Photo Tour of the Kaohsiung computer district, Taiwan

The Jianguo Road area in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan is full of computer and technology related stores. I recently ordered a 120GB SATA drive for my Macbook and used the trip to collect it as an excuse to snap a few shots of the area and any interesting things that caught my eye.

You can see all of the photos in this Zooomr Photo Set (My free Flickr account is maxed so I’m testing out Zooomr), and I’ve featured some of the more interesting photos below-

This tablet PC is an 8.9inch Fujitsu Lifebook P1510. the screen swivels so it can be used in both laptop or tablet mode. With a 1.2Ghz Pentium M it’s not the most powerful system, but it just feels so damn good to use it. i can’t remember what the resolution was but I can remember thinking it was fairly decent for a machine of it’s size. Comes with a 60GB HD, USB2.0, Bluetooth, Modem, LAN, WiFi and finger print sensor but only 512MB of memory.

A shot from the balcony of what seems to be the biggest gaming store in the area. This store is absolutely crammed with games for all platforms, consoles, DVDs, figurines, Web Cams and other hardware. It makes me wish I could read Chinese or Japanese so I could play some of these games.

No this isn’t a Wii, it’s a Core Duo based small form factor system that are quite common, although not as common as the millions of variations of mini MP4 players. At $29,990 it works out at about £480 or $900US, which seems a bit expensive to me, I’d be more tempted to buy an Intel Mac Mini - although, all prices are negotiable here

I know there’s places in Taipei and Japan that are bigger and better, but this is still a long way away from anything you’d find in the UK etc, I could hang out there all day

Typo and Trackback Spam

I recently got hit with over 100 spam trackbacks on an article and then a few more everyday. I really like Typo, although trackbacks suspected of being spam are still listed under an article.

John Wilger has a quick fix for this by adding a few lines to two template files for Scribbish.

Asynchronous Image Uploading and Database Storage

Here’s a code snippet that I mashed up recently. I started with Asynchronous image file upload without AJAX and worked in code from one or two tutorials. The result is an asynchronous image uploading script, using an iFrame, that resizes the images and stores both the original and the thumbnail in a database.

Get it here:

The table that needs to exist in your database:

CREATE TABLE `image_upload` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`name` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
`type` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
`size` int(11) NOT NULL,
`content` mediumblob NOT NULL,
`thumb` mediumblob,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
)

Trulia Feed Creator for Wordpress

Here is the first release of my Wordpress plugin for creating a Trulia compatible XML feed of properties. The feed can be submitted to Trulia and subsequently used for creating a Trulia Map of your properties.

The current version of the plugin is 0.3 and can be downloaded from the following links:

YouTube and Internet Protocol T-Shirts

I’ve just been to the local Carrefour supermarket, next to Love River in Kaohsiung City Taiwan, and saw these internet protocol t-shirts. They were on sale at $199NT (about £3.20 or $5 US). It wouldn’t usually be noteworthy but it just surprised me to see them in such a mainstream store, what is essentially the Taiwanese Tesco or Walmart.

I bought a HTTP, FTP and Avatar shirt, although it was the YouTube one that caught my eye when walking by.

Where to get design/CSS inspiration

Everyone has the places they go online to get inspiration for their latest web design/print/CSS projects. Online resources are a great place to get ideas for colour schemes, layouts, design techniques and other elements. The following is a list of sites I visit I’m when working on a new project and need some inspiration to get started. If you have any other sites please add them in the comments!

Color Lovers - Allows users to browse and share colours and colour palettes. There are thousands of colour palettes to browse making it the perfect site for choosing a scheme for a new project.

Net Cocktail - This is a CSS design gallery that takes beautiful designs and extracts the main colours from the site’s colour scheme, great for seeing how certain schemes are put to use

Design Meltdown - An invaluable resource with lots of articles exploring colour usage, design element/technique usage, and also tutorials on graphical techniques and CSS development. The designs of various site genres are also explored.

The following sites are all CSS design galleries, I won’t describe them in too much detail individually as they’re all very similar, but each one is good resource for quality design.

• CSS Remix - CSS design gallery with user voting
• CSS Import - The “no frills” CSS gallery
• CSS Beauty - A selection of tagged and categorised CSS sites, also featuring a design forum and web design news
• Inspiration King - A CSS design gallery organised by site category. Also featuring web design news
• The Daily Slurp - A new selection of CSS designs everyday
• CSS Mania - CSS designs organised by site category
• CSS Allstar - CSS designs voted on by users
• CSS Princess - Beautiful CSS sites with a “woman’s touch”

A few design related sites that recently made the homepage of Digg.com and caught my eye include -

China HTML W3C SItes - This is an absolutely huge collection of CSS based sites all crammed onto one page

The Bluesfear Worm - An amazing example of collaboration by designers from the Bluesfear design community. There are lots of design styles, colour usage and other techniques demonstrated.

There are more than enough sites here to get you started thinking about a new project, or even just for browsing to see what makes good web design.

Trulia Wordpress Plugin - Development Update

Update: The plugin has been released and can be downloaded from this page

Here’s a quick update on the progress of the Trulia Wordpress Plugin i’m developing. Development is almost complete and I should have a release posted some time very soon.

Features of the plugin will include:

• Table creation in the Wordpress Database
• Image uploading
• Image resizing
• Database stored images
• Trulia compliant feed generation
• Post creation with the property details
• Feed Caching

I’ve been using this project to ease myself back into PHP coding, as I’ve been focusing on web design over server-side scripting for a good while now, so there will be a lot of room for improvement. Once it’s release anyone is welcome to add-to/modify/or enhance the code.

Update Oct 6th 2006 - The plugin is now finished but I want to test it properly to make sure everything works okay, I also need to install it for a client to use. The plugin will be posted for download at some point in the next few days.

Update Oct 10th 2006 - I was ready to go live with the plugin when I thought I’d test it with a non-root wordpress installtion without pretty permalinks and there’s a few problems that need fixing. I originally didn’t want there to be any configuration, but it seems i’m going to have to add an admin panel so you can specifiy the page that the Trulia Form is installed on. I need this info as I use $_GET variables to pass data at some points in the plugin and I was parsing out the vars sometimes to get the URL of the plugin page (which won’t work if pretty permalinks aren’t being used). I’ll fix this and release the plugin by the weekend.