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Archive for the ‘internet’ Category

create a digg facebook like frame to display external content

August 28, 2009 Saj 1 comment

You might have noticed the stylish iframes used by digg or facebook that display external content. There are plenty of argument about how bad is the iframe for the web , I believe its okay to use iframe if you wanted to share some interesting content for your visitors and keep them inside your site. Here is the simplest, optimised html and css to create a digg like frame to show external content inside your website. Enjoy. 

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
body {
	overflow: hidden;
}

body, iframe {
	margin: 0 auto;
	padding: 0;
}

#frameHeader {
	background: #ccc;
	height: 30px; /* change this to increase the bar height */
	left: 0;
	top: 0;
	position: absolute;
	width: 100%;
	z-index: 999;
}

#content {
	padding: 5px;
}

iframe {
	margin-top: 30px;  /* change this to increase the bar height */
	width: 100%;
	height: 101%; /* just to make sure that iframe takes the full content, you can reset this to 100%  */
}

</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="frameHeader">
	YOUR SPACE TO ADD STUFFS
</div>
<iframe src="http://www.ajaxination.com"></iframe>
</body>
</html>

*Update* – 30/Aug/2009
I am glad to know that folks at broadbandproviders.co.uk implimented this code in their broadband news section.

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stop crying, we have to support IE 6.0

August 18, 2009 Saj 1 comment

I am tired of seeing numerous post about not supporting IE 6.0 anymore.

If you look at the sentiments from the web developer community most of them are tired of writing hacks for IE 6.0 specific. For a change I dont consider IE 6.0 as enemy of the web developer. I think its the bad development practice of developer that create issues.

For example, when you know IE 6.0 have issues like box model you still tend to avoid doctype or excessive usage of padding on your div tags. How many of us actually take the pain to validate our css and HTML for each single page we develop on a daily basis.

Why IE 6.0 is still valid and important?
If you install a fresh windows xp even today, by default the browser version is IE 6.0. Even today, there are plenty of customers who are on windows xp and stick with whatever gets shipped in the package. IE 6.0 user base is fading but still its a very large user base to ignore completely.

My Two cents
Stop crying. Seriously. If your page is having cross browser issues, 70% of the time your HTML/CSS is not cross browser friendly.
Upgrade yourself to FF 3.5 or new chrome but don’t expect your users to do that. Upgrade your knowledge and try to develop solid css and html to fight against cross browser issue.

Resources
I should show you some way to get there also right?
6 Steps to Create a Cross-Browser Friendly Web Page

Writing Cross Browser Friendly CSS (Mozilla vs. IE)

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google says 1$ = 1Rs for Indian Adsense publishers

September 27, 2008 Saj Leave a comment
google india adsense error

google india adsense error

Well, here is a shocker to the Foreign exchange rules and RBI :) . Google Adsense issued cheques to her Indian publishers on a exchange rate of $1 = 1Rs. I just hope they will fix it soon and re-issue the cheques.

This reminds me the old forward joke that assumes 1Rs = $45 :) )

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logo plagarism

August 4, 2008 Saj 2 comments

Ever since I saw the new website www.in.com, I have been thinking about their UI and Logo. Today afternoon suddenly I remembered the source of their logo and UI theme.

It’s not a bad idea to getting some inspiration from other designers ideas, color schemes and even the work flow. But this looks like a rip off to me :)

I am not just talking about the logo, compare the color scheme and the layout as well :) . I admire the linkedin.com’s usability and UI.
www.linkedin.com logo

linkedin logo

linkedin logo

www.in.com logo

Do you think the designer or whoever approved the design can justify this inspired creativity ? :)

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opensocial, orkut and the standards

July 26, 2008 Saj Leave a comment

Its been a while since orkut launched its opensocial apps to the Indian users. It was launched with 25 pre-selected interesting apps. After a month or so, there are 317 and growing number of applications in the directory. The excitement among the developer community is really heart warming while it raises a lot of questions as an orkut user to me.

The Standards
Though orkut have a strict guidelines about the behavior and work flow of the apps, most of the apps seems like dont give a damn about it. We all know, how facebook is fighting with the apps now to make it less spammy and protect user data.

I would love to see orkut coming up with a more strict guideline before they approve an app in the directory. Take a look at the screen shot, seems like orkut approved an app with a “Under Construction” screen shot.

My point is as a user, I love the apps but give me apps thats not buggy and cheap. I don’t want to see the orkut users are “forced” to use this kind of half cooked products. How can orkut assure that my information will be safe and secure with these app owners?

