TechNayak(mirror)

I have been a big fan of OpenId for a long time and also advice many people about the benefits of using it. What I really disliked was the fact that big names were missing from the OpenId directories. That changed as Yahoo is beta testing being an OpenId provider and the news is Great. First of all it almost triples the number of users who have OpenIds and also almost every internet user has a yahoo account (approx 30 million) , which makes the proposition a whole lot better.

I have been trying to make a web property OpenId enabled and its a cinch. Just download and install libraries for the multitde of programming languages and then just follow some basic configuration steps , map the OpenId users to your user management system and you are done. Here is a list of all the plugins available for OpenId enabling your site.

OpenId has really come of age and with Yahoo announcing support its become a neccesity for almost every web App. I would even go so far as to mandate websites , old and new , to enable OpenId on their sites and save the users from the painful signup and confirm cycle. The sheer number of OpenId holders should be motivation enough for properties to go the OpenId way.

Recently, the field of performance has been taken by storm. Right from the people in my company who came to improve performance of our websites to the people who gave talks about performance in unconferences held in the city, performance seems to be the thing to talk about.

A recent trip to the Yahoo Developer network portal also showed some glaringly visible tributes to the field of performance. Continue reading Performance and its importance for websites…

There are a lot of schools of thought when it comes to the comet paradigm. There are some who think of comet as a technology in itself that can change the way the web works, while others think its nothing more than another buzzword alongside Ajax and Web2.0. I think, in essence , the latter is more appropriate.

Comet is essentially an design principle which aims at achieving true push technology using http. Comet is not a technology in itself, cometd is an implementation effort to make such a paradigm possible, but comet itself isnt a technology. For real time systems and other applications like stock tickers you don’t need an entire page refresh, its enough if you can get the updated values in your respective places. Ajax seemed to be the answer for sometime with browsers asynchronously requesting for changes and then updating the same in DOM. The problem with Ajax was the polling, since the job was asynchronous, there was a interative pattern of asynchronous requests and replies. Continue reading Comet paradigm implementation…

Note : I blog on my personal space at riteshnayak.com/blog . This is a mirror of the content.

I am a wannabe webmaster, I ever so often get involved in discussions with webmasters and build engineers about hosting, reliability and optimization tricks and so on. I am also a big fan of analytics and web site metrics. My experience spans with my first tool webstat, webalizer , awstats and then graduated to Google Analytics. I am interested in the dynamics of a website, what gets your visitors there, what keeps them there, what are their turn offs and so on. My own blog has been an experiment with analytics, I keep track of my stats and compare them to my site’s design and usability and yes they all culminate to one wierd mass of analytics mess that needs a lot of time and patience to comprehend.

Of some of the metrics that I found interesting apart from interestingness , entry points, exits , pageviews , timespent etc I liked the bounce rate very much. Yes bounce rate is the most amazing metric when it comes to the web.

In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave “instantly”. - Avinash Kaushik

Sites with good content have very low bounce rates, that coz users stay on the site for longer than just their immediate need. This metric is extremely important to consider as it could lead to some startling discoveries. Bounce rates directly translate to your site’s usability and design. A complicated design often confuses a user and he or she tends to leave a site if the site seems too cluttered ( which is why I hate GoDaddy’s design ). A blank design with no navigational links is also bad. Once the user finishes reading what he/she came to read, you need to coax them to stay longer. Either by giving them sneak peaks of other related articles or any abstract writeup, tags, internal links and so on. For bloggers, please do read this article to make a list of things to lookout for when picking your blogs design.

Note : I blog on my personal space at riteshnayak.com/blog . This is a mirror of the content.

Past couple of days, I have been trying to pick out a new theme for my blog and have made a small checklist of things needed to make the decision more simple. I had been running a really pretty theme which somehow seemed to hamper the entire readers experience, So I picked this new one. Its not just me speaking here, it was the stats that showed bounces from the very fist page. Also since the number of pages /visit also had dramatically reduced ever since I shifted to the new theme, I decided it was time for a revamp. These tips that I will list below can be applied to almost all websites with respect to its usability, accessibility , information etc.

