blog update

i have written reviews for some of the social networking platforms where currently looking into for Plan Live,Social text and Jive SBS(which i co-wrote with a fellow intern) to name some.
we based the reviews on our findings and conclusions, and closed them with our recommendations.
with the purpose of enlightening the people on the Plan Live project who havent really worked with the platforms yet.

also for me, and my fellow interns, this fun and educational time is almost coming to an end ( the date for the final presentation is already set) but where we leave, new interns will come and support Plan Live, and hopefully blog about it.
but for now we still have work do to.

blog update

I said id blog more frequently yet forgot to do so.

Ive been busy with several projects.
IKve been looking for suitable images to use in plan live template's.
And working on promoting plan live on other social site's

But for the most part ive been focused on reviewing the choices for the Plan Live platform and writing reviews for them to present to the other participants of the project.

Thats the rough estimate of what im doing now.

return of the blog

I havent blogged in a while, because i didnt really find researching in social networking platforms and widget's much to blog about.

Today we had a long meeting in which we joined several project groups which are going to do different projects around and within PlanLive, we could join as many groups as we wanted and appealed to what we wanted to learn from this internship, personally i liked them all so i joined them all so it will be a busy period for me.
im not gonne go into the groups because they only just started today so there aint much to say yet.

I was also given leadership over the group: "project manager/host", which will help in selecting the platform and navigating as admin on the platform, so i wrote a few documents surrounding that group.

Translator Widget

i put 2 translator widgets in this post though it might be that you can only see 1, one of them is struggling to get on blogger, but i think both of them translate pretty well(for an online translater) but then again im no linguest(only speak dutch, english and limited german).

Artificial selection

Today was a good day.

I started the day with Wix playing with its function, and i liked it( earlier i dismissed it for not being a widget dev platform) and ill see if it will be used later on.

We had a 2 hour meeting which was informative, and opened up a new road.

Planwidget is now going brainstorm on which social platform where gonne use, so we split up in 3 groups and are going to look into diffrent platforms(wont reveal the names, not sure if there confidential ).

The platform im looking at with my teammate raymond, is looking good so far and im curious to see what the days to come will look like.

Coffee count of the day: 2 cappuccino's 1 caffe mocca.

title-less tuesday

today i worked on my facebook, but in all honesty i dont see what makes facebook stand out in the world of social networking, but time might change that.

i like twitter and blogging but im still not into the whole profile aspect of social networking ,maybe because people write walls of text's and the support of gifs and images leading to annoying spam(im starting to sound like a grumpy old man so ill stop here).

also did some introspection, and came to the conclusion i should post a pic of myself on twitter,blog and facebook(ill spare you the other conclusions i drew out it).

and the rest of the day was filled with smaller activities not blog-worthy

there's a 2 hour meeting scheduled for tomorrow which im looking forward too, might appear in my blog if not confidential.

Coffee count of the day: 2 cappuccino's 2 caffe mocca's.

mundane monday

ill blog about today and last week seeing i did some work in the vacation.

i finished up some things i was looking in to, namely wix(http://www.wix.com/).
you can make your own custom page there( looks great so far). but i decided to halt research into it till a later date.

i took a closer peak at facebook( cant figure out what makes it stand out from other social sites, so far it doesnt look very special).

and i did some studying into social networks, and how you can apply them to your work.

and on a more personal note: im trying to lower the amount of coffee i drink, tried to not drink at all today but ended up drinking 2 cups of cappuccino.

can't think of a witty title thursday

ive said it in previous blogs and i will say it again in this one: today i made a widget(and so did my teammate raymond for that matter).

i made this widget from blank template( i made the previous two by editing and modifing existing template's), and i also made it in sprout, which means ive made 3 widgets now and that's the maximum amount of widgets i get to make with a free sprout builder account.

i checked by the planpedia team to see their work, and it's looking good.

next week we have a week's vacation(though i might pop in the office to work a little), so probaly no blogs next week(which might be good, because reading back on this one, my creative writing has hit a roadblock).

so until next time, with even more widget news, and hopefully better blog writing then this.

The anatomy of a widget pt 2: are widgets safe?

Why use widgets on a social site?
There's a simple anwser to that question: why not?

widgets are easy to add and a fun/useful element for the user and the profile's visitors.

however there's is a dark side to widgets, they can be used for virus distribution.
such as adding a link to a viral website in the widget.
but with simple reasoning skills you should be able to reconize those viral widgets( they often use the same format as viral email's, such as click here to win a prize, or find out who has a crush on you). and dont just go click every link you encounter.

but despite the few viral widgets dont be discouraged to use them, there's alot of usefull and/or fun widgets, the amount of diffrent widgets out there is big, and the amount of normal safe widgets outnumbers the viral one's.

to anwser the question are widgets safe?
well basicly there as safe as most of the other thing's on the internet.
so you should be safe.
like going to a viral site , using viral widgets can/will infect your computer.

so in short, dont go clicking on links or downloading files, without thinking/researching first, a quickly made decision leads to a quick demise.
and always have a good up-to-date virus scanner on your pc(you should have that already i hope.)

the "sprouts" of labor

i started the day with catching up with school administration(filling in my working hours).

after that i made another widget in sproutbuilder, and so did my fellow sproutbuilding teammate raymond(ill link his blog though he hasnt updated it yet, http://planraymond.blogspot.com/ ).

i also searched for other widget development enviroments, but alas that didnt lead to much.

i must say i find making widgets in sproutbuilder fun, but i only have room for 1 more widget on my free account( so hopefully ill find alternative dev platforms tomorrow).

and on an unrelated sidenote, i finished my audiobook today(World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War ), so now ill need to get myself some new audio entertainment to listen to while working on my widgets.

monday, tuesday, z-day

Since i didnt blog yesterday ill make a double deluxe blog.

