About a dozen people turned out for the first WordPress Phnom Penh meetup held Saturday at HackerspacePP. Informal conversations drifted from theme designing to Custom Post Types, to community building, BuddyPress and more. A few people arrived late, and conversations were still going strong at 2 p.m., when I had to leave.
The February meet will be held Feb 19 in the same place.
phpThumbs is a great script for resizing images on the fly. The script lets you create thumbnails or other variations of an original image simply by calling a specially crafted URL.
<img src="../phpThumb.php?src=images/disk.jpg&w=200" alt="">
That line of code will produce a resized version of the original at a width of 200 pixels. Easy as. The only drawback, however, is that phpThumbs can be slow, even with caching.
Mr. Php has a great solution that solves phpThumb’s speed issues. It’s easy to implement and really makes phpThumbs a robust solution for nearly any situation.
I just stumbled across DukaPress, what appears to be a fully fledged e-commerce plugin for WordPress.
DukaPress is a simple and free WordPress e-commerce system. It is open source. With DukaPress you can quickly and easily set up a fully featured online shop which can be used to sell digital or physical goods to customers all over the world.
That is no small claim. Shopping cart and e-commerce functionality have always been sorely lacking in WordPress. While there are a few shopping cart plugins out there, none are very robust. If DukaPress really is as good as it looks, then e-commerce for WordPress has finally arrived.
Idle computer hands now have a place to play.
Hackerspace Phnom Penh will officially open in January 2011, giving the Phnom Penh IT community a common space to converge.
Hackerspace philosophy promotes the idea of knowledge sharing in an open, decentralized society. Dozens of Hackerspace groups exists worldwide. Collectively, the goal of the spaces is to provide “a location where people with common interests, usually in computers, technology, or digital or electronic art can meet, socialise and/or collaborate,” according to the Hackerspace entry on Wikipedia.
Hackerspace groups support themselves by collecting membership dues. Students in Phnom Penh, for example, pay just $10 per month to receive 24-hour access to the Hackerspace facilities, including high-speed Internet, community workspaces and audio-visual equipment.
“[W]e decided the best way to raise the capital is internally from future members and supporters of Hackerspace Phnom Penh, rather from private companies or organisations,” the founders wrote on the group’s Wiki. “This will ensure the independence of the Hackerspace which everyone at the first meeting thought was very important.”
Visit HackerspacePP.
Is there nothing that research endowments won’t fund?
A team of researchers has found a link between the size of our amygdala, the epicenter of our emotions, and the size and complexity of our social networks. The bigger the amygdala, the bigger and more complex the network.
…Â Although the study doesn’t determine causation, like whether a bigger amygdala leads to a bigger social network and vice versa, the research does suggest an evolutionary aspect to the size of our amygdalas as socializing becomes more complex.
“To get along while getting ahead, it is necessary to learn who is who, who is friend and who is foe. It might be productive to form an alliance with certain group members in one context, but to outmaneuver them in another,” the researchers wrote.
Glad we got that cleared up.
I am trying to get a WordPress Meetup going. If you are WordPress user, or would like to learn more about WordPress with a group of like-minded people, please join the community. Sign-up details after the jump.
Feel-good American party band El Dealbreakers has announced its return to Cambodia. In the band’s own words:
El Dealbreakers are an American band that plays party music. Rhythm & Greens, they like to call it. With accordion and bajo quinto (a Mexican 10-string guitar) handling the chords, and a tuba belting the bass lines, the sound is rounded out by fiddle, mandolin, and trumpet.
The music is a mixture of blues, country, Tex-Mex, Cajun, reggae, polka-billy, and rock songs done El Dealbreakers’ way.
The band will play Pagoda Rocks in Sihanoukville, and The FCC and Paddy Rice in Phnom Penh, among many other dates.
What happens in an “Internet” minute?
Such is life in the digital fast lane.
SOURCE: Exact Target.
Digital Surgeons has a tidy little chart comparing the two heavy hitters on the social media circuit. While it’s not immediately clear how useful — or accurate — the information is, the info-graphic provides a fast overview of the two sites’ user bases.
Some highlights:
Such global trends are reflected here in Cambodia, too. The number of local Facebook users has skyrocketed over the past 6 months. Cambodia now claims nearly 200,000 Facebook users, up more than 300% since June.
Many of those new users are local businesses who are now making meaningful connections with new customers and strengthening relationships with old ones.
It’s dead simple to create a Facebook fan page.
Being memorable is a bit more challenging, but not impossible. (For starters: Mashable offers a quick intro to custom landing pages; Tech Crunch showcases 12 plugins that help; Hyper Arts provides an excellent tutorial for the keen do-it-yourselfer; and Custom Facebook Pages serves up a huge gallery for inspiration.)
Fan page promotion is not nearly as difficult as many people imagine, either. In fact, if there is a prevailing wisdom on how to best promote your Facebook page, the idea epitomizes the Renaissance Slacker ethos: Don’t try too hard.
Email, apparently, is now “old school.”
The number of total unique visitors in the United States to major e-mail sites like Yahoo and Hotmail is now in steady decline, according to the research company comScore. Such visits peaked in November 2009 and have since slid 6 percent; visits among 12- to 17-year-olds fell around 18 percent. (The only big gainer in the category has been Gmail, up 10 percent from a year ago.)
The slide in e-mail does not reflect a drop in digital communication; people have just gravitated to instant messaging, texting and Facebook (four billion messages daily).
That Facebook is the new new should come as no surprise.
Lena Jenny, 17, a high school senior in Cupertino, Calif., said texting was so quick that “I sometimes have an answer before I even shut my phone.†E-mail, she added, is “so lame.â€
Facebook is trying to appeal to the Lenas of the world. It is rolling out a revamped messaging service that is intended to feel less like e-mail and more like texting.
The company decided to eliminate the subject line on messages after its research showed that it was most commonly left blank or used for an uninformative “hi†or “yo.â€
Facebook also killed the “cc†and “bcc†lines. And hitting the enter key can immediately fire off the message, à la instant messaging, instead of creating a new paragraph. The changes, company executives say, leave behind time-consuming formalities that separate users from what they crave: instant conversation.
Facebook, of course, has a horrifying record regarding security and privacy. The site is literally an Openbook. So what will happen once it owns half a billion people’s private messages? If nothing else, it’s going to be funny.