One of the greatest things about the internet is the Open Source movement. Incredible shifts in collaborative working as demonstrated by sites like GitHub are some of the greatest manifestations of this philosophy. It is exactly that kind of collaboration which requires one to work towards the “greater good” that makes me think that the right conditions to spawn an Open Source-esque movement would never have occurred in over-competitive Asia.  Working in a corporation in Taiwan has provided me with insight into the type of cutthroat competitiveness that is part of the culture here. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned here is that any sort of co-operation which requires sacrifice of competitive advantage is considered naive or foolish.

One of my close Taiwanese friends says that kids here are brought up with competitive thinking from a very young age. The strategic principles detailed by the famous treatise “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu (孫子兵法) are apparently introduced in a more palatable format when kids are still in grade school. The end result of this type of upbringing is not an environment of collaborative learning, sharing, etc. It is an environment where people at the very best don’t work with each other, at the worst, work against each other. Now, scale that thinking up when it comes to a family, a company, or a country.

Where the game is always about more than the game

One thing about living in Taiwan that has taught me a lot is the strategic boundaries of games here. We recently had a team-building activity in our company. It was a challenge which divided our workers into smaller groups and the group which won would receive a small cash reward. One of the  very first things the game-master brought up was something along the lines of “don’t sabotage the game for other teams.” I’m not sure if I’m too old or boring, but it was just a team-building exercise, the reward money was not substantial (less than 500 NT), so I just assumed people would appreciate the exercise for what it was and play fairly. The game-master, knowing the kind of competitive thinking of the locals, had to make her warnings up front to encourage fair play. Maybe I’ve been away from the West for too long, but I figured most people would understand the purpose of the exercise was not to win, but to extract whatever team-related lesson they were trying to impart.

As such, the game in Asia often is goes way beyond what happens on “the playing field.” In fact, I think a lot of people here spend more of their time strategizing about the meta-game (conditions, backroom stakeholders, other external forces which the spectator doesn’t get to see) than the actual “on field” action.

Extreme competitiveness ≠ Open Source

Anyway, back to the point of this post: Open Source couldn’t have come from Asia because the competitiveness ingrained in the culture here teaches the opposite lesson: don’t share working knowledge because it could help those who are not on your team, because they are / could be your competitor. This precludes “naive” doings such as releasing source code for the masses or helping somebody else improve their project. That said, I do know people here that do enjoy working on Open Source projects, but the culture here means the movement would never have started here.

In part one of this series, I gave some background about web design in Taiwan. In this part, I will expound on why I believe Taiwanese web sites always strive to have a very busy homepage with as many colors, animated widgets, and images as you can cram. This stands in stark contrast with Western design thinking which emphasizes simplicity and focus.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying sites can’t be busy. If there’s a lot going on in the site (Taiwan’s Yahoo! portal is a good example, as is the technology forum mobile01.com), you need to surface that content on the homepage. On other sites for small businesses or small organizations however, focus is important so that people are able to get the information they need or do whatever tasks they need and get out. Unfortunately, it comes back to point 2 I made in the first post: Web design in Taiwan is focused on business image, rather than users and business goals. And one day a few years back, I came to the realization what that image was: the night market.

The Taiwanese night market is an orgy of colors, smells, sounds and people all crammed together in a narrow street. Up until ten or so years ago, this was the main nighttime entertainment besides sitting at home watching TV. A stall at the night market will have one or more of the following features:

• A long queue of eager customers
• Scores of products
• Something moving to catch your eye
• Something fragrant to catch your nose
• Something loud to catch your ear
• Colorful display

The real drivers here are population density and competition. Everything is squeezed together in a small area and stalls which offer similar goods are very competitive. The pressure to stand out amongst the cacophony and the competition means for a never-ending game of one-upmanship.  If you try to map this type of thinking to web design, you get:

This series of posts are going to focus on how I rationalize what I consider to be poor design choices in Taiwanese websites. Before I begin with the first topic, I’ll set up the series with some background observations that I gained during my time as a developer in a small web design studio here. Most of our clients were small businesses, so that has a huge impact on my experiences. These are just my opinions and would love to see some discussion below in the comments to see how they hold up against other people’s experiences.

Screen capture taken from the Taiwanese government site Culture.tw

1. Design is not respected in Taiwan

This attitude may be changing slowly thanks to the impact of Apple products in Taiwan, but basically being a designer in Taiwan means lots of work for very little money. Design here is treated the same as commercial artwork – it’s seen as a commodity with little importance (“drawing pretty pictures, anybody can do that”). How does that translate when you’re dealing with clients?

• They don’t listen to your informed guidance and often will push to have their design changes implemented even if they go against the goal of the design (“the boss’s girlfriend likes pink” -type stuff)
• You can’t charge by the hour here – this is a particularly painful point, because the client believes it’s her right to make as many changes over the course of the project thereby diminishing your already meager hourly average. I did have a client where we did charge for extra changes, but this was agreed beforehand and even if the extra charge was minimal, it did help to reduce the number of changes. However, most clients here don’t get that paradigm and just think it’s their right.
• They don’t really understand what you do, so you’ll get comments from clients like “I want more design” which just boggles the mind.

