Xtremax - Web Design

Microsoft has launched Silverlight and as any other product it is gaining fame for itself. So, let’s review if it really has something new and advance to offer other than the old and most used flash. I have taken a course to compare both silverlight and flash side by side for each feature and functionality. I have tried to cover couple of features, if left any please feel free to point it out.

• Silver light doesn’t support Linux, so can’t be use on other OS other than Windows and Mac. On the other hand flash had no such limitations

• Silverlight usually run with file format WMV which makes it no good with vast majority of video streaming webs, like you tube itself. Flash facilitates more formats than WMV but to run these formats flash codex must be installed on the client machine.

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Plugins enable us to modify system functionality without the need to alter existing code. For example, plugins can be used to alter content before it is displayed, extend search functionality, or implement a custom authentication mechanism.

In first step you have to create a sand box means creat an xml manifest file which contain all information of your plugin.

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Since the web is becoming the most powerful marketing and research tool for products and projects respectively. The Web Design needs to be more interactive. However, the web is not always good, they are black shaded or complex region which are not very must convenient for the general user to go through. In all this a new term came, the usability testing. Usability means how better we can use something for the people. It is measure of tendency on how people are going to interact with the application keeping its purpose in mind. On general Usability testing measures the usability of a system.

Why Usability Testing?

On the web usability is the most important feature. If a website fails to compile with the usability, it will lose traffic and audience. If navigation is difficult user will leave, if the home page take too much time to load the user will get irritated. Similarly if user cannot find his information and is lost, he will not appreciate the site anyway. Users, never read sitemaps or even manuals to get the information they need. Especially where there is 20 million websites over the internet.

If you are planning to do business online, than you need to care about usability even more, because if user cannot find the product and an easy way to check out the probably is very high that he will leave the site and you can lose a potential customer. Losing each user or time he wastes on your website looking for the right information is all what is causing you extra resource and money that is of no use.  Usability is something that has to be carrying on with the project all along the development process. You cannot just start thinking about usability at the final stage, this can cost you heavy bucks and at times to do a major change in the whole project, to cover one aspect of usability.

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Since Blogging is very much into trend now, so I thought to review a Joomla Component, which can help with integrating a blog within your Joomla based Web site. This useful component is MyBlog. In this review, I will try to cover the basic functions and attributes along with 5 modules which can be used as a source to get some decent information to be a sophisticated summary for your blog activities. Like in earlier posts, I will follow the same patters with couple of screen shots to explain it better.

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Recently, I was dumbfounded when during a presentation, an IT Consultant asked me if Google Analytics (GA) will actually work in their environment which is protected by a barrage of firewalls.  Now wanting to give a wrong answer (even though I was pretty confident that it was yes…) I told her that I will check it out….

The answer is a resounding yes!

On second thought, it should be obvious.  GA works on the http protocol and generally very, very few intranets block the http port.  But even if the http port is blocked (for in-bound traffic such that the server cannot access the internet, but the internet can access the server…), it would not have mattered….

This is because the GA codes are executed by the clients and not the server.. and these clients must definitely have internet access to see a internet web page….  Just took a peek at the net traffic in Firebug and sure enough.. we see google sneakily simulate a blank image download to track the statistics…

Isn’t this exactly what we do tot track email open rates?

I was always downloading the jquery javascript and playing with its functions until I realised that hey… it can be done dynamically by google.  Basically, it is a 2 step process:

Step 1:  get the jsapi javascript from google

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>

Step 2:  load the jquery library. this is necessary as google has a lot of other libraries…

google.load("jquery", "1");

For a complete source code sample… see below:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script>
  // Load jQuery
  google.load("jquery", "1");

  google.setOnLoadCallback(function() {     
      $("#test").wrap("<b></b>");     
    });
</script>

<div id=’test’>just testing</div>

Was trying to figure out the logging architecture of the NCC application when I found something very useful in the debugging of Joomla applications. There are often times when you would very much like to look at all the SQL statements which have been executed in the page request.  It can be easily done in Joomla by:

Step 1:  Enabling the debug plugin.

Step 2:  Activating it in Global Configuration.

Results:  Shown at the end of the page.

I was assigned a task by Mr. Otter, recently. It was basically to do a review on available Gallery Components for the Joomla CMS. I will do a quick review for the component Morfeoshow image gallery along with screen shots to give you an insight over it. I have used graphics to expose the functionality and usability for component in review. So let’s start here.

The Morfeoshow Gallery
I hope for you all know how to install a component in Joomla. If not than get yourself some help from Google. Alright, after installing the Morfeoshow Gallery, let’s go straight to the component back end Panel, inside Joomla. It gives us three main options,

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Quite often, in CMS driven websites, the thumbnail images to be shown on the listing page is very hard to be controlled to be the same size, especially for clients who do not have image processing knowledge. I discovered a easy workout which can automatically crop the images and add a nice border.

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Well, just chanced on a really, really hot backend administration panel.  Major revamp.  Loved the activity logs, mac like toolbar at the bottom, easy templating mechanism. etc.

Check it out!

http://www.adminpraise.com/