On monday, we had the weekly meeting.
i did research on widget development platforms, for making widgets.
also i looked at the social networking platforms that there considering using
and to quote my planpedia colleague "my conclusion was that i'm rather happy that I don't have to choose which platform to take."(http://planpedia.blogspot.com/).

now on to tuesday where the fruits of my labor finally pay of.

Me and another member from the widget team looked into a devplatform for widget called sproutbuilder( ill bugg him to blog about rather then steal his credits),he originally discovered the platform, and we both made small widgets with sprout(im afraid i cant show them to you just yet).
the program is easy to use and you dont need understanding of programming to use it(basic computer knowledge might be a req). but the catch is that with a free account you can only make 3 widgets, then if you want more you'll have to pay, but its still just one of the platforms where looking at(might be more on sprout in future blogs).

We also had a meeting with the marketing department, who told us what they do and how they do it.

As for z-day, im listening to the 6 hour World War Z ,(z stands for zombie) audio book while working(awsome book which i can recommend).

tomorrow will probaly hold new adventure's in the world of widgets for our team, and also in the world of zombie's for me.

thursday's 2 for 1 sale.

one day 2 blogs.

today i finally found a visitor map widget(which i ironicly found under the terms visitor and map).ill post a version of the widget tuned to this blog, but the essentials are the same.



just click the image and you can see a map(a google map) which pinpoints where the various users are from, which might be limited and few for this blog.

this is just one of the widgets the team agreed on that's in line of what we want, but it aint the final choice( or is it!?).

i had lunch which a few fellow interns at a local Chinese restaurant(though half the food we ate was Indonesian).

and the midday was filled with various meetings, all intressting.

this week was interesting, and the second of many more weeks to come.

next blog will probaly be on monday if not later.

till then i leave you with just one message, cafe creme is the worst coffee/drink ive ever tasted, just what's in there.

the anatomy of a widget pt 1

i noticed i havent really written a blog about what a widget is.

widgets are small gadgets that can be placed on website's or desktops.
they can be anything, from a simple clock, to a mini game.

this road to making a widget to call your own can be a harsh and lenghty one.
but never fear the internet is here, there's litterly thousands of widgets on the web already and most of them are up for grabs (most free, some not).

to give you an example here is a clock widget.







you can simple get this widget from here http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/relatime
all you have to do is go to the site click Get widget, and a window will pop up with a chunk of code, simple copy this code and post in in your blog( you might have to toggle Html).

so know you should have a rough idea what a widget really is( chances are you've already worked with them without knowing what they where called) .

there easy to use even if you know nothing about programming( you'll need to know how to copy+paste).

there's multiple sites on the web dedicated to libraries full of widgets( the link i posted is just one of them).

i hope this small explanation has/will prove usefull to you, and that is has sparked your curiousity about the diffrent widgets out there.

the tuesday , wednesday duology

im just gonne write about today and yesterday seeing as i didnt blog yesterday.

i worked on finding a clock widget which shows the time from diffrent countries(rather then your own), the search was a succes.
me and another team mate did a combined search to find a widget which shows where the visitors on the site are from and point that on the map( which has proven to be a bigger fish then the other widgets, we still havent really found one we would want to call our own).

we had a few meetings about ideas , the progress on the project, enz.

also i did some research about the marketing of widgets.

thats about it for those two days.

widget progress

today was a good day.
we found 5 widgets we might use in the PlanLive project(nothing's certain yet).
wont reveal too many details till the bosses have seen them and approved them.

but there's no point in reading this blog if i say nothing so ill spoil some info about one of the widgets i was working on today.

i was working on finding a suitable translation widget.
i found multiple of them but had to decide which one was the most suitable for plan.
the question is if my choice supports all the language's required for this project( something ill check tomorrow).
i won't reveal which exact widget i have in mind seeing as it isnt approved yet.

also we got some members from other departments to talk about what it is they exactly do, we plan on going down the whole company finding out what everyone does to really get the feel of the company.

first week

the first week of the internship at Plan Nederland is over( not counting the week of the communication training).

since the team got to know each other at the comm training, there was no need for introduction.

the first day we had a meeting explaining both the pedia and widget project in full detail and got settled in what will be our work place for the next 5 months.

the workplace is nice and clean, the co workers are nice, and i could probably write a whole blog about the coffee( taste's good and alot of different type's of coffee), to sum it all up the taste of the coffee is probably one of the biggest factors in a work place(ill just stop typing about my coffee addiction before things get out of hand).


after some researching and brainstorming we decided on the sort of widgets we wanted to use for the PlanLive project.

the next step will be to dive more deeper with a better focus on the widgets.

i look forwards to the future of the project, and hopefully after you've read this you look forward to my next blog, with new details on the project and perhaps the coffee.

start of the project

yesterday was the start of the plan live project(both widget and pedia), i am in the widget team.

as a start where researching information about widgets and deciding which widgets we will use and implement, i hope to reveal more information in the future as the project goes along.

communication training

yesterday i came back from the communication training i had with the rest of the interns of the Plan Live project, there where also a lot of interns from other company's .

the training lasted 2,5 days and contained both indoor communication training, and outdoor group game's.

the indoor part was about the different communication style's people have and how to adapt to those style's, the four different style's where supporter, controller,analyzer and promoter(mine was controller).

the outdoor part was made up out of different games and activities which where suppose to be solved as a team.

overall it was an interesting experience.