₦airaland Forum

^^^ I once had an insider in a certain state government "office" that had a website that hadn't been updated in 4 years, yet an annual budget of N20m was set aside for "maintenance" of same website

I have always wanted to post this but have been too busy. Now I have a few minutes to spare

I hate it when I visit a site, any site (in this case a very popular Nigerian online newspaper), and I see an email address listed beneath the author's name that isn't related to the newspaper's domain. In other words, instead of say, aaa@sunnews.com, it is aaa@yahoo(or gmail or msn, etc).com. Don't these folks know that it doesn't make them look good, not to mention such sites lose out on branding opportunities?

Na wa o!

Interesting article

http://www.punchng.com/i-punch/nigeria-a-country-with-an-ailing-website/

Nigeria, the self-acclaimed giant of Africa, has no functional official web portal. The website of the Federal Government of Nigeria, www.nigeria.gov.ng, is ailing.

For several weeks running, the web portal has been in a bad shape with no information other than the picture of President Goodluck Jonathan clad in his traditional Ijaw attire, smiling and waving at the supposed guests who get disappointed after visiting the blank website.

The information on the website reads, “Welcome to the Federal Republic of Nigeria’s web portal. This web portal will be uploaded shortly. For more information, email: webmaster@nigeria.gov.ng. Powered by the Federal Ministry of Information.”

A mail sent to the e-mail address, seeking enquiry and clarifications on the development, was also not replied as at the time of filing this report.

The poor African countries, including Zimbabwe, Republic of Congo, Burundi, Liberia and Guinea-Bissau, own and maintain functional websites and use them for the propagation of business and investment opportunities, relationships with various economic and political organisations as well as development partners from different parts of the world.

Even South Sudan, which is the newest nation on the continent, takes the issue of online presence seriously. The Government of South Sudan, under President Salva Kiir Mayardit, updates the site frequently with its activities. The last of such was the country’s plans to export oil through Djibouti via Ethiopia.

However, one wonders why presidential advisers and assistants own and maintain websites with adequate social media plug-ins and good visual resolution while the nation’s website, which is supposed to serve as a gateway to the rest of the world and a one-stop site for every information about Nigeria, its people and culture, is left unattended to.

But there is a twist to this! A Google search, by our correspondent, of the name of the Minister of Information, Labaran Maku, whose ministry is saddled with the responsibility of managing the website, shows that he might not even own a website as none could be attributable to him.

For more, read: http://www.punchng.com/i-punch/nigeria-a-country-with-an-ailing-website/

^^^ I actually never used my hands to follow anyone. I can assure you of that. I also am the only person who owns my account so no one did it for me. That means either the system does it by default or Seun did it. When I visit this board, I do nothing else but read and/or respond to stuff. I in fact rarely "like" a post.

Wow! Some people are so out to (dis)prove a point that they will see who is following who? Interesting.

@Seun: LOL. Nice one. Not jealous either. Just wondering when the "follow follow" mentality will end for some people. It gets annoying sometimes. I mean, if someone wants to know how much you earn, they should just ask and stop guessing. If you aren't on the wiki, that is your decision and not theirs. IMHO...then again, what do I know, right?

Congrats

All this obsession with Seun na wa o! Who should be more concerned about his absence of wikipedia? Him or you? Wetin concern bird with toothbrush?

First it was (and still is), "how much does Seun make?", now it is "why isn't he on wikipedia?" What will be next? "Which style does Seun use to wipe his bom bom after doing the #2?"

Folks wake up! Yes, Seun has done a marvelous thing with NL but it is time to look up to yourselves and not others.

Okay, I am off mu soapbox now

^^^ But of course. It's okay if your site is pulling at best, 10 hits a day...if that

If your site is pulling millions, then you have to cut down on the bandwidth costs and the page loads of your users, hence writing efficient code is a must.

OP:
You needed to have coded incrementally. Now, the time you will spend debugging will be more than the time you would have spent coding incrementally. What I regard as incremental coding?

1) You open all target browsers
2) You start coding another section of your site
3) You refresh each browser, ensuring that it looks consistent, fixing any issues along the way
loop begin:
4) You code another section, maybe the navigation
5) Repeat 3 and 4 above
loop end;

You repeat 4 and 5 above until you are done. By coding incrementally, you can easily isolate issues and fix them as opposed to coding everything and wondering what caused an issue after the fact.

