktop

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:40:00 +0000

I have an entry in 60minuteswiththegeeks where I argued that trying to morph the web into a desktop might be a step in the wrong direction pointing out that such gestures fail to see the web as a unique platform…

This is not to say that I’m against the concept of Software as a Service (SaaS), definitely not! Saas is the future and it is the way to go.

I argued that wining on the web will involve a good understanding of the unique characteristic of the web and then building services that takes advantage of these characteristics. In that light the obvious ubiquity of the web is itself a chief characteristic of the web and so a model that allows for distributed or remote data processing is positively a strategy that will fit on the web.

My point was that taking advantage of the ubiquitousness of the web shouldn’t be the same thing as copying and pasting the desktop onto the web.

Quoting FORTUNE magazine, the technology section of July 23, 2007:

“The best SaaS offerings, however don’t just use the web but leverage its unique capabilities. They aren’t simple traditional, disk based software fitted with an online interface”

That is exactly the point I’m trying to make. Creating a parody of the desktop on the web is definitely off beam. Like someone aptly put it: “replication is not the same thing as innovation”

Lesson Learnt...

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:32:00 +0000

I got a scare at work recently...

I was working on a form that is suppose to jumpstart a service we will be deploying sometimes this year. And due to time constraint ( exams were fast approaching and my time table was looking like evil) and sheer carelessness on my part, I didn't put in place the necessary security measures and I apparently left the system susceptible...
Then I got a call from my OGA who says that there has been a security breach; that the database has been compromised...sqlinjection attack he said.

OUCH!!!

It was then I understood the value and importance of taking adequate security measures, I mean in like 5minutes I could have safeguarded the application and prevented this supposedly mayhem...right there I added "prevention is better than cure" as part of my guiding tenet when building applications...

So I got down to work, did some poking around to see the extent of the damage. At the end of the day, it wasn't what my OGA thought...but still, the lesson stuck.

When it comes to securing web application Jason Gilmore aptly put it when he said:

"Any Web server can be thought of as a castle under constant attack by a sea of barbarians. And, as the history of both conventional and information warfare shows, often the attackers' victory isn't entirely dependent upon their degree of skill or cunning, but rather on an oversight by the defenders."

You see, the interesting thing is that in most scenarios, the steps even needed to safeguard your applications are far from being complex. They are simple tasks that are so simple we sometimes forget how important they are.

So the lesson I learned from the scare? 'Never ever move from development to deploying again without first putting all the necessary security checks'.

40 Days Already?

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 12:45:00 +0000

...cause I've been in the lab wit a pen and a pad tryin to get this d*mn label off?--Dr Dre

Can't believe i have been away for 40 days!

Blame me?I have actually been busy with school and pushing 60minuteswiththegeeks alongside. And the online spot for 60minuteswiththegeeks is not doing bad; the blog has enjoyed over 300 page views within its 30 days of existence...not bad if you ask me. And still cooking up strategies to make the blog more popular.

So that is why i have been kinda silent over here, but school will be going on break soon and sure, will have more time on my hands then to share my thoughts here...not planning on forsaking geekabyte!