While opensocial is interesting, it will be nice if they can control the apps and make sure that quality of the apps are good.

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Where is my orkut profile ? :)

July 22, 2008 Saj 10 comments

Is something wrong with orkut today? When I checked in the morning first I got the site maintenance page. After a while I got the screen shot below. it Says “Your profile is temporarily unavailable. Your data will be restored in 24 to 48 hours. Please, try again later. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

I just hope orkut is not messing up with my data.

orkut my profile

orkut my profile

Orkut developer blog dont say anything about the maintenance as well. Any one else facing this problem?

*Update*
Just came across this thread in the orkut help group http://groups.google.com/group/orkut-system-alerts/msg/d87dce8dfb2da422 . Hopefully I will get all my data back :-/

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Indian Tech Blogs, OpenSocial and Some Humble Thoughts

May 9, 2008 Saj 2 comments

No doubt that blogs are more about the individual’s or the group’s opinion and that any news posted on a blog need not necessarily be cross-checked like a journalist does. However, as we have observed, most of the prominent tech-bloggers outside of India, verify their facts and give it the time before they make any overly critical observations in their coverage.

If you look at the Indian Startup blogging community, the blogs I follow are contentsutra, pluggd.in and startupdunia.com among others. I follow them because I like to read their analysis and thoughts about Indian Startups. Recently, the trend of bashing any new ideas and any startup they come across has risen. One believes that these comments are being made without understanding the startup’s motive behind its actions and if it fits into the startup’s vision.

As an example, consider these blog entries on two of India’s widely followed blogs on internet and startups.

Here are the articles :

1.) MingleBox launches orkut Apps – Is Sleeping with Competition that bad? on pluggd.in
2.) WTF – MingleBox makes apps for orkut ? on Startupdunia.

Both articles talk about minglebox.com – an Indian campus oriented hangout place for teens and youth, launched apps for the Indian audience on orkut under Google’s OpenSocial platform.

As bloggers, each of them had different takes on this. No issues. These were posted just following the post on the official orkut blog showcasing the apps made by minglebox. Looks like no further information was looked for and a hasty post was up on the blogs. What made me think so?

If one were to go through the apps directory on orkut, they would have seen not two apps. A small check on the apps directory would have helped the readers get the correct information.

While pluggd.in perhaps got it right in terms of the value proposition for minglebox, Startupdunia, using very strong languages goes on to question on how orkut itself benefits from these apps – “If anyone can figure how orkut benefits from this (other than getting two additional apps into their fledgling app repository), can you kindly enlighten me ?“

What is OpenSocial? Briefly put, it’s a standard to make the web communities serve better to their users. Instead of developers writing different sets of APIs for different containers(social networks), OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs that allow developers to access the following core functions and information at social networks:
1.) Profile Information (user data)
2.) Friends Information (social graph)
3.) Activities (News Feeds, friends update)

To put things in a better perspective, concepts of Microformats and data portabality help us make better sense of Open Social.

These apps are for the containers under OpenSocial and not just orkut alone. And it helps the developers building these apps if these can be ported to other social networks with minimal effort. Maybe there’s some play in there for a company like minglebox. Let’s wait and watch, shall we?

While feedback, reviews and critical analysis are most welcome, especially for startups, one wonders if our bloggers and commentators are a little too skeptical of any new approach or initiative by startups? Isn’t it better if we let the new approaches and initiatives take some shape before being extremely critical of them? Just some humble thoughts from an observer of the the Indian internet and startup scene.

A lot of people, including myself, regularly follow news and reviews mentioned on these well-known blogs. It’d really help us if there is some background check and more thought put into the posts, as we more often than not, tend to take them at face value. And as someone closely associated to the web rightly said,

With great power comes great responsibility

We’ve watched this movie enough number of times, haven’t we? :)

Peace!

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Introduction to Ajax Frameworks

December 30, 2006 Saj 2 comments

Healthy Warning: Its an introduction note to the Ajax beginners and late adopters to choose from the top frameworks. If you are an experienced d00d , don’t waste your time reading this :-)

Prototype for downloads and more info

First of all, Prototype can not be called as an exclusive Ajax framework. It should be called as a Utility framework powered with Ajax.
Sam Stephenson created this amazing library of functions to ease our JavaScript development practices for the web developers. Best part of protoype are the shortcuts to handle the DOM elements, form elements, array and many more.

