TechNayak(mirror)

I am really amazed at what flock has done to the browser experience. I have always been a flock fan and the recent additions to the browser are just great. Almost all the userful and popular online applications are integrated into the browser. If you take my case ( take a look at my flock settings in the image below), you will see that my favorites is automatically del.icio.us. I can write a blog post to any of my three wordpress blogs, or my blogger account. I can integrate flickr and upload photos from flock directly. Beats having to deal with the flickr upload page ( which is currently great, but previously was a pain). Twitter updates directly from the browser. Plus the myworld page follows my friends on facebook, twitter, flickr, blogger etc. It shows latest updates on photos from friends, blogs, comments on my blog, latest twitters by friends etc Its great!!  I can also drop images, links and other interesting media like videos, audio etc to my friends on facebook which is a great way of sharing.

  I can integrate gmail or yahoo mail and send pages, links, images are email to people with just a single right click button. The web clipboard which is also a godsend is wonderful when you are puling images, links and other paraphernalia from the net for your blog. For me the flock experience is perfect as it takes browsing to a whole new level. For all firefox users, try flock, you wont be dissapointed.

Yahoo India search has a new feature which is very impressive, the glue search page. Its a portal search page which displays results like a portal on the topic. I didnt see a world wide release though, but on the India page its there. Portal serach is a concept which people have been trying to work on for a long time. Ofcourse portals can only be given for relevent search results which have information sources of different types. Try it at

  http://in.search.yahoo.com

try these example searches

  http://in.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A8pWBjyekyJIoDUA2Qy6HAx.?p=shaurya&ei=UTF-8&iscqry=&fr=sfp&rd=r1

http://in.search.yahoo.com/search?p=Mysore&fr=sfp&ei=UTF-8&rd=r1

http://in.search.yahoo.com/search?p=IPL&fr=sfp&ei=UTF-8&rd=r1

You may think building a web property needs not just code but scalable hardware, but you will be surprised to know you don’t need anything but a browser. Thanks to hosted infrastructure you can run and control your online business from the realms of a browser. Even the former, code, is something that is sparingly used in today’s businesses. That’s the flexibility the web offers.

Lets see some specifics and understand what I am really talking about. You will say the first thing a web based venture needs are servers and collocation centres, WRONG!! You have EC2 for computing, or EDGE grids, S3 or other similar services for storage and even if you do require the pleasures of your own server, try one of the virtualization technologies of the web hosts. That should just about cover your hardware part of things, except if you are trying to break the record for calculating largest number of decimals found in Pi ( which stands frighteningly close to a trillion digits when I last checked).

Now comes the software part of things. Most web businesses thrive on prebuilt, read to deploy open source software. Be it blogs, wikis, forums, bug tracking tools, there is always an open source software for whatever that is that you want to do. What’s even better, is that some of these software’s are self hosted and all you need is to include some paths and you are up and running with the latest and most stable version of the software. The advantage with this scheme is that you don’t need to manually upgrade your installations; they are done by the provider.

Supposing you do require the luxury of your own server, then invest in one of the upcoming virtualization technologies provided by many top hosts. They give you shell access and the comforts of your own server complete with install privileges and best of all, you don’t maintain it.

So since the hardware and software parts of the company are done, all you have to do is think of an innovative idea and get the ball rolling.

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.

The recent opening up of the facebook platform has created a rage in the industry. Facebook themselves , after opening up to public signups, have had an increase of 80% in their monthly uniques. The facebook platform is just another icing in the cake.

There are innumerable number of apps that are being created on the facebook platform. Existing applications like wordpress are taking heed and porting their apps into the platform. Some of the initial apps have been taken over and VC’s are announcing seed fund for apps built on the facebook platform. Its like everyone wants a part of the 26 Million uniques visiting the site and want to cash in on the phenomenon. So what did facebook do right ?

Continue reading Community as a Service - implications of the facebook platform…

Note : I blog on my personal space at riteshnayak.com/blog . This is a mirror of the content.
Collaborative apps have been around for quite sometime now, but they have been lurking very close the corporate apps which can be used primarily in a business scenario. A simple example of the same could be the productivity 2.0 apps like Zoho or Google Docs. The only other breed of collaborative app has been games, which is a again a huge draw. Its true that this genre of applications is still finding its foothold on the web and as time progresses you will find killer new applications that will explore new possibilities with colloborative apps.

I had written about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and how it used the power of collaboration combined with automated project management to get arduous work done from people. Taking and extending on the same paradigm are newer applications that try and achieve some good from these collaborative applications. Its like the Seti project which uses your computational resource when idle, these applications use the power of human intelligence to contribute to a greater cause.

Continue reading Collaborative apps and Collective human intelligence…

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

Google Gears was released recently as an effort to promote offline web. I have written time and again about this genre of web applications and have spoken about the advancements like the Dojo Offline Toolkit, AIR and the new Silverlight that try to blemish the line between web and desktop applications.

Google Gears is designed ingeniously. Gears is an activex plugin on IE and an XPI on firefox(installables) . Gears then works in your browser for any applications designed to use the gears technology. The foremost application that uses gears is Google Reader, which can store and retrieve almost 2000 articles. The transition between online and offline web is supposed to be seamless, as in one taking over when the connectivity is out and the other when its back. In reader, you have to explicitly make the shift from online to offline, something like the work offline option in IE. Continue reading Getting Familiar with Google Gears…

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

The Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston has inspired me to write about it. So whats this enterprise 2.0 all about ? Its about mainstream enterprise applications going the 2.0 way. Everyday applications like ERP’s, CRM’s etc going soft and going web. Office automation taking a whole new meaning and likes of Chat, Social Networking , Wikis etc playing mainstream roles in Enterprises. Its an eventual evolution of all things enterprise into a more social, productive and user friendly environment.

Ten years back you couldn’t imagine IM in enterprise software;today most of the enterprise vendors supply their own chat service for support and maintenance. The recent acquisition of Tribe.net by Cisco and the more recent IBM including a social network in the recently revamped Lotus suite are just indicators of how big this phenomenon is. The general know how is somehow concocted to a statement “regular productivity apps like email will be ditched“, is not all there is to enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 will see penetration of tools like blogs, RSS, wikis , Instant messaging and collaboration, which can be defined as the aorta of web2.0 enter enterprise space. The benefits are tremendous in terms of productivity. A social network as a base for all applications makes the software more friendly , collaborative and builds better communication capabilities. Instant messaging can replace those single sentence emails, wikis can replace knowledge bases. Community portals can represent newletters and bulletin boards. Discussion forums can help solve and analyse problems better. Mindmaps makes brainstorming more productive. RSS and its enterprise filtering can make information management and overload a little less cumbersome to deal with ( see newsgator and Knownow ).

Take Basecamp for example, it encompasses a true project management tool with 2.0 capabilities. Updates through RSS. Blog like memos, easy to use resource and task management interface all this with a very social feel to it. If you look at Zoho and their productivity 2.0 suite, its got everything that any business needs. Online Office automation, wiki tools, mail and chat , their newly released meetings and project all are excellent examples of how 2.0 can be introduced into everyday enterprise applications and not compromise on quality.

The race is on and more and more enterprises will compete to cover as many 2.0 technologies as possible. Not all of them will prove useful but they will be an asset anyway , if not that at least for the sake of competition, the 2.0 radar will be covered. If you are an enterprise customer and is jittery about trying 2.0 , don’t fret, it may be too late when you do. You wouldn’t something as unimportant as new technology let your competitor get the better of you .

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.