They are following me everywhere. Yes, I admit I’ve been there. But that’s not a crime!

What is more surprising than you find internet marketing ads are following you? I visited Dominio.com and NetowrkSolutions.com yesterday, and today found them following me wherever I go. On totally different content, repeatedly and on multiple sites. Here are screen-shots.

I know the only way to get rid is to clear browser cookies. I did and they went away!

[Note: Typically I use AdBlockPlus, but these days I am trying to understand how AdWords works.]

- Ankit

tool used for creation: http://vectormagic.com/online/how_it_works

Another from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IIT_Kanpur_Logo.svg

-Ankit

IRCTC charges flat Rs 10 on each ticket as their service charge. But why? Cards payment industry has a painful clause that merchants has to bear any fraud. For example, if a fraudster books a ticket with stolen card and later the card owner files a chargeback, IRCTC has to pay the amount back. But the fraudster has finished enjoying travel before owner files a chargeback! So how to does they deal with this? IRCTC decided (like what other merchants do) to take this from consumers as an insurance money. And that’s how an honest poor Indian suffers!

Let’s get back to the business of this post. Apart for typical IRCTC charges, the consumer has to beer additional bank charges too. Refer the list of transaction service fees charged by various banks at IRCTC. All credit card payment gateways charge 1.65-1.8% of transaction amount, Debit cards are charged at flat Rs 10 while net-banking transactions are charged a little more (Rs 10 + Service Tax).

If you want to save a few bucks while booking small tickets (up to Rs 600) use credit cards and debit cards if they are enabled. ICICI has enabled use of Visa debit-cards at credit-card gateways. I typically select Axis PG and use ICICI debit card. As a result I pay Rs 10 + 1.65% additionally.

- ankit

(for vsnlproxy. as of 25 April,2010)

It means at IITK people download videos at an average speed of 5.3 kilo kbps. People here enjoy the best internet/networking infrastructure in UP (or probably in India too). The average speed is almost 10 times better than what an average Indian gets. If you see carefully, the average for Kanpur is pulled up 3 times compared to rest of India and UP. Why? I think it’s just because of IITK!

Note: The data for bsnlproxy is too different. Seems like using vsnlproxy downloads videos much faster.

- ankit

Rich colour photographs: They add liveliness to your website. Some of the academic websites have photographs of saturated colours and these are highly discouraged. Photographs of real students (or at least Indian people/models), campus or building definitely helps in making applicant’s mind.

Latest Happenings: Building a website is a continuous process, and it must have up-to-date information.

Moving content: Widely said – moving content on websites is bad. However, as long as it does not hurt visitor’s attention it is acceptable. For example, the fast moving content at IIITM made me search for what I’m looking.

Two institutes which took my immediate attention are Mangalayatan University and IIT Madras. They both have some of the best designs and give the first impression of excellence! However, I personally prefer former as their whole (home page) content fitted in viewing area. For IIT Madras’s home page, I am required to scroll through to see rest of the content. At last, IIT Madras wins the game because of their ‘site search’ feature and CMS.

1. IIT Madras (IITM)

They have a well chosen color scheme, search box placement and classification of information. No doubt it is designed by students, but it shows their excellence! I am amazed to see Joomla as their CMS. I think they are the only guys using a full fledged CMS in Indian academic world. Hats off to their excellence and awareness!

2. Mangalayatan University

Well chosen theme, photographs, course locator and highlighting of admission process. Pros: fat footer!

3. Jaipuria Institute of Management (NOIDA)

Pros: Photo animation, Color selection. Focus on admission. Cons: Not any.

4. IIT Bombay

Pros: selection of high contrast colour scheme, sidebar menu arrangement. Cons: scrolling events list and flashing footer.

5. IIM Ahmedabad (IIMA)

Pros: Photo animation. Cons: somewhere it seemed to have messy content. I feel they should experiment with alternate layouts. Also, the sitemap link is problematic as popups are not visible to search engines.

6. Delhi College of Engineering (DCE)

Pros: Home page design and content placement. Cons: Placement of logo and header should be tweaked; they are overlapping with photo gallery.

7. IIIT Bangalore

Cons: Search feature is missing.

1. Rajiv Academy for Technology & Management: Their home-page design is worth to mention. However, they do not have good search engine ranking and most of the web-pages are broken.

- Ankit

Disclaimer: This post is my personal opinion and parameters chosen for ranking may not be complete; all it is from the website’s first impression. If you think your website is missing send me a link. If it influences me, I’ll be happy to list it here. Website is not the only criteria for choosing a school. This post just chooses some of the best homepage designs from India academic world and should not be treated in any decision making.

Lets see where do we stand in the massive Web of Internet. There are total 3,109,827,840 IPv4 addresses issued worldwide. India owns merely 0.6% (19,267,224) of them. We hold world’s 17.6% population and only 0.6% of internet is hosted/used inside India! On the other side, with 19% of world’s population China has 7.2% of IPv4 addresses becoming the third after USA (48%), UK (8%).

You may argue that I should have measured by # of Internet users, but there are not exact figures to support it. Some agencies say 40M Indians have touched Internet while other say 80M. Whatever, I feel # of IP addresses gives pretty accurate measure of a country’s Web presence (web-servers hosted) as well as usage (ISPs).

