About my website

I had the idea about how my site should look and function, but never really got around to implementing it until recently. I wanted the site to have all the important stuff about me in one place. Problem is, I am active at many places online, and write a few blogs. So I wanted to have all this show up on this site. Also, I wanted to have all my favorite links, videos, and other stuff from different websites to show up here.

This website runs on Wordpress. Yep, I'm using Wordpress as a CMS, and am not the first one. Wordpress is known for its blogging platform, but I found that there's alot of things to be levaraged that make this my pick as a CMS. If you're familiar with Wordpress, the rest of this post will make more sense ;) Else, why not learn more about from the Wordpress site. I like its strong community support, stable versions, and best of all a huge array of plugins. I'm using my own custom, widget-enabled Wordpress theme. If you'd like to make a custom theme, the Wordpress Codex website a good place to start.

I've used quite a bit of plugins here, some of them customized. To start off, here's some you can see at work on the UI.

• Twitter for Wordpress: Lets me show my latest tweets on my sidebar
• YouTube Favorites: I've customized this plugin to show my latest favorited video on YouTube
• del.icio.us for Wordpress: Shows the latest useful links I bookmark

Also, here's stuff in the background that's so helpful in organizing content:

• My Category Order: My theme is category-driven, meaning I arrange posts by the main navigation showing categories. With this plugin, I can arrange my main navigation menu the way I want.
• My Link Order: If you look at the sidebar, there's the del.icio.us links and there's also other links like "Me in the News" or "Links". This plugin lets me arrange the ordering of these more static links.
• postMash (Filter): Whenever you click on a menu on the navigation, its pulling up all the posts within that category. This plugin lets me custom-order the way the posts are shown.
• TinyMCE Advanced: Helps me do cool stuff while typing in my content.
• WP Include File: If I want to include my own PHP code within a post, this is the way to do it.

Apart from all these plugins, there's a lot of things I've been able to do just by using the built-in widgets that come with Wordpress.

• Add This: This cool website allows me to add bookmarking to my website. But no need for a Wordpress plugin to integrate it, I just used the Text widget and the code from the AddThis website.
• Trip Advisor: Another cool website that let's me mark the world map to show where I've been. I integrated this website's sharing code into Wordpress using the Text widget again.
• My other blogs: I've got 2 Wordpress blogs. By simply getting the URLs to the RSS feeds from these blogs, I was able to use the RSS widget to show content from my other blogs. Had to customize the RSS widget a bit.

So there's some inside info about my website. Will be putting up more stuff later on.

Welcome

Welcome to a blog about random stuff in the life of Hamman. I'm currently at the University of Alberta in the Department of Computing Science where I'm completing my doctoral program. My supervisor is Prof. Osmar Zaiane and my research focus is in health informatics. If you want to know more about me, check out my website.