Good luck!

^^^ You are right but IMHO, even for a language as hard as, say, LISP, people will always right bad code. See, you can write code and you can "write" code. For example, I keep telling people that if in the course of writing your code you notice that you are doing the same thing more than once, you need to declare a function, regardless of language. Instead, as in the case of jquery, you will see stuff like this:

#id.click(function(){
#a.show;
#b.hide;
#c.hide;
}

For the "smart" ones among us, of course the above isn't legit jquery but you get my point, hopefully.

This craze never die yet? All the same, "like"

^^^ That has to do with the designer at hand. I on the other hand have also seen crappy WP sites

@Afam:
I am pretty open when it comes to technology, calling myself a trisexual - I try anything at least once. I try to be a hammer so I don't see everything around me as a nail. I try everything at least once and draw conclusions based on features, drawbacks, learning curve, etc. I have tried Joomla, WP and drupal and though I wouldn't use it for everything, I have found it to have a lower learning curve than the other 2. Personal research also supports this conclusion. I like to do my research well before settling for anything.

^^^ He he. Interesting. I happen to find Joomla easier to use

Could it be because, as I just read on punch online, there are plans to scrap jamb, utme and napep, "to streamline government agencies and reduce the cost of governance"?

1) When I typed "d", I got 8 results for various products

2) Something is wrong with your registration form. For example, I started off by entering "a" in each field. Typically, you should have both front and back end validation. You don't have the former. Then even for the latter, instead of spitting out all the errors at once, you tell me there is a problem, one at a time. In other words, I have to hit "register", wait for the page to load, get 1 error, fix that, hit "register" again, then be told of another error, etc etc. This is one vicious cycle I am no longer enjoying

3) Something is wrong with this code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html lang="en" dir="ltr"><head>
<title>wippypick - Phones, Electronics, Games, Watches, Cloths, Cars</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<meta name="description" content="Phones, Electronics, Games, Watches, Cloths, Cars">
<meta name="keywords" content="Phones, Electronics, Games, Watches, Cloths, Cars">
<meta name="generator" content="wippypick.com">
<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.wippypick.com/themes/default/style.css">
<link href="css/cbdb-search.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/user_advance.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/shadowitem.css" />

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<script type="text/javascript">
function stopTab(el, e){
var k = e.keyCode || e.which;
if(k === 9){
el.focus();
return false;
}
return true;
}
</script>

There are many definitions of "copy":
1) The concept
2) The content
3) The layout
4) The color scheme
5) Rank Xerox

Typically, when I prospective customer seems confused, I will ask what they mean by asking them if there is a site that they have visited and liked that I could look at. That will save me minutes of useless questioning/answering. Once we settle, I will insist that it won't be a carbon copy but similar in concept. 99% of the time, it works out pretty well. For the 1% that didn't, I still did the job but I didn't feel satisfied inside as I basically saved out the source and made changes to color, logo and content.

You sure can. This is why you should have a good web strategy up front, one in which you plan for everything (desktop, mobile, seo, etc) before you even start. Generally speaking, retrofitting is often a difficult task.

What do you want us to do? It is a server problem. You have no control over that. If it really bothers you, call them or better yet, pay them a visit and tell them what's up.


Good luck!

Your website is automatically configured to work on mobile devices though the experience might differ considerably b/w desktop and mobile and b/w various mobile devices.

If you want to create a mobile-specific solution, you can look at jQuery Mobile or Twitter Bootstrap. For the former, you will need to have a separate mobile site (abc.com/mobile or m.abc.com) while for the latter, you are using what is called Responsive Web Design (RWD) to present the same content in different ways, depending on the device the user views your site with.

Since i don't like repetition, I would personally recommend you learn a technology like Twitter Bootstrap. This way, you don't have to worry about managing content in more than one place.

Good luck!

http://www.ispon.org/

Sure it is for software but bare this in mind: if you build web applications, you are developing software, albeit for the web.

This is what we should be doing o! No be to dey charge N5K for website. Something unique. No borrow-borrow...no copy-copy

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/26/us-yahoo-summly-daloisio-profile-idUSBRE92P01C20130326

Got a tech idea and want to make a fortune before you're out of your teens? Just do it, is the advice of the London schoolboy who's just sold his smartphone news app to Yahoo for a reported $30 million.

