I’ve always been a big fan of Firefox, at least for the adblock plus extension which doesn’t let me see insane banner ads all day long. If not for speed, I’d have never moved to Chrome at all. It turns out, I was losing out on a lot of fun all the while just by not looking at these orkut ads!  There have been instances of orkut ads going wrong for me, but this one is a HUGE fail. Visualize this:

Orkut wtf

So orkut tried to “Find a match in my community and profession“. These are three epic stupidities in just one sentence! The girl they choose to titillate me with is Ms. Shah, a Gujarati (while I’m a marwadi), who is an MBA (while I’m an Engineer). And of course I’m MARRIED! The probability of me being interested in marrying Ms. Shah would be lesser than me surviving two thunder strikes and dying off a coconut falling on my head. So much for the targeted ads.

Oh, by the way: Facebook isn’t doing too good in terms of targeting either. The post on pluggd.in which talks about Indian matrimonial websites stooping too low also notices this.

Better photography, a well known photography magazine of India organizes the “Photographer of the year” competition every year. And year after year, they have organized it successfully offline, accepting entries from the best photographers across India and abroad. This year, however they decided to take this online and canvera.com being the associate partner had to come up with a web application that would enable photographers to submit their entries through a brand new site.

Three weeks was the allotted time for the completion of the project in which the design (and its thousand iterations), development, and QA and all the tweaks would all had to be completed. And my team, i.e. Mayur (a.k.a the designer), Kanupriya (product manager) and myself (the developer) were given the responsibility for the web application. It was definitely a roller coaster ride; new designs being discussed (and partly implemented) daily, new functional requirements and the architecture slowly but surely building up.

I had an option of choosing Ruby on Rails or php or Java EE to build this application, and for a two weeks time frame the former two would have definitely been faster. But we decided for Java, and built the entire application using jsp/struts/tiles/spring/hibernate/postgresql/jboss. It’s a standard web application: A home page which briefly introduces the application, some static pages which explain the competition in the detail, a registration page (with forgot password functionality), login, user profile page, category page, theme page and upload image page. Image storage and thumbnail generation have been given a lot of importance, and is pretty scalable. But to get the thing work in IE6 was a real pain. IE7 didn’t play too nice either but they all eventually fell in place

A javascript library is needed in every modern application, and although a big fan of YUI I decided on jquery this time. And I am amazed by the variety and support in jquery plugins, and slowly becoming my favorite. Although this is the first application where I hadn’t used any AJAX in the whole application, the whole experience is pretty smooth in my opinion. The image upload could have been a little smoother(and it will be, I promise ) with the flash uploader. Some more small features like an ajax feedback modal dialog box and editing image details might follow soon.

Coming to the competition, there are actually three of those. Photographer of the year(POY for brief), Young photographer of the year(YPOY), and Wedding photographer of the year(WPOY). YPOY and WPOY are being organized for the first time this year, and as you’d have guessed, YPOY is only for people under 18.

There are eight themes each for the photographer/young photographer of the year: Family and friends, Natural elements, life on streets, man/environment, twilight magic, still life, wild life and landscapes and a maximum of four photographs can be uploaded in each theme. For wedding photographer of the year, the themes are: Bridal portraits, couple portraits, family and friends, behind the scenes, emotions and photo series of a single wedding. All competitions are open for amateurs and professionals alike, so just pick up your camera, shoot some cool shots and go uploading!

All in all, it was a very fulfilling experience developing the application, in which arguably the best Indian photographers, young photographers and wedding photographers will upload their best shots! I hope that the best photographers in India would find participating in the contest simple and enjoyable.

If you think that orkut is the only social networking platform that cannot count, think again!

We’ve all had problems with orkut’s calculations gone wrong with number of friends, scraps, posts in communities. It’s a common error you get when you see when you check a community thread with number of posts, say ‘14′, but when you click through, you get only 11.

But facebook has gone a step ahead and has started messing up with dates. You can actually write a wall post in future as well

I went to a person’s profile to wish him ‘happy budday’, but guess what… people had already wished him ‘tomorrow’ and he had replied to them as well. I thought it would be some kind of problem due to time-zone difference, but he’s from India as well, so my theory had to just bite dust then and there.

p.s.: Yes, the birthday dude’s nickname is ‘mausi’.

And yes, wishing people ‘tomorrow’ for their birthday is another thing that really grinds my gears.

Recently I came across a Romanian website for discovering restaurants in NCR region. (Courtesy Sukrit)

So here’s a short review about it:

The site basically revolves around restaurants in the NCR region, also featuring some events, and discounts. Restaurants can simply be browsed, or can be searched. I can’t really comment on the search quality as I don’t know about the NCR region too well, but at the first glance it looks like the site doesn’t support proper search, i.e. search by category, or narrowing by price or cuisine. The ’show me more options to search on’ link is not highlighted, and calls for an extra user click. But it’s a bag of cookies once you click on it! It looks like they have very detailed information on restaurants, as one can narrow search results by both features (a lot of them) and cuisines(a lot of them too). I was disappointed to know that I couldn’t get results for a simple query like: Restaurants in Central Delhi with Indian cuisine, and a rooftop/garden setting.

The search for discounts is a little low on search features as well. You can find discounts only on restaurant names, and only when you book through aplacetodine.com. The good thing about discounts was that I finally got to a restaurant details page (which I attempted to go through the search, but had failed). The restaurant page really looks a menu card for a fine-dine restaurant, very different from the parent site. I think the designers had intended it to be that way, giving each restaurant a number of templates to choose from. They have detailed menus for each restaurant, a BIG bonus from my side if they can keep that data updated. Also, you can book a table online and order for home delivery. Each restaurant page lists all future events in that restaurant.

The user registration process is painful and disguised as being pretty simple. First, you just give your email address, then check your email to click the link they provide. Click on it to activate your profile, but you’re not done! Now comes the real registration. You have to provide details like state, city (why would you ask all that when you’re only an NCR based website?), locality, landmark, and guess what… your mobile number as well. And that’s not optional. So basically to write a review, you have to put at stake your email, mobile etc. They will be sold to the restaurants or not, can’t be guaranteed. Anyway, giving a bogus mobile number works fine, so I just did that The website has a concept of reward points, which I believe can be reimbursed or redeemed in some form later.

Coming to the implementation and UI of the website, I think they have done a decent job at it. Nice use of colours and a homogeneous user interace. They haven’t restricted themseleves in using AJAX or flash wherever appropriate. A little more thought could have been given to make the site a little lighter on resources, i.e. the page size should be at least reduced by 100 kb, in my opinion. Their homepage gives about 90 HTML errors, which is unacceptable, as plenty of <div>, <td>, <tr>s are not closed.

Overall Rating for the website: 6/10 (Given that they will launch in at least 8 cities)