esn studio

The keywords from Day 2 are: innovation, accessibility, usability, project management, social network, mobile and data.

1. To allow innovation at workplace, management should not be destructively critical when mistakes are made (Ref: William L. McKnight, 3M)
2. Having a clean and organised data structure for your web site is important
3. Mobile social networks are coming to town
4. Some ways to publicise your start-up: sponsor a related event, send an email about it to everyone you know, hand out flyers, give away free merchandise
5. Embrace your obsessions - love what you do, and do what you love

Technorati Tags: wds2007, wds07, web directions, tips, web

The keywords from Day 1 are: web 2.0, standards, social media, web apps, mash-ups, APIs, web services, mobile, users

1. Social systems are built to serve people’s selfishness
2. No matter how boring your startup website may be, as long as there is a need for it, people will use it
3. Mobile 2.0 is the next big thing and mobile web applications are the future
4. Build it quickly, market it, release it and if not successful, abandon it
5. Give “the control” back to users
6. Content leverage: Let anyone/everyone build cool stuff using your data (Web Services and APIs)
7. iPhone uses screen media type for stylesheet (rather than handheld)
8. Standards. Standards. Standards
9. Web 2.0 is evolution, not revolution
10. Improve user experience through customisation

You might also like to check out the following blogs* to find out more about the presentations at WDS2007:

• Anthony Milner
• Man with no blog

* Found them via Technorati.

Technorati Tags: wds2007, wds07, web directions, tips, web

• About 2 million sites (20,016,421 domains, to be precise) use PHP (Ref: Usage Stats for April 2007)
• 75% of Web 2.0 sites are built in PHP (Ref: InformationWeek)
• Some of the biggest online brands, such as Facebook, Friendster, Flickr, Technorati, and Yahoo! are powered by PHP
• About 5 million PHP developers worldwide
• As of August 2007, PHP is the #5 highest rated (most popular) programming language (Ref: Programming Languages Trends)

White Paper
PHP Leads Web 2.0
A Closer Look at the Hidden Drivers and Enablers of the Second Internet Revolution

Technorati Tags: php, programming, programming language, web development

In PHP, exporting data into an excel file (.csv) can be achieved very easily by sending a raw HTTP header. And having a formula in cells is no brainier either (and I only found that out after searching through google and not finding any solution - hehe).

The following is a rough example of how you do it. What I am trying to do here as an example is have an excel formula in Age column to calculate the person’s age automatically.

        header('Content-Type: application/csv');
        header('Content-Disposition: inline; filename="report.csv"');  

        // print column titles
        echo 'Name,Year born,Age' . "n";  

        // a full numeric representation of a year, 4 digits; eg: 2007
        $year = date('Y'); 

        // $count starts from 2 because the first row is reserved for column titles
        $count = 2;  

	while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)) {
 	    echo $row['name'] . ',';
            echo $row['year'] . ',';
            // formula = Current year - Bx(Year born)  B is the column position
            echo '=' . $year . '-B' . $count;
            echo "\n";
            // increment $count by 1 (same as $count = $count + 1)
            $count++;
        }
        exit;

Technorati Tags: php, programming, csv, snippet

More witty cartoon can be viewed at bLaugh.