First Lesson on Talkiv.com

Today we had our first lesson on www.talkiv.com! It was a really successful lesson conducted by one of our selected tutors. Many more bookings for more lessons have been made already. We are looking forward to a lot more future lessons and will continuously improve  our platform.  A Korean version and integration of a payment system are on the way.

Globalize2

We have started to adopt I18n for internationalizing our application. It was quite a hurdle and took almost 3 days to find all the plain-text used in our application and replace it with 'I18n.translate' calls. Unfortunately I18n doesn't come with content internationalization. You may want to have a list of countries being displayed in the users' language, for example.

One way you could internationalize your content is putting the content that you need to internationalize into the internationalization YML file itself (i.e, en.yml). One catch is that your keys may not start with numbers. Having everything that needs to be translated in one file can be convenient if you delegate the translation to someone, because that person would have to only edit the text file you hand them. One downside is that your YML file grows extremely big.

Now I found Globalize2, a internationalization plugin that builds on I18n and provides content translation. It looks quite promising and more 'rail-ish' than putting your content into the YML file.

Backup Haven

The worst thing happened: I accidentally deleted all the user data on our server! I don't know how this could have happened, but instead of issuing a 'select * from users', the command I saw in the history was 'delete from users' ! -- all user data gone in less than a second -- worst nightmare come true!!!

Fortunately, I had developed a backup script that would backup all the databases to our S3 server. What a blessing! Now I could restore all data with simply mounting the backup snapshot.

Lesson learned? Amazon EC2 and S3 rock, and having a backup script is the i dot! Take a look here for an introduction.

Blogger is simple, easy

The variety features that wordpress.com offers comes at the price of complexity. I tried to find a way where to put 'about this blog' information in the sidebar, but couldn't find it.

Also, it Wordpress still seems kind of buggy to me. I tried to upload a custom header image, like i did with this blog here, but the image always disappeared after refreshing the site. Or yeah, and not every theme allows you to upload a header image, btw.

On the good side, though, is the interface: it looks sleeker and more stylish. But what use is a good looking interface if it stays in your way and makes writing blog entries more complicated?

Wordpress?

I am thinking about moving my blog to wordpress. It provides a lot of more features than blogger.com I feel.In fact I have had  a wordpress account for quite some while now. I will try out what interface and features I like better. So I might blog some other entry on jinthing.wordpress.com as well.

ajuma and train (iPhone picture)

I took this photo with my first generation iPhone and edited it with the iPhone App 'Best Camera'.

Google Analytics During Development

Google Analytics is an awesome service that gathers data about traffic data to and on your site and displays it in sweet fashion with graphs. The problem is that during your early deployment and or development phase you will be responsible for most of the traffic and distort the data by quite an amount.

Especially if you do offline advertisement (distributing flyers, posters, etc). you will want to an estimate idea how many people visit your website due to that (probably inefficient) advertisements. Under you google analytics account you will find the numbers under 'traffic sources/direct traffic'.

Since most of the direct traffic, the one without referrers, will be generated directly from your development machine, I was wondering if there was a way to tag your own generated traffic or never gather it at all. Any ideas?

talkiv.com

Proud to announce that we put our new online tutoring site www.talkiv.com finally online. We have four tutors from the states so far and several Korean students from the Seoul National University (SNU). We are planning to expand our program further to other top universities in Korea - Yeonsei University and Korea University and KAIST are planned for the next weeks.

At the moment we are working on a translation of our site to Korean. It should be available in a couple of days.

Hope you take a look at our site and give us some feedback at info@talkiv.com.