Previously, IESGlobal were relying on 3rd party CRM software which didn’t integrate very well with their outdated website. Using Drupal Views and a fresh approach to the role and permissions system, we are allowing them to use an integrated Drupal CRM solution.

We also looked heavily into their target audience, and existing marketing channels (Flickr, Facebook) to improve the way they can centralise their media and marketing updates. Flickr galleries are embedded seamlessly, and future Facebook updates can be added.

A second phase has been completed on WunschArb. We have added a highly structured content section to easily navigate a large body of content heavy in categories. Again, Drupal and Views allowed us to directly create filters to navigate it.

We have more updates coming soon and are in heavy development mode on a number of projects which need to be out by Chinese New Year – January 22, 2012! Then it’s party time!

So if you’re in China, some of the sites are blocked so you will get an Er Error. The rest are Yes or No. Let me know how accurate it is :)

The code in question:

function visipisi(url, cb)
{
  var count = 0;
  var start, cachedTime, uncachedTime;
  var cached = new Image(), uncached = new Image();
  var determineVisitedness = function () {
    cb(cachedTime < 0.05 * uncachedTime);
  }
  var errCB = function () {
    count = -10;
    cb(null);
  }

  cached.onload = function() {
    cachedTime = (new Date()).getTime() - start;
    if (++count == 2)
      determineVisitedness();
  };
  uncached.onload = function() {
    uncachedTime = (new Date()).getTime() - start;
    if (++count == 2)
      determineVisitedness();
  };
  cached.onerror = errCB;
  uncached.onerror = errCB;

  var start = (new Date()).getTime();
  cached.src = url;
  uncached.src = url + ('?' + Math.random());
}

Source & Code
Original

Bam, new design for Snow Polo World Cup:

We will have a fairly complete player profile gallery as well as a number of other juicy tid bits in this website. The games commence in 61 days time!

We also have 2 new staff on the back-end side. We can now focus on customers bigger projects which are increasing during this period. Fresh eyes, fresh ears and fresh projects!

But the big news is that we’re moving office! The office floor was sold to a single company so we’re went hunting in all directions to find something which reflected the way we wanted to work. We now have an apartment office in South East Beijing (Near VIVA!). It’s much bigger than our current premises and this allows us to grow. It’s a little tight in the engine room at the moment so it will be a welcome change.

Happy Fridays from Crystal Asia!

The intention is sound, right? You want people who are familiar in mainly Facebook, G+ and Twitter to share your page. In reality, they act as a visual buffer between your content and comments/end of the page. They are also very identifiable with advertising. The only exception to this rule (which was quickly put in it’s place) is the Facebook Like button, and now the +1 from Google Plus.

This is due to habitual familiarity more than anything else. In reality, these are useless.

What most people forget is that there are real people there reading your site and the have more than one thing going on inside their browser, and also outside. If they want to share it they will use the oldest sharing method possible: Cut-and-paste. If it’s in a conversation they will “send you the link”. We do this because without that mental bridge between personal action or person to storing or memorising the link, it is largely useless. ie. The idea of bookmarks but even more: Browsing History.

So just because everyone else is doing it, don’t. Get back to basics. Write something worth remembering.

In China it’s not such a good idea to rely on Google to do this as the service is throttled and intermittently unresponsive… frustratingly unresponsive.  Sina Weibo, the Twitter of China has GeoLocation based on IP’s as part of their API (http://open.weibo.com/wiki/Geocode/ip_to_geo). We can get this from a IP request:

http://api.t.sina.com.cn/location/geocode/ip_to_geo.xml?ip=60.194.172.177&source=$appkey

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<geoResult>
<geos>
  <geo>
    <city>0010</city>
    <longitude>116.39794</longitude>
    <latitude>39.90817</latitude>
    <city_name>北京</city_name>
    <province>32</province>
    <prov_name>北京</prov_name>
    <pinyin>beijing</pinyin>
    <more>中国 北京 北京 电信通</more>
    <ip>60.194.172.177</ip>
  </geo>
</geos>
</geoResult>

Now I need to see how good and accurate this on 500 users. I can accept a 10% deviation… and I’m actually wondering how close the latitude and longitude really is. If I can actually get it within 200m of a major exchange I’d be happy but something tells me things are not that organised :)

Adobe says to ZDNET:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

Tech Crunch sums it up nicely:

The notion that Apple wouldn’t include it on the iPhone because of performance issues was pure hogwash.

