Only downside is you lose InnoDB usage. But what the hell.

Speaking of which, I think I should offload all my RSS feeds to feedburner. Another avenue to save bandwidth usage on my Slice.

All this going against the better advice of the developer who is more of the subject matter expert.

Mind you, the site was small, 6 pages including the index and the newly requested “news section”. Still I thought it would be fun to see where this would get me and how long it would take.

Since I had experience with WordPress having hacked together a major site using it and converted a design to a WordPress template. I figured it shouldn’t be that difficult.

Updated: Main site has been moved to the WordPress version.

Started off with a clean install of WordPress 2.6.3. I love UI changes, but I think 2.7 would lose the feel that the version before 2.6 had.

Grabbed a pack of plugins to make life easier

• Admin Management Xtended (Less fiddling with individual pages, more productivity)
• Advanced Excerpt (Makes excerpts more powerful)
• Dashboard Editor (I don’t like dashboards with extraneous information)
• Google XML Sitemaps (Need to have the major search engine see everything I had)
• Markdown for WordPress and bbPress (Love clean HTML)
• Multi-page toolkit (Pages within posts)
• PJW Query Child Of (Allows querying of subpages like regular posts)
• Post-plugin library (Plugin library for everything post related)
• sCategory Permalink (Permalink library, helps to specify only 1 category for the post’s permalink if you have multiple categories that a post is associated to)
• TinyMCE Advanced (Rich Rich Richhh texteditor)
• WordPress Navigation List Plugin NAVT (The godliest navigation list generator)
• WP Google Analytics (Love my urchin stats)
• Yet Another PhotoBlog (Can’t live without associated photos to posts)

That settled I proceeded to chop up all the pages I had into well… pages. This time much of the content is controlled via subpages with a main page having a summary and a listing of the content of its subpages via the template.

Lots of control done using post meta data to specify things like content summary, title and even which class to use for the image associated with the post when it is displaying.

After figuring out the templates, it was a breeze to implement the different sections, even the faux news section which has now, thanks to WordPress’ content management, its very much a serious section.

I forsee newer content to come after the site has run is purpose and this should prepare for that eventuality.

Inccidentally, I used Billings to time how long this took and it came around to a reasonable 5 hours and 42 minutes. 5:42 to convert this to this.

Links from the main homepage are now actively pointing towards the domain. NTU also has a media release about the programme.

I think I’ve come a long way from doing small SME sites to something that is of a more official tone.

I used to think he’s a real whiz at Keynote, until finding out the genius behind the company that helped him communicate his message most effectively — Duarte Design. I have since bought Nancy Duarte’s book, slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations and have become more enlightened in the art of communicative media.

Herein lies the thought. If CEO’s and important people are leveraging these companies to help communicate their message laymen, normal people, average joes, how come this is not applied to academia, where the most difficult messages actually have to be communicated daily if not at an already frantic pace via the wonder of technology known as Powerpoint.

Is there a potential for a company to exist to help tertiary institutions or any other education facility for that matter to create presentations that help in that capacity? Heck, even as a part of the process in getting teaching plans audited prior to approval for use by teachers would help many clueless students.

That being said, it means training is also required for teachers to help them effectively use the these new tools.

This is why I feel Apple is far ahead of the competition. They constantly innovate, willing to try new things and experiment and shift the paradigm.

Still on this note, it kinda clears up the direction for now as to my next few computing purchases. First up would be an UMPC to facilitate easier carrying around. Am missing the mobility that my 12″ PowerBook had. The MSI Wind cuts pretty close as a choice considering its the most likely candidate for Mac OS X.

Next up would be a proper hackintosh since I’m just too poor to afford a Mac Pro. Its getting easier to mod these days and with the advent of boot managers like the boot-132 or even the USB Efi-X, it just lowers the bar for easy updating and usage.

Would love the new LED 24″ too eventually. Would help with the docking of the MacBook Pro to an external display. The expanded screen real estate would help plenty much too.

Bluetooth is pretty straight forward so I’d just list the steps for USB. This is for Mac OS X Leopard.

1. Connect E71 to the Mac through USB using “PC Suite” connection.
2. Open the Network Preferences Pane in the Systems Preferences.
3. Network Preferences should auto detect the E71 as a new interface should it not have been previously.
4. If not, select one of the Nokia E71 interfaces within Network Preferences.
5. Enter your account name and password as “star” and “hub” respectively. Leave the other options blank.
6. Click the Advanced button.
7. Select “Nokia” as your Vendor and “Model” as “GPRS (GSM/3G)”.
8. Enter “shwapint” for your APN.
9. Leave CID as “1″.
10. Under PPP and under “Session”. Ensure “Disconnect if Idle” is not checked.
11. You’re done! Hit connect and you’ll logon to StarHub’s 3G network.

As of now, it seems that the MSI Wind is the best candidate for such a system due to its widespread support, a customised installation of OS X floating around the torrent networks as well as actual work currently being done to rectify the problems with official WiFi and Sound inputs.

That is, until the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 hits. Really love the 9″ form factor and the business look. And woopiee do, some guy has Leopard running on it already!

Possible long term contract work with a friend who’s starting an events company.

Its really when you are most busy that the projects do come in. Clients page has been updated.