Info: April 2006

Friday, April 28, 2006

Install BlogMap on a Wordpress Blog

Last time, I have written an article on how to install BlogMap on our own blog. The article is more useful to those who uses Blogger for their blogs. Now, how to install the BlogMap on a Wordpress blog?

Basically, it's the same. There are five main steps need to be done:

Get a geo-tag
Put the geo-tag on our blog's template
Register our geo-tag to BlogMap
Get the script to display the BlogMap
Insert the script into our blog's template

The only differences are on point (2) and (5). In Blogger, the edit template option will provide one single interface to edit the whole's blog template. How about in Wordpress? Which template file we need to edit? It depends on the Wordpress theme use you. Each theme has different template files, even though usually there's naming convention for each type of file.

For step (2), the geo-tag needs to be inserted into the header of our blog. Therefore, in Wordpress, we usually need to edit the header.php file on our Wordpress theme's directory. The geo-tag should be inserted between the <head> and </head> lines, anywhere between the lines. I would suggest that you can put the geo-tag just after the <head> line, before the <title> line.

For step (5), we usually put the geo-tag script on the side bar. Therefore, the template file we need to edit is sidebar.php, the same file we need to edit when we need to insert our shoutbox, or any other banner we want to put on the side bar.

In Wordpress, we will see the change immediately after we edit the template files. Therefore, we don't need to do another "republish" like in Blogger after we edit the template files.

You can read this article to see more details about the other steps on how to create BlogMap in our blog. Do have a try! :)

[Indonesian version]

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Which article goes to which blog? :)

After knowing that I am opening another blog, Minda Indra, my friend Tata asked me a very good question. How am I going to manage which article goes to which blog? :)

A good question, indeed. However, I actually already have the answer, and I have actually written it here. However, it's in Bahasa Indonesia, so please find the answer on how I manage my blogs, below. In English, of course. :)

Actually, I "only" have four blogs, "so far". :) Two in English, and another two in Bahasa Indonesia. Here they are:

New Information, which is this blog. This will be my main blog in English. Postings on this blog will be in English, and can be formal or personal.
The Journey of Inka and Irza. This blog is also in English, and this is more to a diary of my personal and family's life.
Minda Indra. This is a new blog, based on Wordpress installed on my own server. This blog will be in Bahasa Indonesia, and the contents will be more formal, including my announcements and technical articles.
Rumah Indra. This used to be my main blog in Bahasa Indonesia, and I will still post more personal articles for myself and my family, here.

Got confused on which blog you should visit? Don't worry. :) I am now using one of the features provided by Kinja to aggregate all my blogs into one single page. So you can view all the postings on all my four blogs in one page. You can find the aggregate here. I actually intend to install a blog aggregation tool called Planet on my server, however I still don't have the time to do it. Well, perhaps later. As for now, we'll use Kinja first. :)

One of you might ask, why don't I just combine all the four blogs into one. Especially since we can categorise posts on Wordpress. Moreover, Wordpress allows us to import all contents from a Blogger/Blogspot blog in a single click. Well, in fact, I have actually considered that option. However, I'm not too sure what will happen to the main page if I post everything there. I imagine our family's diary will be mixed together with my technical articles, English articles will be mixed with my Indonesian articles, very messy. Mixed, like a rojak. I don't think I will like it.

As of now, I think I'll prefer to have the blogs separated. So people will not have any difficulties reading them. As for those who wants to read *all* my posts on all my blogs, well they can use my Kinja aggregate. In the near future, I will also try installing Planet so I won't have to rely on Kinja to aggregate my blogs.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Minda Indra

Minda Indra. What is that, and what does it mean?

"Minda" is actually a Malay word, not an Indonesian word. It means "mind". So, "Minda Indra" means "Indra's mind".

OK, so what is Minda Indra?

It's just another blog of mine. :) Yup.. yup.. understand that you will complain. I already have several blogs, some for myself and some are dedicated for my family, in both English and Indonesian, so why should I create a new one, again?

Simple. I want to try installing Wordpress on my own server, so I can use my own domain name for my blog. One of my friends, as well as my customer, Glenn, asked me why I am still using blogspot.com for my blogs, even though I am working in a hosting provider. :) Well, I told him that I don't want to "sacrifice" my own server's space while I can get free hosting space in blogspot. :P But actually, the truth is because I am a very busy person (at work for the company, and at home for the family), so I didn't have the time to set up my own blog on my own server.

So at last, I managed to setup my own blog on my own server, using Wordpress. It's located at this URL: http://ip.sg.or.id/ and it's called "Minda Indra". The blog will be in Bahasa Indonesia, and the contents will be similar to what I am going to write here, I guess. In the meantime, the contents of Rumah Indra and The Journey of Inka and Irza will be more personal and more dedicated for my family.

So far, I do not have any plan to migrate or move all my blogspot blogs to Wordpress, yet. Perhaps later, in the future. Having your own Wordpress on your server combine all the features on both blogsome.com and wordpress.com, and more over, you can get all the flexibility that you can get, including installing whatever plug-ins you want to install, since everything is inside your own server which you have control.

