Orangescale Studio

In 2007, I had my friend Hanifa contacted me to help her with (at that time) her personal site called Fashionese Daily. At that time, I haven’t known who she was. One thing I knew was that she had a blog and she wanted to move it into something different. It was using Blogspot service. I said I was available, and take the risk to help her.

During the first few months, I was a little busy her site. Moving from Blogspot to WordPress, installing forum software — it was PunBB, making customization, and more. The site was growing day by day. I work together with her and friends. Until today…

After three years, Fashionese Daily is much bigger — which is a good thing. Last year, I focused on developing Fashionese Daily. This year, there are more than three blogs in the network. I’m responsible for the blog design (all blogs under Female Daily Network like Fashionese Daily (blog and gallery), Mommies Daily, and Fame ‘n Frame). From the technical-related stuff, my responsibility is to create blog design to help content delivery. Also, I do things related to social media research. I’m enjoying the process.

Now, I’m in Jakarta. Joining the Female Daily Network ship. I just hope my addiction of blog and social media can contribute to this lovely community. I hope I contribute more…

Here’s an illustration:

You learn about web technologies like design, content management systems, social media. At the same time, you also study some of those subjects deeper. It makes you understand and sometime you can make a small prediction about what will happen next if you use certain strategies (in one of those technologies). You help someone based on your knowledge, but he/she always gives you arguments, telling you this and that like he/she knows better than you.

In the end — or in a particular stage — the situation happens just like what you tell him/her. As the consequence, you have to deal something that you already had in mind before everything was started. You move backward.

I think some people already been in the situation above. And sometime, it happened to me. For example, when Twitter was not popular in Indonesia like today. I taught myself about what happened to Twitter out there (outside the country). I read how Twitter was being used by individuals, public figures even companies. Not only that, I also learn the good and not so good practices of using Twitter.

I had someone asked me about this and wanted to learn about Twitter. I told many things about Twitter, including what Twitter is. I proposed some ideas about how Twitter can help him to build his brand. He did not found that Twitter was popular at that time. He only ‘heard’ of it, but never used it. I believed that it was about time.

After about a year, Twitter popularity hit this country. Many people use it for different purposes. What happen to him? The situation left him behind. While everyone gain something good because of what I’ve told him months before, he goes nowhere. Sometime, I really want to say this: “I told you…”

I hate when I’m in this kind of situation. I really wanted to help, but sometime some people did not allow me to help. I’m fine. Sometime, I just smile.

Let’s make this post short. When I worked on my blog in Bahasa Indonesia, I decided to use a simple theme. I don’t want to use too many images. Then, I created a theme. A simple theme. I realized that I haven’t created any single free theme this year — or may be last year.

Now, if you want to try another WordPress theme, I publish a WordPress theme called Texta. What does Texta mean? Well, the above paragraph tells all — I think. Go to Texta theme page and download it from there. Yes, it’s free.

When I have someone who wanted to ask our service and it’s related to web design (blog, sites, etc), we don’t just start the work right away. I usually spend my times and steal client’s time to have some discussion about the project. Usually, I ask few things:

• What kind of website you want to have, and what about priority/goal you want to get?
• How do you want to work on your site? Do you do it yourself or you have someone to do it?
• Tell us what you want to have for your future website.

Usually, I have feedback from them. By this, I can work faster and more efficiently. In most cases, clients are happy with this kind of initial discussions. As the designer, we have to work together with clients. And, not only that. We also have to deliver our ideas and (sometime) arguments. For example, I had a client that already had a concept. I told our client about what we think about the concept. I gave another insights. This made our clients think.

Another example, I proposed an idea of having part of the website to be placed in a certain area. I give my arguments why it came up with the idea. The client thought that it was make sense and she didn’t think about it before.

I tried to offer a solution. I tried to flood them with some alternatives — with arguments of course. But, in some cases they really stick with their ideas because they [thought] knew with all this design stuff. Sometime, I said OK. Once, I had an arguments on this issue. Our client and I didn’t go with a same idea. And since I had time, I let our client to go with his design ideas.

Did you know what happened after that?

(more…)

I’m not sure when this problem firstly noted. I just found it today. I don’t have a personal account at MediaTemple’s (gs), but I do maintain an account — with some sites installed under it.

MediaTemple reported:

Starting Nov 6, 2009, we noticed many customers reporting a new php injection exploit. If you feel that your sites may have been impacted, here are the steps need to fix the issue:

• Examine and remove any eval() code from your php scripts.
• If necessary, replace all of your CMS (Wordpress, Drupal, etc.) core files from a know, clean source. Consider updating any plug-ins at this time also.

A developing update is available at Kyle Brady’s blog post.

Honestly, I was a little bit panic. Reading all information in brief, I make a conclusion that the problem is not on the installed softwares/applications. Many WordPress-powered sites are infected. But, Drupal and also Expression Engine are also infected. I hope MediaTemple will solve this problem as fast as they can. I run to one of (gs) account at MediaTemple I manage and check every domains hosted. Starting from .htaccess and index.php files. For WordPress-powered sites, these two files are the first files to check. It looks that I am lucky. Everything is normal.

Anyway, the first reason I chose (recommended) MediaTemple is for its good reputation. I heard many positive reviews about them. I know, the price might be higher compared to other providers. But, sometime it’s not about the budget. Meanwhile, I think I’ll ask my friend who has an account with MediaTemple to stay with them for a while and see how they deal with this issue.