The worst part about this first thing is that there are a lot of low-cost web design providers that charge less than 50K NTD (~1600 USD) for a site and use cookie-cutter templates and other ways to reduce their costs. The drive towards the bottom means that the quality of most websites in Taiwan is pretty shocking and will continue that way until general understanding of design improves. The guys working in these el-cheapo web-shops are focused on quantity and speed, and don’t normally have the time (or onus) to study better methods.

2. Web design in Taiwan is focused on business image, rather than users and business goals

When you talk with clients about their website, it’s always about their business and the image they want to project. You’ll also find that your clients rarely have any business goals in mind when deciding to get a website (our competitor has one, so we need to get one, too). As a designer, it’s your job to bring the focus of the client back to the user and on the business goals they want to pursue. Normally, they’re thinking: Flash intro, lots of colors, visitor ticker, and any other bright, flashy widget they can stick on their page. You need to rise above this kind of thinking and put the focus on the right track, otherwise, there will be a lot of time wasted and frustration after they realize that the website doesn’t get them a return on investment.

3. Taiwanese web developers don’t love web standards

This is improving as more Taiwanese developers are working for companies like Yahoo!, but for a long time, Windows was the only OS in Taiwan. A lot of prominent local websites (even government ones!) only work or “work best” in Internet Explorer and up until the smartphone explosion and the rising adoption of Macs, that wasn’t a problem. However, this is a new day and age, and when your site’s navigation uses Flash (as a lot of bar, restaurant and hotel sites do) – say goodbye to your iPhone user who’s trying to get information while they’re on the street trying to decide what’s for dinner. There is a growing group of talented front-end engineers in Taiwan, but the vast majority of web-site builders here don’t have much awareness of standards, especially semantic HTML. They don’t really get what the tags are for (granted, they are markers for English language constructs), and it shows in their tag selection.  It also means that if you are writing solid, semantic HTML for a Taiwanese website, by default you’re going to boost their search engine ranking because a lot of sites are still using table-based layouts and Flash.

I will be adding to this list as I think of more, but until then, I’m looking forward to reading about other people’s experiences in the comments section.

Open Graph is Facebook’s attempt to standardize a layer of descriptive metadata to all content on the internet. Being a fan of semantic movement Microformats, I’m trying to bring this to any sites that I develop these days.

Open Graph’s website says that currently, Facebook and Mixi (the Japanese social networking service) are the ones consuming this metadata. It’ll be interesting to see if Google will acknowlege this format in the future (if they’re not already). At the very least, adding Open Graph metadata to your HTML will improve the appearance of your content on Facebook when people ‘like’ your page or post it as a link on their wall.

One of the basic four datum that you add to your page is type. The problem is that there are so few types, even at a general level, I can’t see how they expect to classify all content on the web into these types.

There are a total of 34 types for all content on the web. In the business types, there are only the following five types:

• bar
• company
• cafe
• hotel
• restaurant

I’ve just spent an hour and a half upgrading to WordPress 2.9.1. Why did it take that long? Well, their database upgrade assigned the wrong collation to the fields in the database, rendering all the double-byte characters in my posts as ???. Very annoying and a pretty major oversite for such a widely adopted piece of software.

After searching around the WordPress Forums, I found this post which blames the Gengo plugin for these encoding problems: [Plugin: Gengo] characters showing as ?????.

What was the solution? Open up phpMyAdmin. and:

1. Change the collation for each table to “utf8_general_ci”

2. Change the collation of the offending fields to “utf8_general_ci”

It’s a pain, but it’ll solve the issue. Hopefully, the next WordPress version will solve this problem.

Well, I signed up for the Versions app beta and finally got it about a bit over a month ago. I installed it and then minutes later, I clicked it off, fired off an email to their feedback address and removed it from my dock, expecting never to use it again. You see, the problem was I couldn’t get it to work with my Site5 SVN setup. I received an email back from the beta team and now it’s working and back in my dock.

Version’s website mentions a feature: svn+ssh:// key pairs are unnecessary. However, the first time I tried to connect to my repository on Site5, I got an error message “Connection closed unexpectedly.” I tried many different login permutations, but nothing worked. And so I was resigned to looking into other more painful Mac SVN clients like SvnX.

The email today alerted me to newest beta update and so I downloaded the update and tried again. No beans. Following a tutorial on setting up SVN on Site5 I was still getting the same error. There was still no way to point to the private key I had set up. After re-reading the Versions website (I really hope some documentation is on the way), I realized I was going about it the wrong way. Assuming you’ve already setup SVN on your Site5 account, here’s the correct way to connect to your Site5 SVN repository without creating key pairs:

Location: svn+ssh://[Site5 username]@www.[domain name]/[path to repository]

Example: svn+ssh://username@www.versions.com/home/username/svn/project
Username: [Site5 username]

Password: [Site5 password]