The money is there, just waiting for clever new moves, said 17-year-old Nick D'Aloisio, who can point to a roster of early backers for his Summly app that includes Yoko Ono and Rupert Murdoch.


"If you have a good idea, or you think there's a gap in the market, just go out and launch it because there are investors across the world right now looking for companies to invest in," he told Reuters in a telephone interview late on Monday.

The terms of the sale, four months after Summly was launched for the iPhone, have not been disclosed and D'Aloisio, who is still studying for school exams while joining Yahoo as its youngest employee, was not saying. But technology blog AllThingsD said Yahoo paid roughly $30 million.

D'Aloisio said he was the majority owner of Summly and would now invest the money from the sale, though his age imposes legal limits for now on his access to it.

"I'm happy with that and working with my parents to go through that whole process," he said.

D'Aloisio, who lives in the prosperous London suburb of Wimbledon, highlights the support of family and school, which gave him time off, but also, critically, the ideas that came with enthusiastic financial backers.

He had first dreamt up the mobile software while revising for a history exam two years ago, going on to create a prototype of the app that distils news stories into chunks of text readable on small smartphone screens.

He was inspired, he said, by the frustrating experience of trawling through Google searches and separate websites to find information when revising for the test.

Trimit was an early version of the app, which is powered by an algorithm that automatically boils down articles to about 400 characters. It caught the eye of Horizons Ventures, a venture capital firm owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, which put in $250,000.

That investment attracted other celebrity backers, among them Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher, British broadcaster Stephen Fry, artist Ono, the widow of Beatle John Lennon, and News Corp media mogul Murdoch.

That all added up to maximum publicity when Summly launched in November 2012, but the backers brought more than just cash for an app that has been downloaded close to a million times.

"It's been super-exciting, (the investors) found out about it in 2012 once the original investment from Li Ka-shing had gone public," said D'Aloisio. "They all believed in the idea, but they all offered different experiences to help us out."

His business has worked with around 250 content publishers, he said, such as News Corp's Wall Street Journal. People reading the summaries can easily click through to the full article, driving traffic to newspaper websites.

"The great deal about joining Yahoo is that they have a lot of publishers, they have deals with who we can work with now," D'Aloisio said.

He taught himself to code at age 12 after Apple's App Store was launched, creating several apps including Facemood, a service which analyzed sentiment to determine the moods of Facebook users, and music discovery service SongStumblr.

He has started A-levels - English final school exams - in maths, physics and philosophy, and plans to continue his studies while also working at Yahoo's offices in London. He aims to go to university to study humanities.

Although he has created an app worth millions, D'Aloisio says he is not a stereotyped computer geek.

"I like playing sport," he said. "I'm a bit of a design enthusiast, and like spending time with my girlfriend and mates."

@soloqy:
Based on your logic, you shouldn't have even opened this thread because it was meant for Dual.

In the (opposite) words of sisqology, *laughs*

Go through old posts

I used to hate the old layout - it was very hard on my eyes. As a result, I would just scan a few posts for viewing/responding to. This one is way better on my eyes and for the first time since the last "redesign (at least 1 year)", I have gone through every single new post that in my interested (webmaster) section.

Kudos to whoever came up with this decision!

Your question, no offense, doesn't make sense. Isn't MS outlook an email that has an inbox? Are you saying that clicking your submit button pulls up MS outlook?

Clarify please.

you know, if you want that particular script so bad, you can always save out that portal as a complete website, go through the code and reverse engineer it for yourself

IMHO, it's because when they come up with an idea, especially a money-making one, their first thought is not how to groom the site so that it can grow organically but is on how to make $1m the next day so they can follow drive SUV, build mansion, etc. In other words, they fail to see the forest for the trees. Secondly, as a purely consumer society that doesn't produce anything, we see a site like facebook, replicate and again, hope to make $1m the next day. Of course, if you ask them, they will feign humility and give you quotes by Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs but deep down, they know (and they know that you know) that their true motive is to make that $1m the next day. How many threads have you seen on here about "I have signed up for google ads but haven't received my money yet" or "problem with my blog" or "visit my blog and give comments"?

Remember, in Nigeria, 25% of those of working age (15-65) are out of work. This unfortunately creates an "incentive" to come up with the hopefully next big thing that will provide instantaneous results.