– Information : People come to your blog for information. Its very depressing if you cannot find what you came looking for. Its also more likely that if they do find what they were looking for, they will stay a little longer on your blog and may even acknowledge your effort with a nice comment. So what should you do ? make sure your content is well placed and is of good typographical quality. Avoid typewriter like fonts, they are old school. Use more rounded fonts that don’t need any anti aliasing. The position of the content is also extremely important. The content must always occupy the majority of the real estate on your blog.

– Load time : Its easy to get carried away with themes that are very glossy looking and also have dynamic refreshes and complex javascript. People!! readers don’t come to your blog for your template, they come there for the information. If I have to wait for 20 seconds to get 4 lines of information , which comes enveloped in about half an MB of images and javascript, then I will be might pissed. Take a subtle theme that is posh to look at and uses as less images as possible. The other problem is that the image based themes look extremely bad if the images don’t load; most of bloggers themes have this problem that none of the images load and you are left with a very ugly looking page which does zilch to visual appeal. Selecting CSS based layouts ensures that page degrades gracefully even if your images give way.

– Delivery : yes this is extremely crucial,which is why I went for a revamp. All things said, I come to your blog for content, so make sure I see it first, the widgets and other sidebar junk can come later. Its easy to get carried away with all the widget goodies available now for blogs, with those flash based embeds and scripts. But these only add to the overhead of your blogs load time. My previous theme had all the widgets on the left and the content on the right, as a result, only after all my content was loaded, my content would appear. A typical reader would have to wait for over half a minute to get a glimpse of what he actually came to read, that too, considering he had a good broadband connection. There were dependencies too- if one of those widgets were to fail , then your content would never load, which is bad. Always make sure your content is the first to load. A simple way to ensure this would be to keep the widgets and other junk on the right hand side of the content, when pages get rendered left to right, the content will appear first.

– Credentials : People like to know the credentials of a blogger while reading. I definitely would trust techcrunch against TechNayak, so its that essential to establish your blogs credentials. Solutions include a map of all your readers, mybloglog widget, stats from your blog and also brief abstract of your blog and you. Most of the times, a future employer will be reading your blog, make sure you get his/her attention. A simple description about you and your blog should just about do the trick.

– More reading material : If people like your writing and want to read more, give them some more material to read. In addition to your article that is already being read, make sure there are some click able links that point to more of your work. Internal links in your post could be a good starting point. Even better would be a related posts section that many blog providers offer, its more likely that people will be interested in reading more about the current subject.

– Feeds and syndication : feeds are growing in popularity and people are busy bookmarking and burning your feeds into their online world. Exemplify your feed URL, make it easy to access and use. There are some themes that don’t even provide RSS urls in the main page, don’t use them. Always make your feed url stand out in the clutter.

– Customize if you can : No theme is perfect , there is always something or the other that will be missing. It could be something as simple as the way your theme addresses people, instead of saying ” Leave a comment ” you may want to say ” Say a word or two ” . Make these customizations where necessary.

In the midst of all this don’t forget to have fun and blogroll. There is nothing sweeter than sharing link love.

Note : I blog on my personal space at riteshnayak.com/blog . This is a mirror of the content.

All you javascript programmers, are you one of those people who are bitten by the RIA bug and write endless lines of JS code and include 200Kb header or bootstrap files. Then you suffer from bloat, a condition in which a content 3kb in size brings with it 300kb of javascript for presentation purposes. Bloat is exhibited by Gmail or any of the latest google applications , which while opening sometimes makes your browser really sluggish and non responsive.

Its not so bad in the real world. There are techniques being thought of to reduce the memory footprint of these mamoth js bootstraps. First step would definitely be to use the right library , if you use dojo make sure you use the right flavor of dojo like dojo for ajax or dojo for UI etc. There is no point in having functions bloating if they arent used at all. Next step would be use some brains and filter out unwanted functions in your bootstrap files. Its not that hard I guess, get your self Venkman or the recent firebug and you can be on and reducing in no time.

Now for the real deal:

1. use Dojo Shrink safe to reduce, compress and pack all your js files together. Most of the times your file reduces by almost a third using this. This utility doesnt obfuscate so you can call the same methods and not worry about changing function names.

