A Night @ Synaptris

Life seems to be easy until u find tougher times… this is what happened to me yesterday, Myself and Awdesh (a colleague of mine @ Synaptris.com) planned to stay at office yesterday night in order to implement some SEO changes throughout the website, This is a painstaking process which will involve a huge amount of work…. And this was gonna be my first night-out on office work. And the experience was too good. i would have been boring if there is no one around, but awdy gave a nice company…

After joining here, i got used to work late hours, and yesterday was really awesome, the early morning environment is too good that if i start workin like this for a couple of days , i may get addicted to these things, neways i shuldnt do that way….

By 3 am we were planning to make an innovative project for Synaptris.com, we used have one such thing in the old site, which we don’t have anymore… but we wanna start off from scrap, so that the implementation will be scalable. We will discuss more about in our future blogs…

Ek mahiney ho gaya

Donno how time passes, it feels that I joined jus now and here we go, one month is over, how gud I am after one month at Synaptris is still a question?, but I feel I have learned a gud amount of Corporate designing, campaign page concepts, SEO optimizations, mailers, etc..  I still don’t know where this learning curve is gonna take me, but my manager always tells me to head out in the direction of usability, but I don’t even know any word on usability. I still a fresher in this area maybe I ll get to know more as I improvise on my experience.

 For a non-corporate perspective, I m eating a lot these days (although awdesh is responsible of most of it), this is nothing special since anyone at syanptris will tell the relationship between Marketing Team and food.  And I am speaking a good amount of hindi, becoz of this hindi rich community around me, ever since my first semester, I didn’t have chance to speak some of the languages I like most.

Zindigi chal raha hai, cool and slow paced…. C u in next blog …

An year after final year tour

Exactly a year ago we were in some remote location in kerala, enjoying those precious moments of our bachelor lives, our final year tour.

Tour has been one of those special moments of my life which will take a tsunami strike to forget it. Life has changed a lot during these days, just making a comparison of how i stepped into the train that day (results were out that day, i thought my life was devastated ) and how i am now (sitting in some s/w company and doing what  i like most ) , shows how fast life has changed, but anything is short lived in this world , maybe next in july i could writing a similar blog as VO from home, but for whatever it takes , its has been a hard fought battle to succeed and success could be short lived too...

Anyways i m not gonna regret for my mistakes but i surely will do so for the things that i have missed in our tour. I was having some gigs of work to be done today when someone reminded me of our tour last year, that's all a sparkle of fun and joy rushed through my brain, I was filled with a some kinda enthusiasm never felt b4, although it didn't last long befor I got a ping in my sametime to remind me of my pending works… it was good enough to teach me a lesson "how fast time travels??"

I feel very lucky for havin got a chance to work in Chennai itself; it keeps me in nice touch with most of our classmates. Of course meeting guys who have joined work has become very rare, at least I m satisfied with those text messaging and occasional meet with guys at Kutty's, Annanagar or Room.

Animated GIF vs Flash SWF

This debate has been going on for quite some time, which is better suited for banner ads and web animations, GIF or SWF?

Format: GIF

Animation: BITMAP animation (Frames based)
Colors supported: 256 (Palette)
Compatibility: high
Compression: Average

Format: SWF

Animation: VECTOR animation (scalable)
Colors supported: Full Color
Compatibility: Medium
Compression: High

 

At every point SWF is always better than GIF for playing animations but SWF falls short of mark when it comes to compatibility, SWF's require a unique flash plug-in offered by Adobe to be installed on the client machine for playing SWF's this is the only point that pulls SWF down in the race for the best format for animations on internet, While GIF is more standardized and consistent, it needs to improve a lot, the last GIF spec came 17 years ago (GiF89a), while Macromedia (now Adobe Macromedia) comes up with a new version of flash every year.

We jus cannot leave about GIF and start workin on our animation in SWF, because internet is all about diversity and if a solution is not compatible over a wide range of machines, then thee is no point in implementing such technology.

And SWF is not useless too, SWF offers excellent clarity and unmatched compression rates because of its vector animations and latest compression mechanisms, so if you are targeting a group of hi-tech people with latest system configurations, you can always implement your animations in flash.

if u ask me the answer for this question? Here it is

Best - one: SWF

If u need compatibility then, forget flash the winner is always GIF ..

NOSCRIPT Problem...

I was working on these javascript menus when i came across this problem with java-script, there is an option in every browser that allows you to configure the browser in such a way that it can be made to disable java-script processing (i.e, all the java-script based coding in the pages will not be displayed by the browser), there was nothing much to worry about in this regard since most of the visitors do’nt do that, so i expected things to go well, but to my astonishment i came to know very lately from some SEO(Search Engine Optimization) Expert, that google too has the same habit of not processing Javascript, this means i was in trouble, the entire site navigation system was not being understood by google, i cant go ahead and change these hundreds and thousands of pages with a new navigation system, the solution to the problem is <NOSCRIPT> tag

Lemme explain how no script tag works, Javascript technology was developed by Netscape, when Javascript was first introduced, microsoft browsers(IE) at first it didnt have inherent capabilities to process it, the power and flexiblity of javascript made it one of the most successful scripting technologies, placing it much ahead of its nearest competitor (VBScript , a Microsoft Product), scripting generally refers to javascript although we can use any other language to write scripts, While microsoft and netscape while waging scripting wars, most other browsers didnt even had support for any of the scripting technologies. This led to a confusion Javascripts pages wont render properly in IE, VBScript wont render in Netscape, Some browser X will not support neither of the technologies.

This led W3C to introduce a tag called NOSCRIPT which will render some information if the client browser dosent support scripting….

Lets take the scenario where i am creating an Javascript menu, this wont render in the scripting-disabled browser properly

[A normal javascript menu in a javascript enabled browser]

[A normal javascript menu in a javascript disabled browser (Google looks at your site like this)]

As u can see the browser didnt render the javascript menu since javascript processing was disabled

Now if we add a NOscript tage and put the navigation system in place , this will work if the browser doesn’t render Javascript menus

[An optimized navigation system for no-js browsers and search engine bots, NOSCRIPT tage also improves your page ranking in google]

Why is this so important if 98% of the browsers have scripting enabled?

Nothing really matters if the percentage of non-scripting browsers in 2%, but unfortunately GOOGLE falls in that 2% and for that matter none of the prominent search engines can’t process Javascript, so if u have your site navigation systm designed in Javascript, forget it, google wont read it…. it means your site is not accessible to google, this reduces a lot of clicks to your site… If you work in SEO you will know how much troble your site is in.

The Solution :

Use an optimized text links menu to replace your navigation system inside a <NOSCRIPT> Tag jus below your script. It will do the trick and will also improve the your page rank in google pagerank.