Prototype is backed with rich Ajax support. Periodical executor and ability to execute a js function on ajax returned html makes your life easier.Another great utility comes with the prototype is Try.these functions. This function will attempt to execute one path of code until it encounters an error, and then switch to the next path, way better than writing a browser detection code every time. Other than that this framework is powered with features like, key press event handler, mouse handler,class creator and even comes with ability to attach an event to the DOM using observe.

Scriptaculous downloads & more info

It is a collection of Web 2.0 style JavaScript libraries that help web developers add AJAX functionally to projects.The power of AJAX allows for rich user interaction without the trouble that has bugged traditional web applications. Building upon the wonderful Prototype JavaScript library, script.aculo.us provides you with some great additional value like adding some cinematic effects into your RIA efforts.

Google Web Toolkit downloads & more info

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. It comes with browser history management features that will compliment the back button issues in normal ajax application and it also have the ability to integrate with your JUNIT test cases. This is more recommended to developers who are more familiar with Java or C++.

YUI Library downloads & more info

The Yahoo! User Interface Library is a set of utilities and controls, in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. It even have some of the coolest colorpicker and some other cool ajax ready to use features. Y! comes with features like darg and drop, tooltip, containers, widgets and many many more goodies. Y! is very serious about this community and its backed up with very good documentation and tutorials. I liked this one after prototype (thats just personal opinion ;-) )

Dojo downloads & more info

Dojo is the Open Source JavaScript toolkit that helps you build serious applications in less time. It fills in the gaps where JavaScript and browsers don’t go quite far enough, and gives you powerful, portable, lightweight, and tested tools for constructing dynamic interfaces.

Dojo powered with widgets like SortableTable, TitlePane, Form validation,Menus and menu bars and Google & Yahoo maps . If your a mashup developer, you may like Dojo over other frameworks.

Rico Downloads & More info

Rico provides a very simple interface for registering Ajax request handlers as well as HTML elements or JavaScript objects as Ajax response objects. Multiple elements and/or objects may be updated as the result of one Ajax request. Rico also powered with features like cinematic effects and drag & drop.

Atlas downloads & more info

I never used this. But my Brother did in his application.This new Web development technology from Microsoft integrates client script libraries with the ASP.NET 2.0 server-based development framework. In addition, “Atlas” offers you the same type of development platform for client-based Web pages that ASP.NET offers for server-based pages. And because “Atlas” is an extension of ASP.NET, it is fully integrated with server-based services. “Atlas” makes it possible to easily take advantage of AJAX techniques on the Web and enables you to create ASP.NET pages with a rich, responsive UI and server communication. However, “Atlas” isn’t just for ASP.NET. You can take advantage of the rich client framework to easily build client-centric Web applications that integrate with any backend data provider. It required Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 .

I shall try Atlas on my Home PC one of these days :)

There are more tools like xajax, sajax, tiny ajax, MochiKit, xoad, haxe etc.

Personally if you ask my favorite, I go with the prototype for its amazing set of utility functions and the powerful ajax features. Plus a large community is using ruby on rails which integrated prototype. Opensource community already demanded adding prototype to core js libraries. So someday you should not be surprising to see prototype features on js core. If you are a .net guy, I badly want you to try atlas. It seems like very promising and cool. My second option will be YUI for its simplicity and power packed features and widgets.

Orkut is down for almost 24 hours, youngsters going crazy!

December 29, 2006 Saj 2 comments

I am not exaggerating this.

Just read this blog entries and a discussion forum entry says “I feel like crying” . It’s a well known fact that after Brazil, Indians are the second largest community in Orkut. And in 2006 Orkut become one among the top website in terms of traffic. What makes Orkut so special compare to any other social networking sites ?

Secret is their Scrap Book, People ,Teens and Adults just love to scrap their friends and some peeping tom’s get that peace of mind by keeping an eye on others scrap book. So I was talking to my 19 year old friend from Bangalore and she feels like “World has come to an end” She is feeling “so empty” . She even went on saying “sue google” if they permanently shutdown the services.

Dear Orkut,
If you ever decide to shutdown the service that will be a black day for the millions of Indian Youths. IIT’ians and other top colleges in India use your scrap book service to discuss assignments, homeworks and People even use it for small things, like scrapping to ask what time you’re going down to the mess for dinner.

Please come back soon :) My little friends(mostly) & even big friends are going crazy here :p

Riya API Example – using Ajax

July 13, 2006 Saj 7 comments

Here is my modified Ajax API example of Riya public search. I have used ‘xmlhttp.js’ from www.ajaxextended.com for cross domain access. I have also used prototype.js file keeping some other feature addition in mind. You can download the stuff here. Lemme know if you face any issues. Enjoi!