Show The Malaysia Trishaw Becaman Support

Just like the bearded man who lifts heavy objects for charity, we now have our own local charity stint as well. Meet Frankie Tan; trishaw (beca) man. While there isn’t personal information about Frankie like his age and where he hails from, the ‘cuti-cuti’ Malaysia mission he’s undertaken is traveling from Melaka to Penang and back – on his trishaw!

Frankie has made the statement what he’s doing isn’t for personal gain but to promote Melaka and Penang as world heritage cities. In addition, any monetary support or form of charitable support will be donated to the charitable organisations below:

• Majlis Kebangsaan Bagi Orang Buta, Malaysia also known as National Council for the Blind, Malaysia (NCBM)
• Pertubuhan Pertolongan Wanita, also known as Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO)
• WINGS, Melaka—Early Intervention Centre
• Melaka Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals  or SPCA Melaka

I’d personally donate to the National Council for the Blind. They’ve helped create awareness about website accessibility through a previous conference.  Anyway, you can follow Frankie’s travel journal and photo documentary he’ll be calling; United Faces of Malaysia, the trishawman website.

Blogged MY Challenges Project Petaling Street

Malaysia bloggers who ping Project Petaling Street (PPS) would already realize a change in the face of PPS. At the same time, Project Petaling Street is now now under new management.

As for the future and what’s to be expected from PPS, I’m going to have to ask the new management soon. In the meantime, there’s a new alternative to Project Petaling Street for Malaysia bloggers to share their blog and ping. It’s called Blogged.MY and I’ve done a short interview with the creator.

1. Who is behind Blogged.my?
Well, me (Teow Wee). Mostly a blog reader but I do have photoblog at teowwee.com.

2. Why create Blogged.my?
I thought the current breed of local (Malaysian) blog ping aggregators are not good enough and lacking certain features and nobody is doing anything about it. It was time to get my hands dirty, so to speak.

3. Are there plans for world domination? If Yes, care to share the vision?
World domination? Wow.. it’s still early days, so we’ll see

4. Any plans of working together with Nuffnang/Advertlets or organizers of blogger communities?
It would be interesting to work together with them in the future. But currently, I doubt they even know Blogged.my exists yet. Blogged.my only went into public beta in February this year btw.

5. How does Blogged.my plan to sustain itself now and the near future?
At the moment it’s running out of my own pocket, but in the future I hope it’ll be self-sustainable in one way or another. In an ideal world since this is a community project, donations to fund the server will be the way to go. However we don’t live in an ideal world so there must be other ways to generate funding. The possibility of requiring sponsorship from commercial blogs that uses Blogged.my’s services is there.

I’ll do a follow-up interview with Teow Wee maybe end of the year or when there’s massive change to Blogged.MY. But from what I’ve found, I already like the new ping aggregator – besides, no advertising.

It looks good and there’s features to rate posts, bookmark them, avatars, content filtering (24 hours, week, month and year) and an auto-ping capability by adding your blog feed after you create a new account.

My recommendations to Blogged.MY would be:

• More content, less visual. (Example: Smaller avatars, more fresh pings.)
• Remove most popular area and have an easy to select filter.
• Keep the login fields on the bar. No need for fancy show and hide.

Well, I hope this’ll help you Teow Wee and I’m really looking forward to how Blogged.MY grows and evolves into Malaysia’s preferred ping anggregator.

Google Joins Domain Parking Industry

Woah! I didn’t know Google launched a domain parking service under their Google Adsense umbrella. It’s right now called AdSense for domains. Besides generating revenue via Google adsense alone, now Adsense subscribers or domain owners (and parkers) can make money via Google adsense using this new service.

Setting up is as easy as adding your domain names and adding/modifying your domain name A records. If you didn’t understand that, you’ll need to start learning about how to modify your domain name records normally found in your domain name control panel.

As lucrative and attractive as this new service sounds, I’m wondering is Google promoting the activity of buying and parking domains even if it were for exploitation.

What do you readers think about Google’s new service; Adsense for domains?

Malaysia Internet Downtime Affects Productivity and Health

Malaysia employers of Internet technology companies who said the Internet (when it’s up) affects employee productivity I’d say are morons. From what I’m experiencing right now as an employer and employee, with TMNet Streamyx Internet service interruption is affecting my productivity more than when the Internet was up.

In the morning, my primary activity is to check my business emails and address all of them in a timely manner. And, I spend less than 10-minutes to reply them. Plus, there are occassions I only take less than 1-minute to reply a simple question posed by clients. Before the interruption, it takes me maximum 2-3 hours. Now, it takes me 4-5 hours to only address my emails.

After lunch is the time I research, design, do more research and prepare proposals for my clients. In between all of that, I still address emails from my business partners and clients. Now, thanks to the interruption of TMNet Streamyx, my productivity is affected exponentially.

I can’t complete proper designs for my clients and I can’t propose new ideas which I would normally observe based on the international online trend. The Malaysia Internet downtime which has been ongoing for more than 2 weeks now has all my work backlogged.

Besides work productivity, Internet downtime also has an affect to my health – not as an Internet addiction. Because I can’t complete my mentioned tasks in a proper timed schedule, I’ve no choice but to sacrifice sleep to meet deadlines. It’s not like all my clients will accept the excuse, “my Internet was down due to TMNet”.

Health and productivity aside, the government wants and wishes for all Malaysia companies to target the international market. I’ve once shared an example of what happens when we (Malaysians) don’t do enough research of the outside market when we propose a business plan.

Therefore, is it our fault the reason we can’t produce products or export services for the international market is due to our lack of knowledge or skillset?

Is the main Malaysia broadband provider themselves ready to provide the services and performance which doesn’t affect productivity and health of Internet companies here whom are targeting the international market?

Or, is the main Malaysia broadband provider only promoting and supporting the sales of our products and services within the country – while our government says look outside of Malaysia?

Easy Error 404 page Creation Using Google Webmaster Tools

The error 404 page is the webpage you’ll normally see when you can’t find the article or item you were looking for in an author’s website. Here’s a quick example of my error 404 page I tuned up.

Now, because the error 404 terminology is commonly understood by tech-savvy users, it’s approach has been made to be more user-friendly. Such as the error 404 page example you saw when you clicked the link.

From simple functional error 404 pages, other designers and developers with strong beliefs in web standards have made entertaining error 404 pages. Here’s an example from Abduzeedo.

This has been done to lessen tension and the immediate confusion of a non tech-savvy user through humour. Plus, it makes planning and designing error pages for users now more fun.

If you’d like to create a simple error 404 page as the one I did, you’re going to need Google webmaster tools. It’s free and all you’ll need is a Google account.

Does your website have a user-friendly or humorous error page yet?