Of course, I didn't have the time to install any plug-ins yet. I haven't even finished editing my Wordpress template, let alone installing plug-ins. Slowly... but sure... :) :)

Saturday, April 22, 2006

Kantin Aneka 2

Since October 2005, there's a new "makan" place for those who loves authentic Indonesian cuisine. Reggy Haryanto opened Kantin Aneka in Lucky Plaza, Orchard Road, with authentic Indonesian cuisine such as ayam bakar rica-rica (spicy grilled chicken), ayam goreng (fried chicken), nasi timbel komplit, nasi empal, batagor, ketoprak and many more.

Initially, Kantin Aneka, which is located at unit #06-46/07 of Lucky Plaza (6th floor), only opens on Sunday. However, since early this year, Reggy also opened Kantin Aneka 2 stall inside the halal food court located on the same 6th floor of Lucky Plaza. This Kantin Aneka 2 stall opens from Monday to Saturday, while Kantin Aneka opens only on Sunday.

When this stall first opened, a lot of discussions is going on the indo-sing mailing list, praising the food served, which is being cooked by a female Indonesian cook, Nelly. I, myself, has went to Kantin Aneka 2 twice, even though I've never been to Kantin Aneka 1 since I seldom go to Lucky Plaza on Sundays.

Last Thursday (20/4), I went to Kantin Aneka 2 to have lunch. This stall is located in a far left corner of the food court. The food court itself is not really strategic especially for those who are downstairs (1st to 4th floor). It's because the whole 5th floor of Lucky Plaza is being used by Medical Centres, so a lot of people do not know that there's food court and some other eating places on the 6th floor, thinking that the 4th floor is already the highest floor housing all the shops and restaurants there.

I ordered the spicy grilled chicken (top left picture) and the ketoprak (right picture), thinking that the portion might be small. It turned out to be quite a big portion each. :) The food is really delicious! The spice on the grilled chicken is just nice, and the ketoprak is also delicious. Too bad I didn't have the time (and the space on my stomach) to try the famous batagor as well.

I would have to say that I'm putting this Kantin Aneka as one of my favourite's Indonesian eating places in Singapore, after Ayam Penyet and Es Teler 77 (for the chicken noodle). I plan to go there again, to try the batagor. Who wants to join? :)

[Indonesian version]

Thursday, April 13, 2006

BlogMap

I was visiting Eko Juniarto's blog and was quite interested in the BlogMap appears on the right panel of the blog. Interesting, we can see the exact physical location of the blogger's residence (not the location of the server hosting the blog, though), and who are other bloggers residing in the same area.

The BlogMap feature is provided by Feedmap, so I went there to have a look and to find out how do I get my own Blogmap. There is a "How Can I..." section however it doesn't actually guide a beginner (like myself) on how to setup and get my own Blogmap.

And then, I stumbled upon this good explanation from Kuan Cheen, a fellow blogger from Malaysia, regarding the step-by-step guide on how to get my own BlogMap. Based on Kuan Cheen's explanation, I can see that there are only 5 simple steps to be done:

Get a geo-tag
Put the geo-tag on our blog's template
Register our geo-tag to BlogMap
Get the script to display the BlogMap
Insert the script into our blog's template

OK, so first, I need to get a geo-tag for my location. Geo-tag is actually a tag containing the value of our current location's latitude and longitude in decimal degree. Kuan Cheen suggested several sites on how to check the latitude and longitude of certain location, and I chose Multimap. By browsing to the maps provided, I can get the exact latitude and longitude of my location, and prepare the geo-tag as follows:

<meta name="ICBM" content="1.343, 103.7693" />
<meta name="geo.position" content="1.343;103.7693" />

Note that the above is the geo-tag of my location. You should use your own geo-tag if you want to have a BlogMap showing your location.

Next step, I need to put the above geo-tag on my blog's template. I'm using Blogger, so I just need to edit the template and put the two-line tag above under the <$BlogMetaData$> line. I then saved the template and republished the blog. I believe you won't have any issues even though you're not using Blogger, as long as your blog provides option to edit the template.

Once done, I would need to submit my blog to BlogMap. So I went to this BlogMap submit page, put my blog's URL and then clicked "Submit Blog!". Once the blog is registered, I will get the codes on how to show the BlogMap, Neighblogs and the OPML (for Blogrolling) on my blog.

I then inserted all the codes into my blog's template, saved the template and republished the blog again. And you can see the result on the bottom left pane of this page.

It's quite simple, actually. So, why wait? You can try out for yourselves. :)

[Indonesian version]

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Goodbye Sonny...

I was very surprised when my friend and ex-colleague Mas Iwan A. Irawanto called me last night, to inform me that one of our best friends and ex-colleagues in RADNET, Sonny Iskandar, has passed away yesterday.

Please accept our sincere condolences to Vanny and family, and deeply apologise for not being able to go back to Jakarta to attend the funeral.

[Indonesian version]

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