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.

Note: Seagate’s quoted “1TB” disk is actually a 931GB disk.

Now read original one:
Jena is a semantic web framework implemented in Java. It allows you to store/query/inference RDF/RDSF/OWL triples. In Jena a set of triples (in RDF) are called Model or stored within Model object. By default Jena creates in-memory models, but this is not suitable if you have pretty large set of triples to process. Here comes SDB to rescue you. It’s a component of Jena that allows you to store these models in relational databases like MySQL, MSSQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc; This post describes my experience while setting up SDB on Ubuntu.

and what’s the title of my blog?
तु मेरी जिंदगी है!

lol…

Where did this come from?
Google अनुवाद

Well, it’s not that bad. For Hindi translation simply converting words and reordering subject/verb/object is not enough. Where does the semantic/context go?

1. Add caption to your photo
2. Match the background with your Orkut profile’s theme color. This gives stunning effect right into your photo album.
3. And it’s free, even without any watermarks
4. Jpeg/Png/Gif files supported.

-ankit

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!');
} );
...

]

In addition to those common features, this phone features something new. In this post I’m going to write those specifications which you won’t be able to know unless you buy the phone. Here are a few:

1. Bright display! I can read text even in sun light. The phone comes with preloaded high contrast images, watching those you can see how much color contrast it delivers !!! – far from any other manufacturer in the same prize range.
2. 3.5mm jack support. This allows any kind of head phones to be used with the phone.
3. Text Copy/Paste feature. Handy for coping/writing SMS.
4. J2ME with support of – Internet access, File system read/write access API, camera API, Messaging APIs, automatic start, local connectivity API, running Java apps in background.
5. You can have at max 1000 Contacts, 1000 SMS memory and 380 events/tasks. (~26MB internal memory)
6. 5 alarms, and you can also set FM alarm.
7. Two kind of keypad lights. White for normal purpose and Orange when Walkman is running. The orange light blinks on the beats of the song.
8. USB charging: When you connect this phone to PC it start charging from the USB cable.
9. Flash Menu: The main menu in this phone is built using Flash Lite. You can switch the orientation and look of the menu. Menu items can be tiled, horizontally or vertical aligned, and can have cool animations.
10. Synchronization is one of the most important service that we should use. In short taking backup of the phone data. I sync my phone regularly with PC. The phone supports synchronization via USB data cable, Blue-tooth, or internet server.
11. Stereo Bluetooth, Picture Blogging, Voice Dial + Playing Caller’s name, Big Fonts, Video Ringtone, etc;

Go and get the phone… it’s a worth buy cellphone.

Note: The camera is not good as compared to ‘K’ series (remember it’s Walkman phone, and this is acceptable). Still it supports EXIF, Night Mode, Effects, Self Timer, No shutter sound (in silent mode), etc;

Ankit

A: Almost 2-5 items a day, as I’m an avid Internet user. Let me list down where Acrobat Reader sucks:

1. The Adobe Reader 8 installer a massive 20.8MB setup to download and time consuming setup.
2. Version 5 was roughly fast whereas new versions are becoming more memory hungry and CPU intensive and version 7 is damn hungry. It takes almost 10-15 seconds to load!
3. Frankly speaking, I hate their patents listed in splash screen.
4. If a PDF file has high graphics it sucks further and application hangs for few seconds.
5. Seriously I’m looking for a replacement!

Hmmm! a serious problem that affects my efficiency directly. Let’s search for a better solution. Wow I got it as first result!

Foxit v3.0 is the answer to all my worries. It’s a free light-weight (only 2.98 MB) and amazingly fast PDF viewer and printer. A 19 MB PDF file when opened, virtual memory required by Foxit was just 10 MB against massive 23 MB for Acrobat Reader.

Even the installer is just an extractor and does not require specific permissions to install. Quite handy in cybercafe. Its user interface is same as Acrobat Reader and you won’t feel using a different viewer.

- Ankit

Ankit Jain: hi
Ankit Jain: u there ?
mama_pendse: Hi Ankit Jain, How are you today ?
mama_pendse: Thanks for the information.
mama_pendse: I can tell climate in any city in World, send me message climate mumbai
Ankit Jain: well what’s the weather in Pune
mama_pendse: Cloudy.
Ankit Jain: give me more info
mama_pendse: Why do you want it?
Ankit Jain: just for my information
mama_pendse: Your purpose is his or her information.
Ankit Jain: i asked you for weather information of Pune
mama_pendse: Why do you want it?
Ankit Jain: ok.leave it
Ankit Jain: what’s there in Mumbai
mama_pendse: Dude! Goodbye.
mama_pendse: You ask difficult questions.

You would love to read the answers it gives; even it remembers your last chat with him. It understands chatting abbreviations. Ask him about its creator, weather of a city.

1. Late notification of some buddy signing in or out.

2. Late notification of whether the other party is typing.

3. The most important fact is that use of UP/DOWN arrow keys is disabled. and I cannot work without that.

Yahoo should understand the accessibility of users and enhence in next version.

If you want to switch to version 6, then it is available here.