As mentioned before, I am creating a product that Hong Kong people can be proud of - a community to help people make environmentally friendly choices on food. I have spoken with some business partners and friends and we are all very excited about the idea. I’ve had this idea for more than a year now, and after leaving Yahoo, I’ve spent time researching into web technologies that would help me achieve this goal. I’ve networked with businesses and industry experts that will help me on different stages of the project… Crowdsourcing, Web marketing, development, Environmental and Social Responsibility professionals, WWF HK, CSR Asia… etc. Finally, it has come down to one of the last, but very important issue - the domain name. I’m thinking about using this one - currystar.com. I registered this name with the intention of opening this food / menu site. I only put my own personal blog on it because the site wasn’t ready yet and I was learning different web blog / CMS systems. So, should I use currystar.com? And move my blog back onto the free cloneofsnake.wordpress.com site? Or perhaps one of my other domains - iswack.com or streetwalker2.com I like currystar.com because I think the name sticks easily, but if I can find a better name that stands out just as good, and is related to food + environment + travel… then I may choose that instead.
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Developing Crowdsourcing Community with Drupal
In the recent months after I’ve moved to Hong Kong, I’ve been working with my former school mates from College to revamp their existing e-commerce pet apparel store and to launch a new business. For that purpose and in preparation for my new role in Tokyo, I’ve been devoting my time to 3 things, 1) learning to develop web sites with Drupal, 2) catching up with the latest SEO (Search Engine Optimization) topics and 3) brushing up on project management skills I learned and used at Yahoo. This post will be about part 1 - Drupal. I had learned of Drupal a few years ago, I was looking for an open source CMS to be used at work internally as an information sharing portal, and Drupal caught my attention because it received support from Google! I didn’t pick it at that time because it didn’t fulfill our functional requirements. However, I did tested it out and honestly, I found it “not very user-friendly”. It was obviously aimed more toward web developers than the regular Joe. What I realized was this: if you just want an easy to use web site to put up contents for yourself and your friends and family, then Drupal is not for you! (Use wordpress instead.) If you’re a business however, and you’re looking for quickly building a highly customizable, highly scalable web site, then use Drupal!
Read MoreSold our house in Seattle, bought a new condo in New York
I’ve meant to come back and post about all the things that I’ve been doing, but I’m not too good with multi-tasking… Whenever I’m too concentrated on one thing, I don’t want to spread myself out to do other things. Anyway, after my last post and my last day at Yahoo!, I flew back to Seattle and stayed for a couple of months. Our family house was still there with no one living in it, so my mom and I went back to pack everything up and put it on the market. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to move from a home of more than 15 years, but I can tell you it’s no fun at all! How I wished DragonBall’s Capsule Corp. was real… LOL. While I was in Seattle, I continued to communicate with my friends at cuusoo.com and refine my research plan. (I’ll post it on here later.) I also emailed the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo to clarify about the research plan and the “Supervising Faculty of Choice”. You have to fill out that field on your research plan, but it seems that you don’t have to contact the professor beforehand. I sent 3 emails to 3 different faculty members, only the 1st one returned my email, the rests simply ignored me. (I sent the email in Japanese too! I’ll also post that here later.) Another requirement was the “Japanese Language Proficiency Level” form, which I needed to find a teacher to administer some sort of test to me. This turned out to be a lot harder than I originally thought! No one at the University of Washington’s Japanese department could do that for me. In the end, I went back and contacted Yamada Keiko in New York, whom I had gotten a last minute crash course from back then for the interview of the position at Yahoo Japan. She gave me the sample JLPT Level 2 test, which was pretty tough!
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