2. Use Dean Edwards packer to further reduce the size by removing linebreaks and other unwanted characters. This usually reduces the file by another 20%

But make sure you always have a backup of the files. As most of these things are unreversible. These are just performance optimizers, they dont help your programming.

In the worst case, if you still a Kb or two short of your SLA then go ahead and obfuscate your code. Packer does a little bit but there are some really neat ones out there that can do a wonderful job. whats the advantage you ask ? a function OnWindowFocusAndDoubleClick() will get replaced by say g() , now thats improvement.

I found this utility which does reduction, try it out : jsjuicer

For years people have been asking me a ton of questions about Javascript libraries - whats that ? why should I use one ? Do you think Im a fool ? Which library do I use , if I have to ..yada yada yada. Well I was more than happy to find the ultimatum in the subject. One of the best introductions to javascript frameworks with all the necessary indications about what to use and how. Thanks to Simon Willison and his presentation.

Click here to view the slideshow.

If you really want to use these libraries, then I suggest Dojo and YUI, both are well documented and have really cool features. You can find the Dojo Documentation here and YUI docs here.

There are a lot of blogs out there and many that you want to catch up on, but given the amount of time you have left for your personal activity, you miss out on some of the most important blogs, news etc. Its also a pain to visit each and every blog to read about the new articles, although RSS has made life easier, many still don’t know the in and outs of it and the various RSS readers. Just as a suggestion, if you are looking for a thin reader try Google Reader and for a thick client, try Mozilla’s Thunderbird. So what do you in these cases; why not get your blogs, news, updates via email.

” Hey that sounds cool. In my office people will think Im reading mail but I will actually be reading my favorite blog , awesome :-)”

Now there are a couple of services that you could probably use for this purpose. I shall list them down in no particular order of preference.

  Feedburner provides all the above with also additional features like traffic analysis. Feedburners feed is the best service they offer in which your blogs RSS feeds go through feedburner which in turn gives you stats on your readers and content. Apart from that feedburner provides you with a host of wonderful services which include publicizing, monetizing and marketing your blogs. It would be my first choice for any feed related activities.

Feedblitz provides you your updates by mail, if you are a blog publisher you can add their subscribe by mail widget on your sidebar, just like mine( look on the left). Apart from that you also get a link that you can forward to people where people can subscribe to your posts.

R - Mail, the service was recently acquired by NBC Universal also provides a similar RSS to mail service, the service already has 50,000 users who have 100,000 subscriptions.

 I have moved my blog to my personal space but continue to mirror content here because there are many who still read this blog. I see a lot of feeds pointing to this blog rather than my new space. Please update your bookmarks and RSS subscriptions to my new space.

My blog: http://riteshnayak.com/blog

RSS Feed : http://riteshnayak.com/blog/feed

Who am I? : http://riteshnayak.com

If you are not the RSS type and also don’t find the  time to read my blogs, get it delivered by mail. Sign up by clicking on the link below and all my updates will be sent you by mail

Get my blogs by mail here : http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=192584

There is this must read post by Tom Johnson on his blog about usability tips for bloggers. Sure blogging has become a rage and there has been an upsurge of blog data in the market; stats also show that many are left idle after they are started. The phenomenon is dying down, but the upside is that good quality blogs are being churned out in the process. There are many great points for bloggers and I shall quote a list of all the points.

1. Pick a topic for your blog
2. Encourage comments
3. Make it easy to subscribe
4. Include an About page
5. Present your ideas visually
6. Keep posts short and to the point
7. Use subheadings for long posts
8. Link abundantly
9. Make headlines descriptive
10. Archive by topic
11. Include a list of related posts beneath each post
12. Allow users to contact you offline
13. Present your real viewpoint
14. Write for your future employer
15. Include a Top Posts section
16. Provide an index
17. Get your own URL and match it to your blog’s title
18. Include a Recent Posts section in your sidebar
19. Reward commenters for commenting
20. Post often

Read the complete post here and try incorporating most of the tips if not all of them.