The same thing was said in 2009.

The same thing was said in 2010.

The same thing was still being said in 2011.

So you’ll forgive me when I snicker a bit at the news tonight that Adobe plans to cease development of their Flash player for mobile devices.

I think this will carry on through right into all their product lines as they usually do but why do both Flash and HTML5 on PC’s? Why not just do HTML5 and use that through AIR? They can still use ActionScript… but why bother? They can go runtime right into javascript.

Anyway… what does this mean for you? Well, we create you HTML5 device ready websites which work in all browsers (degraded gracefully for IE6) and you don’t know the difference. Better for us, better for you, better for Google and Baidu (SEO).

The future is brighter :-)

ps. Steve jobs was right.

So if South Korea does it (and they’re fairly Microsoft friendly there), will other countries in Asia follow suite? China might have it’s own plans for stopping spam.. since a lot of it comes from China itself.

It is a short term solution in my opinion. They will just connect to the new proposed port of  587 instead. But it will take time, and they have the advantage..  and it is legislation…

Zombie Storage has the lowdown:

Do these government agencies actually think blocking port 25 will reduce spam? Most of the issues stem from open relays (yes, I’ve noticed several on my IP block) or insecure servers. Botnets are a problem but using another port doesn’t fix that. From what I can tell they are also recommending people break port 587 by accepting both SMTPS and SMTP connections. Further they recommend 465 for SMTPS just to break the spec more.

The Korean government has long had a system of deep packet inspection so the technical implementation of a nationwide firewall over a port isn’t new or unprecedented. The steps may prevent some spam but really, I doubt it will amount to anything substantial. They can’t block all email and the system would probably fall over with IP forging techniques.
Update: I’ve asked a few people and it seems to be a joint initiative by the two departments and not actually a law. Although it does have penalties and apparently you get emailed warnings the first few times.

Original: http://zombie-storage.com/?p=95

Korean website: http://www.block25.or.kr/

So we loved the Switch job for several reasons and it had some special moments.

During the brainstorming session at the start of the project we realised we could do anything but we did have to conform to existing styles. As we shifted from rectangular, sharp designs into a portal idea where people “get a glimpse” of Switch and then “want to go”.

Billy noticed it was similar to the large kitchen window you can see when you leave the rest rooms. And there it was born. The restaurant voyeur sneaking a look into the magic kitchen of Switch (by kitchen I mean the front facing kitchen, in the back they have a kitchen bigger than most apartments, impressive work!).

To some developers and end users, it’s a paradise of features and plugins, to others, nights of no sleep, sweat and tears wondering if it was the right choice or not.  Customers skip the inevitable hard work and focus on their more day to day problems of running their business. The website has to perform, and it must perform in a changing world. To them it’s not Drupal, it’s just their website, app or sales girl.

Sometimes the customer is us! With our other company www.red.travel, we have seen the value in a CRM, but also in other tools which are instrumental to our business eco-system. Online and offline selling, even with small teams but a big, coordinate marketing angle can leave you somewhere in the middle of all these solutions – none of which talk to each other.

Drupal is one of those special kinds of CMS or frameworks that opens possibilities because in the world business, it’s all about getting data in, searching it, and getting that data out.

Our packages, tour operator information, pricing structure and back-end notes is purely driven by Drupal 7. In fact, in an almost “out of the box” way it could handle the data but did have to extend it.

In the coming months while it goes through beta, we will be thinking about offering it as a distribution so that others can take advantage of data tracking assets. If you are interested before then, you can email us at sales@crystal-asia.com.