Days in Thailand

Hubba town hall meeting

One day, Aim @Hubba came to me and gave me a chance to renew the website of Hubba coworking space.

I answered sure. I told him that it would be nice to have coworking members to listen to what they want, Hubba staffs to know what they think and a designer to know what the website should be like.

On the 19th of Feb, there was a Hubba Town Hall MTG.

Image by Piti, a gentle graphic designer!

It was nice that Maud from sent me a list of requests for the web site and everyone on the MTG gave me many voices about what it should be like.

So, let’s see when I have the time to build a plan so that we can talk one more time.

Updates

Released websites and a blog of my client in Japan
Preparing a website package for Japanese companies in Thailand, which is going to be my second step of my business in Thailand
Joined a organizer group of WordPress Meet-up in Bagnkok
Looking for a nice Thai language school
Will restart to learn Thai on my own 15 minutes per day
Working with Simba Russeau, who I met at Hubba

What I do in February

I noticed that I used to learn more when I was in Japan. This month, I try to get familiar with below.

Composer
Genesis, WordPress framework
Node.js, grunt.js
wp-cli
Vagrant, VCCW
Bobo, a WordPress plugin, see post Bogo, another WordPress multi language plugin.

About Genesis Framework

Genesis is a WordPress framework.

I was working on my original theme. A theme to be the parent theme of my future works and here is the concept image.

many original action / filter hooks
widget areas everywhere
custom menus everywhere
compatible with breadcrumb / pagination plugin

This was intended to be easy to customize, no html coding and less php coding. Now, here is the structure of Genesis plugin.

click image to see the captioned web page.

The concept looks very similar. They’ve gone far.

They have a community and plenty of child themes. Nice to know that there were people who thought similar as I did. To avoid reinventing something and to learn from former efforts and ideas, I will have a look at the theme, the child themes and documentations.

Vagrant VCCW

VCCW is for Vagrant Chef CentOS WordPress.

This is a work of Takayuki Miyauchi and it’s focused on building themes and plugins. I’ll try VVV too.

Bogo, another WordPress multi language plugin.

A multi language plugin, Bogo.

Bogo | iDeasilo, WordPress › Bogo « WordPress Plugins

Author and the plugin name

The author is Takayuki Miyoshi, the author of the Contact Form 7.

The name Bogo comes from a Japanese word 母語, which means mother tongue.

I love the concept

I have used other multi language plugins such as qTranslate and I have tested WPML.

The biggest difference of the Bogo compared to the others are,

Bogo uses the built-in multi language feature of WordPress
Bogo doesn’t add any new tables to the DB
And so, less conflicts with other plugins

The built in multi language of WordPerss

WordPress is now translated into many language including Japanese, Thai and all the other languages listed here. It’s based on the gettext software and the work of localization team in each languages.

Bogo expands this capability to let you easily build a multilingual blog on a single WordPress install.

The plugin checks what language files are installed in the WordPress and provides the features below.

enables you to switch the admin panel language
enables you to create new post for each article
provides language switcher widget
gives you a short code tag ‘[bogo]’

How it looks

You will have language switcher menu on the tool bar.

Here’s how it looks like when I switch the languages.

スクリーンショット 2014-02-16 16.43.09 — Japanese

You will get a new meta box on your post-new.php/post.php pages to make a new post of the existing post.

Users can switch languages through clicking links provided by widget and short code.

Uris works as below.

I installed a Japanese version of the WordPress which has define(‘WP_LANG’, ‘ja’); in the config file.

Front page

– home page in Japanese: bogo.loc
– home page in English: bogo.loc/en/
– homepage in Thai: bogo.loc/th/

?p=1 post

– ?p=1 post in Japanese: bogo.loc/archives/1
– English translation of the ?p=1 post: bogo.loc/en/archives/27
– Thai translation of the ?p=1 post: bogo.loc/th/archives/32

When I get rid of the WP_LANG or change it into ‘th’, which means Thai, then the uri loses its /en/ or /th/, and Japanese pages got /ja/ just after the home_url.

Other notes

I really like the simplicity of this plugin and want to use it for my projects and clients’ web site. Before I do, I need to try these

Custom post types. WordPress › Support » Custom Post Types?
Categories, tags and other taxonomies, which may come in this spring WordPress › Support » Any way to support categories yet?
Duplicating custom fields. I want the custom fields copied too. I will see if there’s any hook to enable this.

Hangout mtg, seeing friend’s grand-ma, met a WordPress geek at Hubba, went to #HubbaBarcrawl

I had a hangout meeting with my client in Japan. They say that it’s really cold in Toyama, Japan. It’s snowing and one man said that he caught cold. I come up on their screen with a T-shirt on me, nice green garden behind me and bird song as BGM 😮

I and my family went to see a friend’s grand mother and ate lunch together while our friend was out in Taiwan and Hong-Kong for his business. Children seemed happy to run around in the garden and to talk with a Obaachan.

Aim introduced to me Bow, who works for clients using WordPress. I talked about community activities in Japan and told that I want to have similar community here, too. Fortunately, we can do it together and I’m really happy.

