D.zigns Design/Development

So my new server is almost ready. Just have to figure out what to store where. I must say, my initial reaction to the new Server 2008 is Yep, better than Server 2003. At the least, it is faster. But of course that can also be because the PC is new.

I had an interesting Saturday last weekend. We had an Open House in our community, and D.zigns naturally had a booth there. There were so many people who I know, but never thought they worked in such interesting fields. Like one guy, his company’s developing the world’s biggest laser at National Ignition Facility in Livermore, CA. Then another guy works for Lockheed Martin, and designs satellites. Yet another is working on finding a better way to target cancerous and other sick blood/body cells, without affecting the surrounding tissue.

Right now, I am synchronising all my data between the laptop and the new server. That is taking lots of time.

We will shortly receive our new pc from dell, which I am planning to use as a windows 2008 server. My present server, windows 2003, is OK, but the hardware is really old(not obsolete, but very near!). So, now I get to update my server softwares, and will be able to hopefully update all other softwares simultaneously.

As I stated in a previous post, I had updated to the latest wordpress 2.3.3, and immediately found that I was too late – Wordpress was already onto version 2.5 – so, now I have to update again. I am sure, by the time I do so, WP will have a newer version out. So hopelessly out of sync I am!

I am in two minds, whether to upgrade my laptop to vista ultimate or not. Right now I have winxp pro, and am quite happy with it. All my softwares are running quite happily in winxp, and I don’t want to upset the cart with the upgrade. As it is, I will be busy with upgrading and customizing my server, so I think I will just postpone this update.

You may have noticed that I have put up some social bookmarks below my posts.

This was quite easy to do so with the admin panel. I found it harder on my blogger website at Tasneem’s Blog. But I have put some code there for those who need help with their blogger blogs.

I also have got my OpenID from openid.net. I have other openIds from blogger and yahoo too. So in essence I have 3 OpenIDs – which is quite against the grain. The purpose of having an OpenID is to remember just one login, but then I had to go and get 2 more

I got these for logging into twitterfeed.com, and to update mytwitter page.

There were some comments about the redesign in forums where I posted for a review, and based on that I did some edits etc, to the design.

The most general comment was that the site uses tables, and is not completely css-based layout. Though I have used only css for formatting, the layout I found was a bit harder. I started with a complete css layout, and found so many differences in the way IE and FF brought up the website, I would have passed all my time in hacking the css code, and not done any redesigning at all! That doesn’t mean, I will not do it some time – in future -. I love css, and find it very very easy to maintain, but right now, the emphasis was on putting up the redesign, and getting the older website out.

So why haven’t I put it up on the main domain yet? Because I am planning to work on other areas of the website too, like the blog, the link section and the article section. The blog, I like wordpress, so will use that same, but will make my custom design for it. The link section is really out-dated, and I will be using another script for this, and again use my custom design. The article section is really a bust, so again a new script and design. I also have to start (restart) my article writing.

Updated to the latest version of wordpress. Whew! That was a lot of work.

The website itself is still very much a work in progress. A new redesign attempt is at redesign. Do leave comments for that redesign.

In other news, I had some projects last year(2007), especially a fast-food restaurant website. Initially we were supposed to integrate the restaurant’s POS with the ecommerce we were developing. But then, we decided to just design and do the online ordering system. Then there were some design websites projects. Some miscellaneous work on forms, emails, letterheads etc. Working in htm, css, asp, php, .net, as well as word, acrobat, excel. Quite nice and busy.

Right now, I am free, and looking for another project.

Requirement for a SAP PP consultant has been posted on our website – Job Opps. This is in LA and is rather urgent. Interested applicants, please visit the website, and email your resume to the email provided in the description.

Just bought a new laptop with vista preloaded, and guess what – it didn’t network with my work pc with win xp. It worked fine with 2003 server, but absolutely refused to say hi or hey or hello with my winxp. As is usual with Microsoft, I had 2 days of complete non-advance in this issue. Finally, after a lot of checkup on both the laptops, I decided my firewall on the winxp was the problem. So, I added my vista pc to the trusted zone in the firewall, and hey, presto – it worked, and is still working. And if you have such a problem visit here, there are other solutions too.

Seriously considering updating my winxp to vista, soon.

Don’t forget to visit my business site and demo site.

Happy New Year all of you. So my posting is a tad unreliable – OK, so very unreliable. If I remember correctly, my last post was in August 2006, about this site winning an award. Well, after that, I completed some projects, small ones, and right now, I am after completing my other sites. I am working on CMS demos, and have finished customising Simple CMS for the site. I have still to work on website baker, joomla and lucid cms. Let’s hope, I finish this site quickly, and then go onto do the other sites. I am using some new css I find on the internet on these sites, so it is always a nice idea to visit my dzignerweb site for new demos available.

From a search engine optimization standpoint, most link directories aren’t worth the time, effort (and often money) spent in getting your site added. However, there are exceptions.

SEO Company has a useful list of the top 40 or so web directories rated by inbound link quality.

This is worth bookmarking should you ever need to quickly get some quality inbound links to a site.

If you’re not sure about the value of link directories in this day-and-age, SEO Book has a good article about whether they are still relevant for SEO purposes. In short, yes, if they are quality directories.

Most of the top directories listed require a fee to get your site listed. However, if you’re not willing to pay for a listing there are five that will list your site for free:

1. Open Directory Project
2. Librarian’s Internet Index
3. Starting Point Directory
4. Jayde
5. MavicaNET

So, if you’re looking for an SEO boost, it would very likely be worth your time to get your site added to these five. And, good luck getting into the Open Directory Project! I’m still waiting.

For a recent project I needed to create a month-at-a-glance date picker / calendar. Seeking some design inspiration, I took a look around the web to see how others had tackled this challenge.

As a result of this search I put together a gallery of calendar and date picker designs that I liked.

In Search of Inspiration

I had hoped to find some good examples from blogs, but it seems that this feature (providing a calendar view of entry dates for the current or previous months) has largely been discontinued. And for good reason — did anyone ever use it as a way to browse someone’s blog? I never did.

Another source I had expected to provide some useful ideas were the date pickers used by travel sites. However, in the main I was disappointed by how poorly these tools were designed from a presentational standpoint. Yes, they functioned correctly, but did they have to look so ugly?

In fact, not all of the date pickers even worked properly. For example, try using Jet Blue’s in Firefox and see if you can navigate forward a month. Just try getting Continental’s to even open in Firefox!

Interestingly, some travel sites, such as Expedia and Virgin Atlantic, have decided to forgo the date picker altogether as a means for choosing your travel dates.

Why they would do this is beyond me — the date picker icon takes up very little screen real estate and is an invaluable tool if you’re not fixed to particular travel dates.

Let’s say you wanted to travel on a Saturday in September. Without a date picker you’d have no way of knowing what dates to choose without consulting another calendar, which you may not necessarily have to hand.

Success at Last

I had more success with the new breed of online calendar applications. The majority of them combined functionality with simple, clean, clear design.

Where I did strike a ‘goldmine’ of sorts was at a couple of sites where you can download user-created skins for various desktop applications. I found many different skins for a calendar app called Rainlender, some of which were extremely well designed.

Obviously, it’s not always possible to exactly translate the design of a desktop application to a web-based one. However, with a bit of creative coding I’m sure you could get pretty close. And what I was looking for was inspiration, not to simply copy something someone else created.

The Gallery

So now I have a nice reference collection of good calendar designs. To save others the effort I had to go through in finding them, I’ve come up with a showcase of the ones I liked the most.

I’d love to find some more examples, so if anyone has any, please email me or let me know in the comments.