Friday, November 16, 2007

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

hindi tranliteration in orkut

Was quite pleasantly surprised today to see Hindi transliteration support in Orkut.
This was a topic that was discussed in brief during the AJAX Collective at Bar Camp Bangalore 4
and I'd put it down as one of the things i need to study up.

Well, seeing the coolness live on Orkut, it definitely moves up my to-do list.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

me @ BCB4 @ 2.30 PM



Having missed out the first day of barcampbangalore-4 due to a fatal combination of rain, whiskey and all-night Harry Potter, me and a college buddy- Sudarshan, managed the longish ride to BarCampBangalore4, The Collectives Edition.
Being a newbie to barcamp I did spend some time on the wiki trying to familiarize myself with the concept... and considerable time selecting the collectives i wanted to attend...

And thus, the morning (in myTimeZone that's 11 am) found me in the BangAJAX collective. Since i know didly about AJAX, having only downloaded a Head Rush book on the same and archiving it, what pulled me to the collective was the agenda -
Introduction to Web 2.0 & AJAX --Sridhar Rao, This session is meant for newbies & begineers. Overview of web 2.0, ajax, xml, and why one should care about AJAX.
However, the session didn't live up to my expectations, as, except for the first 15 minutes it was peppered with random (read non-newbie) questions-answers dialogues - an example - 20 minutes into the session this guy goes... "Hi I am a newbie to AJAX, having implemented only a couple of production projects(newbie!!), can you tell me how I can get rid of cross-browser topics as some of the stuff works fine on IE and Forefox 1.5 but not 2.0.5"...

I guess the takeaway for me was the large variety of AJAX libraries in use... this might be as nightmarish as the multiple implementations/support levels of javascript (which was what scared me away from the field in the past)... A comparison of the capabilities of the same seems to be one the first things i need to do when diving in...Also, here are some of the notes I'd scribbled down... mainly for my reference..
  • A demo was done on the Aptana IDE, which was free web IDE... based on eclipse platform I think...
  • The speaker used WAMP server.. the windows version of LAMP
  • Scriptaculous and RICO was suggested for better UI design
  • http://crockford.com/ was a highly suggested reading material - for any newbie to the javascript language...
  • Firebug for every thing in the SLDC... and Firefox as a must browser for the dev environment...
  • HTTP chunked encoding... and Comet... was also touched upon
  • The author's blog - http://srinix.wordpress.com

Next up was the topic SEO Considerations for AJAX which more like a look into the subject of how to make your AJAXified site searchable in the first place...
One of the deeper thoughts that was tossed about in this session was that AJAX UIs basically change the interaction model i.e. links lose their relevance and that search engines will have to put more effort into how they crawl through such sites... till then follow some tips'n'tricks such as Unobtrusive Javascript, and Hijax...

Last discussion was by Shivku, on the YUI (Yahoo UI Library - I think they are going to pay a price for this all too generic name)
The presenter basically walked us through the feature set it provides via their dev network site...
Note to self- Look into the graded browser support design pattern.
Presenter's blog - http://blog.shivku.com

And then it was lunch time... :)