Last month, I bought a new domain. Unlike my other domains, this time I have domain with my own name: thomasarie.com. When I firstly registered it, I didn’t have any intention to create another blog. I already have too many. My plan was to create a lifestream.

The term lifestream was coined by Eric Freeman and David Gelernter at Yale University in the mid-1990s to describe “…a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream. Lifestreams are also referred to as social activity streams or social streams. [source: Wikipedia]

If you visit thomasarie.com, you should see a single page only. You can see recent posts from my videoblog, personal blog, our Flickr photostream, Twitter, and also Posterous. I don’t use WordPress or any other complex tools to create this single page.

Instead, I use SimplePie. SimplePie does the tasks. Why SimplePie? Simple, because for the page I deal with RSS feeds.

Photo credit: Andrew

I don’t have very large/busy personal sites to handle right now. To be more specific, I don’t use publishing platform optimization techniques too much. In the last few months, I need to work/deal with something what we all call “optimization”.

At the moment, I maintain busy sites powered by WordPress and vBulletin. My responsibility is to keep both softwares updated, modified when necessary, and also tweaked using plugins/modifications. The vBulletin has a good performance. The vBulletin-powered site I maintain receives around 1,000-1,200 new posts everyday, with 600-800 online users during peak hours and it’s on a single VPS server. On the same server, there are also two busy WordPress-powered sites.

Related to vBulletin, I applied some optimization strategies and it works almost without problem. The problem occurred on the WordPress-powered sites. During the peak hours, server performance was not good enough. Many webserver and database processes. I tried to use caching method using available WordPress cache plugins. But, it was not helping. I outsourced the static files to Amazon S3 (with CloudFront). It solved some problems.

After some moments, I decided to turn off all cache/optimization plugins installed and switched to WordPress Super Cache plugin. Did it work? Yes. The server performance is pretty stable now. During peak hours, all sites are running without any problems.

But, what does it mean? Keeping the server running without any problems is not an option. It’s a must. Visitors should have a good experience enjoying the service.

Finally, we’ve just finished uploading hundreds of photos from Jogja Wall Nation event. This is related to my previous post, about our involvement in this event. We’re responsible for the event publishing strategy and management. It’s not only preparing the website for the event, managing all contents and writing updates — yes, we published tons of updates, but also doing some photography-related stuff.

We love photography. We love Flickr. And we love stories stuff online. Starting from day one, we joined almost every single agenda. And, from the very beginning, we thought that Flickr should be responsible for the photo storage service. After having almost photos ready, we upload them to our Flickr photostream page. We managed all photos into sets and put all of them in a collection. After that, we simply embed every sets slideshows. You can see the result at Jogja Wall Nation photo gallery page. There are some plugins available for WordPress as options — yes, the website uses WordPress, but we decided to embed the slideshow: simple and it looks slick. The slideshow requires Flash player. To avoid problems because non-existing Flash player, we put direct links to every sets.

When I organized those photos, I just realized that I (almost!) don’t have my own pictures there. Hahaha! Right now, there are more than 500 photos uploaded, and I still have around 600 more photos to upload. The rest 600 photos are the photos of every mural work. Yeah, we took them one by one at Malioboro Street, Jogjakarta.

I like WordPress and its templating system so far. For many WordPress users, WordPress’ widgets features in theme might be something useful. Especially, for those who do not want to deal with template tags or confusing lines of codes. Personally, when I create WordPress themes for my own sites, I rarely — almost never — use widgets. Seriously.

I find the templating system is not so difficult. When it’s related to widgets, usually we deal with sidebar items like recent posts, recent comments, etc. In most cases, I want to have different sidebar items for different pages. For example, on the single article page, I put recent articles section but not on the frontpage. So, it’s like “put [this] on [here] but not [there]“.

WordPress has its own Conditional Tags for purpose. You might want to jump into the codes for this. Of course, we can create multiple WordPress sidebar widgets. Example: for the frontpage, use widgets under “Sidebar 1″ and for the single article put widgets under “Sidebar 2″. Make sense, right? The problem is, when I use multiple sidebar widgets, I might have more than three sidebars. So, having my WordPress theme without sidebar widgets is the most suitable solution for me. Right now, for my own blog. This works for me, but if you enjoy using sidebar widgets… use them.

Today, I received an email from Sony Ericsson. The email invites me to participate on a survey. Since I was free at that time, and I was a litle bit bored, I decided to take the survey. If the survey was boring, I can stop at any time, right?

Dear Thomas Arie,

What matters to you matters to us. To improve our services and products, we need to know what you think. So, in short: your thoughts, opinions and ideas are essential to us.

We’d really appreciate if you’d give us fifteen minutes of your time.

Please complete our survey, and let us know how we meet the high standards you should expect from Sony Ericsson.

Thank you!

The Sony Ericsson team

But, I decided to stop answering the questions. On the second question, the survey gave me a question related to my phone model. Yes, I bought a K530i few months (or last year?) but I don’t have it with me now. It’s my sister’s now. I was not really comfortable with it. Yeah, it was simply don’t work together with me. Well, probably I cut my budget when I bought it. :) Back to the survey, I canceled it because I simply couldn’t see the picture. Something was broken. See the screenshot.

Was it my browser? I opened the image directly from its location, nothing there. It was simply four-oh-four. Next time ya…