WEB & etc.

I have been extremely busy these few days. Only manage to get a couple hours of bed time. I am working on my first ever commercial plugin for a opensource project.

This is a jobs plugin. It has 2 main modules. They are Employer and Employee module. Below is what the plugin will do.

Employer:

• Maintain company profile;
• Draft and publish new job openings;
• View job applicants.

Employee:

• Maintain resume;
• Browse and search job openings;
• Keep job openings as favorites;
• Apply for job.

I know this is pretty preliminary. I promise I will add more features to it. Below are some features for the next upgrade.

Employer:

• Multi company profile;
• Company verification;
• Draft and publish new job openings for any of his/her companies;
• Shortlist job applicants;
• Reject job applications.

Employee:

• Multi resume;
• Resume verification;
• Apply job by selecting one of his/her resume.

There are too many things in plan. Some of them are interrelated, but most are not. Well, they do share some similarities, at least they are all web, interest and future income related. haha…

Ok! How am I going to do all these together?

• Develop new SNS engine
• Develop plugins for various Opensource projects
• Hosting services
• Web application consultation and development
• Business website/blog consultation and development

No, no way I can do all of these at the same time. You must be curious why I need to do all these? Well, easy, simply because I love them all.

I have to prioritize them! I decided to prioritize them based on $. Ya, you are right, its dollar.

1. 1. Hosting services
2. 2. Develop plugins for various Opensource projects
3. 3. Develop new SNS engine
4. 4. Business website/blog consultation and development
5. 5. Web application consultation and development

First of all, hosting service is something that I already had it up and running. Though I only have very limited customers, but they are all my good friends.

Secondly, I will focus on developing plugins for opensource projects. More precisely, I will develop plugins for opensource projects which will bring me income. Of course, the first opensource plugin will be for the Chinese SNS. This is because my friend already started to sell, and he is selling very well. He invited me to join him in the development. As he already has the channel, I decided to hardness his goodwill, network and experience.

The third being my SNS engine. There aren’t any good opensource SNS engine out there. KC and I decided to build one for our SNS website. Well, this is still extremely initial. I shall talk more about it when we have some progress.

The last two are something extra. This is because I will occasionally have friends asking my help on these two areas. Business website/blog is simply a company website/blog. Where web application requires programming effort or opensource knowledge.

As you can see, all these five are all web related. I really love web a lot though my job is SAP programmer. Anyway, I like it this way. Hopefully my interest will reward me soon.

I have been knowing mind mapping for years. Sometime when I was shopping at book store, I will pick up a mind mapping book to browse. I keep telling myself that mind mapping is a very useful tool for structuring thoughts. I must give it a try. Years after years, I haven’t been trying it.

3 days ago. I wasn’t sure what caused me to google for mind mapping. Oh, I think I was looking for a mind mapping tool for my “old” Pocket PC. But I finally tried a online version of mind mapping tool called mind42. I was quite happy with it. Lastly I found that its file can actually be exported in a few formats. One of it was FreeMind, an OpenSource project. Of course, needless to say, its royalty free.

I downloaded FreeMind and tested it on that night itself. I successfully structured my thought on my SNS project, a task that I wanted to do for long. Do you know how long it took me for structuring this thought? You will be amazed. It took me 2 hours! I was quite impress. 2 hours was extremely cheap for getting this task done.

The next day I used it to plan for my meeting agenda. It was quite helpful as well. It took me less than half an hour to get it done.

I highly recomend mind mapping to everyone. You may use it to structure your thoughts, to plan for meeting, to take lecture or meeting notes, for brainstorm session or any other tasks you think worth giving mind mapping a try. You will instantly be rewarded. Trust me!

Below is an introduction of FreeMind:

FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping software written in Java. The recent development has hopefully turned it into high productivity tool. We are proud that the operation and navigation of FreeMind is faster than that of MindManager because of one-click “fold / unfold” and “follow link” operations.

Oh! I end up didn’t use the Pocket PC version because I couldn’t find a good freeware. There are some good products out there, but they are not cheap though.

The online mind mapping tool, mind42, is not comparable to FreeMind in terms of features, it is quite basic, but its sufficient for basic usage. The advantages of using a browser-based application is you don’t have to install it on your computer, plus portability. The best thing about mind42 is you can collaborate with you friends.

My last post was on obtaining GMail contact list in PHP language. I will be talking about Yahoo! Mail in this post.

It seems like obtaining Yahoo! Mail is pretty easy since Yahoo provides official Yahoo! Mail Web Service.

There are 2 different ways to communicate with Yahoo! Mail, they are SOAP and JSON-RPC. JSON-RPC is compatible with all programming languages which support JSON-RPC, but not all programming languages support SOAP are compatible with Yahoo! Mail Web Service. According to the Yahoo! Mail code sample page, PHP5 is compatible with both SOAP and JSON-RPC.

There are some example on the Yahoo! Mail Web Service Code Samples page. I haven’t had time to look into it yet, but I presume it is not hard to consume. I might be writting another post when I have tested Yahoo! Mail Web Service.

How facebook pulls so many users? One of the techniques is able to pull the contact list from Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail or GMail.

GMail offers POP3 access, but this doesn’t give you your contact lists. So, how to obtain the contact list?

I did a search on google. It seems like there isn’t any official API from google. But I am lucky to find a third party solution, libgmailer. I wasn’t able to reach the download page as SourceForge keeps giving me Page-Not-Found message. But at the time of writing this post, I am able to reach the download page on SourceForge. So do try a few times if you are facing the same problem with me. Maybe could try on a different timing. (I have it downloaded now… :->)

I will integrate this into my social networking site. I will surely writting another post on libgmailer to share about the usage.

p/s:
I found another worth to have a look email program, PHPMailer. This is a powerful email transport class with a big features and small footprint. But this isn’t able to obtain the contact list.