Not Good, Not Bad, Just Different

Being an American living in Taiwan, your perception of life better change or else you’re not going to be very happy here. Wondering "why don’t these people make sense" is a bit of a too sad joke when talking with fellow expatriates.

The lucky of us understand that it’s cultural differences. For me, the cultural difference baseline starts with, Westerners look outward and Easterners look inward.

: Above Xinbeitou

: 6 Orchids - $ 7

: Linkou brunch

: Zhinan temple dragons of fortune

: It looks convoluted, but the user experience is tops

From there, watching and interacting with the Taiwanese people just makes much more sense. So really, it’s a case of…

not good, not bad, just different

Thank you to Ellen Rogers who taught me that phrase. The phrase "not good, not bad, just different" has seriously made life less stressful by learning to just go with the flow in everyday life.

Now, for the real reason of this entry.

I was trying very much unsuccessfully to get a member system working cleanly on Acqal.com in preparation for our newsletters starting this week.

The real trouble was that I wanted a nice thank you for registering with us landing page. The problem is that if you enable auto login on registration and your registration page is set to hide at login, you get 404′d. You could in this case set the registration content to hide on login and put the thank you text as show on login. However, you’d still have this page in your navigation called Register.

Your user is logged in already, why should you show a register page? You shouldn’t it’s bad form.

So… after much wrangling on this and the fourth time Peichi hollered at me that I better get cleaned up for a wedding reception in Taipei, I stopped working the problem.

During my shower, I thought why am I going the route I’m going. It’s brute force in a manner, making something do what it wasn’t intended to do.

ah… Western culture

Therefore, I tried something different. Since all else wasn’t working, how would Peichi look at this issue? She’d start thinking about how the system already worked and work with it that way.

oh… Chinese culture

Then it dawned on me, if I just go with the flow of the user system and adapt to it, I could have a nice registration thank you landing page and hide the original registration page upon automatic login by simply creating another login page, yet not in menu, with a thank you redirect specifically for the registration page.

When I came home five hours later, I tried that idea and boommm it just worked, on the first try.

I was estatic to the point that I thanked Peichi profusely for her help. Of course, I think she probably just thought I was loopy from the French wine and scotch of the wedding reception.

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The goal of this newsletter is to offer you a snapshot of the hot topics discussed in a few of our blogs, as well as announce our latest projects. We encourage your feedback and, when it fits, we will certainly incorporate it into our future newsletters.