At night Aim took us to Barcrawl, which is an event Aim take Hubba people to 9 bars and clubs local people go & drink & dance. I absolutely drank too much but it was really interesting to see Thai people drink around. Amazing that all the bars and clubs are so nice and big and bright and rich and expensive. You can see the economy here is growing and people are enjoying the growth.

Guest from Japan, UX course at Hubba, worked much.

I had guest from Japan. 4 boys visited me. I took them to a famous Thai food restaurant, สบายใจไก่ย่าง. They buy things in Thailand and sell them in Japan.

There was a nice presentation about UX at Hubba. It’s really nice to have this kind of opportunity for I can re-think about the way how I work.

photo from Aim's timeline on facebook — photo from Aim’s timeline on facebook

I talked to people in Hubba that I want to have a WordPress small meet-up and community. Aim the owner of Hubba told me that there a WordPress geek at Hubba and they would introduce her to me. Nice.

At home, we had a late christmas party. We sang songs and ate cake:)

Since I moved to Bangkok, I didn’t have enough time to do my works. It was the day before a big deadline and I needed to sit up until morning.

Found a nice Thai restaurant and café, Thai lesson in Hubba and the rest WordPress theme development

I’m developing 6 WordPress themes at the same time for one client and it’s really hard that I can do almost nothing more than them. I wake up and WordPress, I eat lunch and WordPress and WordPress before sleep.

I met a friend and went for lunch. I came to know him at the WordPress meet-up. He’d read the anngle post. He took me to a very nice Thai restaurant.

They have many pots and pans full of delicious Thai foods and we choose from them what we want on our plate or bowl. It costs only 50-70 Baht. It’s a little bit more expensive than other restaurants but it’s much more delicious.

He took me to a nice cafe too.

The cafe people were really nice. They had Japanese elementary school desk and chair set, which they’ve bought at a second hand store. Other stuff in this cafe were pretty and nice.

I’ll take my wife here when kids go to kindergarten, that is, next year.

I had a Thai lesson presented by the coworking space staff. It was really nice that they had a special paper fot the class and very kind and patient. Nice that we can ask everything.

I write Thai alphabets every night but my problem is that I don’t have enough opportunity to talk Thai. I need to do something about this big problem. Maybe having a Youtube program of Thai lesson?

UpgradeThai visit, surface mail arrival, christmas eve.

Visited Upgrade Thai in the morning to talk about a new project. The boy of Shirai-san had a very cute dog. I must take my kids there sometime.

Our surface mail luggage finally arrived.
Kid’s bicycle and all the toys, guitar and ukulele, books and iMac, dishes, our family credo board and everything. They made our house a home.

Children seemed very happy to have their toys for they’ve had little to play with.

Our daughter wrote a letter to Santa to put beside the tree, set a cup of coffee for Santa to drink and rest, put one cake for Santa to enjoy our home. And she even arranged 10 pieces of cookies for the reindeer.

After children fell asleep, we put the present, drank the coffee and ate the cookies. Reindeer are 7, the left cookies are 3.

Half day with kids, half day work.

Mari went to see PR company people to the city in the morning, and while she was away from home, I took care of the kids.

Yesterday night, we went to Toysrus in Rama IV and beside the toy store, I found a “office mate” where they sell electronic equipments, pens and whiteboard and all the other office stuff. There, we got an HDMI cable to connect our TV to the Christmas present our little boy won at Hubba Christmas party.

So, I could let the children watch “Curious George” and “Finding Nemo” movie.

The Apple TV is really nice not only for child caring but also for our family life. We danced much with “Sister Act” tonight:)

After lunch a friend of ours came to our house with their house keeper so that we can hire her. She was so good at negotiation that I couldn’t help laughing when she said “Pay me even if I’m sick and can’t come to work because I need to pay for the hospital”.

It’s not just funny and I need to take it half seriously for it’s going to happen all the time in my business too.

It seems that, maybe, they demand payments for not just in exchange for their actual work time, but for their & their family’s living.

It’s hard to get enough time to work for kids are always at home. This is the point of truth I need to do my best.

A day of meeting new people in Ekamai.

We, my family were happily invited to a party, where they welcomed us to the Ekkamai Area.

Narumi-san, the owner of a hat shop, who I have many times asked for advice invited 3 mothers with kids who all living in this area.

While boys were running around in the yard followed by our boy, the only girl were helping the adults. Mari asked questions to the mothers and mothers knew a lot of things.

Narumi-san’s grand mother also joined and she was looking the kids with smile on her face.

Peaceful Sunday!

The first WordPress meet-up!

The first WordPress meet-up I organized ended in a really good mood!

There came 9 people. There were WP beginner ( but much of experience in Thailand and in other countries in the world ), html/css coders, developers and those who are running their own companies in Thailand and Japan.

I made a presentation about what WordPress is and why people love WordPress.

Some of my friends also joined and I’m happy with that.

Others came seeing my post on facebook and post on anngle.org, and I’m happy with that too.

With some of the participants. The hand sign is "W" for WordPress! — With some of the participants. The hand sign is “W” for WordPress!

We talked about WordPress, other CMS and Thai market. Also, we talked a little about how I survive in this country 🙂

I’m planning to have one meet up per month!