India comes at 15th in owning total 0.51% of all ccTLDs. China is at 5th with 3.36% of all ccTLDs (after US – 64%, Germany – 5%, UK – 3.7% and Canada – 3.6%). Where is the awareness for country specific domain names? Why are we still running for .com?

There is big gap between no of people who use internet vs no of people who know there is a Internet. Obviously, education is a must to get into this. But not everyone can get English education. The Internet has accepted, they cannot bring the whole world in one language, then why do we want to push English? I am sure there are 100 times more pages in Chinese than a total of Hindi/Marathi/Punjabi/Gujarati/Tamil/etc in Google index.

Apart from cheaper equipment and tariff, the other factor behind mobile revolution in India is the support for local languages (Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Punjabi, etc;) in handsets. We need the same for Internet. Not everyone can speak and understand English. Even ICANN has accepted this after a long time. Why IRCTC is not available in Hindi? Why Indian social networks like Bharatstudent.com, Bigadda.com, Hi5.com are not available in regional languages. There Wikipedia, BBC, Facebook & Orkut are available in Indian regional languages and gaining popularity. Why not Linux community provides free OS in Hindi? Besides, there is a Hindi keyboard layout, tools available for easy typing in Hindi/Gujarati/Tamil. And thanks to Google for Transliteration.

I am waiting for a day when our government shall issue a law/guidelines for website owners for enabling Internet for disabled people. I am waiting for a day when an Indian web-hosting giant opens up a data center in US/UK (for cost cutting bcoz their cooler climate and cheaper bandwidth) instead of collaborating with existing foreign providers. Today preliminary knowledge is almost free over Internet. I am waiting for a day when every member of our society has access to such information free and a child does not necessarily need to buy a book. I am waiting for a day when free internet kiosks will be available roadside and we can access Wikipedia, maps/routes and information will be a hand apart for the poorest guy in my country.

- Ankit

Ref:
* Country wise IP count as of 2009-12-19
* ICANN Wiki and Country-wise Total Domains Data as of 2009-12-14
* Second source for IP stats http://www.ip2location.com/ip2location-internet-ip-address-2010-report.aspx . Here too India is at 19th, and China at 3rd.

Thanks Vineet !

Problem: While surfing around, I came across a website whose content encoding is not being supported with my latest Firefox v3.5.4 showed me unsupported compression error.

Content Encoding Error
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.
* Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

Solution: As per my knowledge web-servers generally use GZ compression and Firefox well supports that. Then what’s wrong here? Digging a bit into Firefox’s ‘about:config‘, I did a search for ‘gz’. The setting network.http.accept-encoding was set to gzip,deflate. What’s wrong? Let’s try setting it gzip,deflate,gz. And it worked!. The catch here is gzip and gz are two different extensions used for the same gzip compression. Eventually, the questions is who’s in fault, Firefox or the website?

- ankit

“computing industry is the only industry more fashion driven than woman’s fashion“

Of course, this is true. Think about the last 10 years, how many new languages introduced, how many new versions of existing languages, new frameworks are released everyday, etc; But what about the compatibility with old? Isn’t today we (as a system owner, who actually pays for software development) want to have a stable, low cost, maintenance free software. I want to install it once and be assured for rest of 5-10 years. New versions/frameworks comes with new bugs. Do you have a stable CRM/ERP that can help me in 5-10 years run?

1. Create hyper-links for few MP3 files
2. Insert following script code to your page
   <script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script>
3. You are done! Yahoo! Media Player will be loaded and it will make all media links clickable

Here are few of my favorite tracks. Use the play button to listen. Thanks to RadioReloaded.com.

Tere Naina, Chandi Chowk To China (2009)
Jaane Kyun Log Pyar Karte Hein, Dil Chahta Hai (2001)
Akela hoon Mein, Raeth
Gum Sum Ho Kyun, Aksar
Ye Jo Mohabbat Hai, Dil Vil Pyar Vyar (2002)
Mumma, Dasvidaniya (2008)
Tujh Mein Rab Dikhta Hai, Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008)

How does it work?

1. Inserting the script loads swfProxy, a flash player, from Yahoo’s server (http://l.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/mus/swf/ymwp/swfproxy-2.0.31.swf).
2. The javascript detects all hyperlinks with mp3/wav as file extension. For more details about supported types refer wiki page.
3. Then a play icon/button is inserted before each supported link. This is done using em.ymp-skin CSS class.
4. The Javascript then builds user interface as interactive sidebar. All images in the player are loaded by extracting small parts (using CSS) from single image.
5. When you click play button, the media file URL is passed to swfProxy object that actually plays the file. One thing is still wondering to me is how do they track mouse click event on these hyperlinks?

Certainly, a great idea and smart implementation!

- ankit

[Edited: 15 Feb, 09: Clarification for the fifth point under 'How it works'

JavaScript best practices suggest not to use any inline event (onClick, etc) with HTML tags. For example, following is a bad practice:

<a onclick="doSomething()" href="#">Click!</a>

Instead, you should separate out JavaScript from HTML.

<a href="backuplink.html" class="doSomething">Click!</a>

In a script block associate onClick event as following:


$('a.doSomething').click( function() {
// Do something here!
alert('You did something, woo hoo!');
} );
...

]