Hello there!
Have a blast on the New year! I am off for a two day trip. Will be changing the looks of this blog as soon as I come :)
avi
Archive for December, 2008
Happy New Year!
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008Why I can NOT be an entrepreneur.
Monday, December 29th, 2008Ever since I was in my my third year at DAIICT I decided that I will start my own company some day. The stories of various people who have chosen similar paths and succeeded inspired me and motivated me to work towards my goal.Today I have completed my Masters and I am going to join Microsoft in a couple of months. I am really excited about the job but somewhere I feel that I did not do justice to myself and to my ambitions. I did not work hard enough…
I was thinking of various things that I might have done differently to be in a different position. I’ll list two of them here:
- I should have spent lesser time online reading news. I am hooked to Google Reader Full time. I follow more then 70 blogs through it and go through more than 400 blog posts/News items every day. This along with the number of times I just refresh the reader page amounts to a lot. I could have spent this time elsewhere with better returns.
- I should have stayed focused. I started a number of projects in the last one year. Many of them were to just learn something new and some were with the aim to create a new product. I hate to say this but I did not give enough time to the projects that had the potential to be something. May be I’ll start giving more time to each of the projects that I start. I’ll also try to reach a milestone in fixed time duration and worry about the last 10% of the features later on.
The two reasons mostly sum up my complaints with myself. So why did I writing them here?
So that I can come back in a year and see how much I have changed things and if I improved from what I am right now. :). Hopefully the title would then have to be corrected to “Why I can not be an entrepreneur for now. What did I do wrong?”
Happy New Year to everyone!
Trying out the new wordpress…
Sunday, December 14th, 2008and the QuickPress feature is really cooool :)
Usable AJAX (how to not break the back button)
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008Have you wondered how the websites like Gmail use Ajax and yet make sure that usability is not compromised? The trick is widely being used but still, I get almost 3-4 hits everyday on this topic. So I decided to explain it…
The problem: Sending requests to servers asynchronously using javascript to load content dynamically(or should I say AJAX?) has been around for quite some time. It became popular when Google started using it in Gmail and it has been in the buzz since then. The buzz has started dying down now with usability becoming the important aspect now. I completely agree with the trend and this post is about solving one of the problems related to it. The problem in one sentence is:
While making AJAX calls, how do you keep the behavior of back button from breaking.
To explain it further: When you are changing the state of a page, using Ajax, how do you make sure that the user can return to it or a meaningful state without problems?
The solution:
Tools for a Web Developer
Monday, December 8th, 2008I have been developing things for internet for more then 5 years now. I started out as a script kiddie when I was in first year at DAIICT. I started out by creating simple websites using Microsoft Frontpageand publishing them on different [free] servers. As time passed, I started hacking javascript code, learnt the concept of CSS and why styling should be done using CSS and not HTML (seperate design from content!). Since then I have done countless number of projects, designed and redesigned my website and also participated in different programs(Google SOC 2007 with Drupal :). Today, I thought I should share the programs that I use for web development and ask you what you use.
As I mostly work on windows, the programs listed here are specific to this OS. Of course this does not mean that these are as fast or function rich as vi.
Editor: I generally use multiple editors for creating the web pages. Notepad++ is one of my first choices. It has tabs, syntax highlighting and it supports almost all the languages that I want to develop in. The only thing missing is the auto-complete feature. If there is such a feature available, I could not find it.
The other editor, that I have had an on and off relationship with, is Aptana. It is a fully featured IDE based on Eclipse and supports all the client and server side languages that I can think of. The only thing that goes against it is the bulkiness. I can never open more then 10 files at a time and still work without being slowed down by it.
Reference: For references on topics related to Web Development, I usually go to Google. I specially find articles on A list Apart, quirksmode to be of real help when dealing with compatibility issues. In addition, there are quite a few resources that have come up recently. One of such resources is Google DocType.
Testing: The rule of thumb here is to develop in Firefox and then tweak and patch-up for IE. Doing work in Firefox is very easy due to the huge number of extensions and plugins that make your life easier. Firefox is also straightforward to develop for as it does not act weird in implementing web standards.
Debugging: Of course nothing is complete without proper debugging tools. Here I find the Web Developer Extension for Firefox and Firebug to be really helpful. You can do almost anything from the combination of two.
With the combination of above tools, the life has become so much easier for me :). Hope it helps you too.
Is there something that I am missing out on? Do tell me in comments!
