TechNayak(mirror)

www.dontclick.it

Truly awesome piece of work. Definetely worth a look
This really has to appreciated. An entire site navigation built around mouse movements!!! yes. The entire site, built using flash, provides navigation through mouse movements. You are warned however to not click and you will be only questioned if you click. All actions ( actionEvents in the programmers dictionary)  are emulated using simple to use mouse movement. Whats more , they even play back your entire navigation pattern, proving a point to those click to register-hit folk. You listening Google? It would really be boon for physically challenged people to use such navigation as it doesn’t involve CLICKing. If this catches up , wonder what the CPC(cost per click) would be !!

So you are a UI designer trying to make a web page and are spending sleepless nights wondering how your pages look on safari, konqueror, mozilla, etc. Well there is a service that offers free screenshots of your webpage in almost all popular browsers.

Browsershots is a site where you submit your url and then wait for the screenshots to roll in. You can even select other elements like screen resolution, javascript, java version, flash version screen depth etc. Definetely a great offering for UI programmers I must say, and its free!! Just see what my site threw up. Lots of browser incompatibilty   have to sit and fix them all.

After a good response on the blogmusik article, I realised how much people value their music and their choice of music, and decided to write a short article about the many music sites that exist, and what they are capable of. One of the newest offering is anywheremp3 which incorporates similar/even better outlook to blogmusik. Anywheremp3 offers a choice of players which you can play your music on, which is good, considering the fact that the bigger part of the world is still yet to see an iPod. The same suggestions of music and it even integrates with your mp3tunes account.

Similar to these are other startups like MOG, qloud and mystrands which rely on users to rate and suggest music to their friends and other users. I think i already mentioned pandora, the music genome initiative, and for an online radio, i would whole heartedly suggest live365. Well there you have it a complete range of music based sites to choose from , no go and quench your thirst for them rhymes.

(mt) Media Temple - (gs) Grid-Server : Details

There is some relief in the hosting world with the introduction of grid computing hosting. For the uninformed web hosting comes in two flavors - shared and private. Private hosting(Expensive) is when you have control of your own server and the server is dedicated to your application. Shared hosting on the other hand, is when you have hosted on a  server shared by many other applications. Typically many users host applications on shared logins of a single server. Mostly shared hosting is the viable option with low costs and supported technologies, but the elemental flaw with these are that, you may end up on a server who hosts a resource hog. A resource hog is a site that uses most of the resources on a server like cpu, bandwidth etc, since there is no easy way of controlling these factors hosting companies strive to maintain a balance of resource hogs and other sites. The other sites hosted on such servers tend be really slow and deteriorate as the load on the resource hog increases.

The solution to such problems to virtualise the server and switch between servers when the load is high, such virtualisation comes at a big price and can be implemented only in limited cases. The other option is to provide grid computing and that concept is what is seeign the light of the day.  Medai temple has started offering Grid Server hosting for as low as $20 a month. My hosts are also beta testing virtual private hosting which is another concept in itself where the user feels he/she has complete control on the server which is virtualised and a simple load balancer takes care of peak loads on applications. These technologies must become a regular offering in web hosting as time progresses

Dojo has just released version 0.4 the new features were present by Alex Russel at the Ajax Experience Conference. You can download the pdf of the Dojo in depth presentation here. Some of the features i like in Dojo have to be definetely the new widgets like clock, progress bar, filtering table etc. There is also a new charting engine and some enhancements to Editor2.

Was just checking out the new social network that is gainign popularity in India, Gazzag, and boy was I dissapointed. After the signup procedure i couldnt even get into the site.  The site is painfully slow if not down most of the times and even after a good one hour of trying i couldn’t get past the header and the menu. The site again is again targeted towards the South American audience and hence provides a export of friends from its arch rival Orkut( another South American Socionet). There are some concerns i have about Gazzag and i shall quote from their wiki and their company page

Social Health concerns :-)  ( thats terminology for the uninitiated) : Generally speaking, the members of Gazzags’s service are young adults in South America, Europe, North America, and Asia aged about 18 to 30. However, even that cannot be accurately defined as there are also many other users within other regions and age groups. The network doesn’t require any invitation from existing members, and anyone above 18 can join in.

  Other Concerns ( from the company site) : You will be able to meet lots of new people and even start dating if you wish. For this purpose you can use Gazzag Dating, a separate site where you can communicate using a nickname and remain anonymous as long as you wish. 

I think its the age for people to take more caution and control over their social network identity and contacts. With more and more impersonations and other scum in these kinds of network the question about security of such sites also is important. I think one of the main reasons for the successof facebook was their ability to control visibilty across the network. Gazzag also asks for peoples Orkut aka Gmail and Yahoo passwords; This procedure requires certain protocols and security certificates, which I could not find.  Lets see where Gazzag goes from here. Well if I can get into the site then i shall surely write about its features and offerings.

Arguably the most popular browser around, firefox, has just become version 2.0. The browser was released a day early to what was supposedly the actual release date. You cn download the browser here.

There is a lot of hype over this release and also a lot of excitement as it falls almost in line with the IE7 lauch. There are already an average 350,000 downloads of firefox2 in just one day and you can expect it to only increase. Some of the new features of firefox2 are all new webpages will be opened in tabs, spell checker, search bar suggestions, session tracking , Rss feeds etc and also a host of other plugins to be integrated. The open source model also means that there may be more Flocks 

There are lot of parties organised for the launch and are scheduled for oct 27th. There were almost 20,000 beta testers and more than 350 parties playing host to the launch with about 3300 poeple attending these parties. Phew!! shows the popularity of a third party browser. I shall check out the new firefox and write about it soon.

The last blog post of Sitepoint’s Aneitlich, there is a short but powerful summary of points for marketing. Couldnt have said it better…

Finally, here is the bottom line:

1. Make business development a priority. Less qualified/talented people who market do better financially than more qualified/talented people who don’t.

2. Develop a powerful, compelling marketing message that attracts prospects to come to you.

3. Focus your marketing on a target market.

4. Get visible in low cost, high impact ways, preferably by educating your marketplace about the problems they face and how to solve them.

5. Think big. We have one go-round in life as far as we know, so don’t waste it on small thinking.

6. Do what you love, and if you can find a way to get well-paid for it, you are doubly blessed.

Really

Google Co-op

Google Co- op has just released their customised search engine for blogs, websetes etc. The service lets you create your own customised search engine which will search based on the preferences you set.  Imagine, people searching based on yoru likes and dislikes. You can choose what sites to be searched and also what content is to be displayed.  You can also earn revenue by integrating your adsense account into the search preferences. Pretty cool ofering i must say, but what i would really like is a search engine that crawls my website and provides a Google interface to the search results, something like a site search. This service can definetely be architected to achieve the same result, but it looses focus I feel. Are you listening Google?

tehBubbleGenerator-XG1

No, it aint a typo, a product of teh company, a simple to use bubble generator which is a lot of fun to work with. I personally like the wizard like interface to teh entire process, makes it really easy to use.  Teh responsiveness of the application is also very impressive, couple of bugs here and tehre but nothing too big. Teh idea of sharing teh image manipulated is also really cool, Just see what I worked out with it.