Beginning Ruby On Rails

I have been developing sites using PHP and MySQL for the past 2-3 years. But lately the upsurge of Ruby On Rails has turned my interest towards it. I have started learning ruby from various sources. I have joined a course by Ruby learning , I would like everyone to check it out because I guess its a great way to kick start rubying. Although it doesnt teach rails but still I think getting the basics of ruby is very important bef0re jumping into rails.

Big Backrounds aren't that BIG

Many of the so called design gurus, I guess, have started a new trend in the web design. Here is a small list of sites which follow this "big background" trend.

• Horizontal Wall
• JustinBird
• NDesign-Studios
• Next2Friends
  
• Squwak
• Webdesigner Wall
• WhatPulse

These designs certainly "look good". But the main purpose of web design isn't making sites "look good". The main purpose of web design is to assist the user in meeting the his objective from the site. Many a times, attractive looking backgrounds may not be as handy as a simple plain background and many times it is.

Every site has an objective. The main purpose of web design is to help the user meet those objectives with relative ease. For example the main purpose of a portfolio site would be to show off the persons skills. But a blog or a news portal may not have the same objective. The purpose of these sites is the content.

My opinion on these abstract-big-backgrounds depends upon the kind of page they are used on. Sites in which content is the objective, the background should blend beautifully and not strike out. Because if it does so then the content wont be the priority instead the background would become more prominent. On a portfolio page, the content isn't the prime objective of the designer, its a means for him to show off his work and so a decorated background certainly makes the design look beautiful.

What do you think of this trend? Post your opinions. I would love to hear from you all.

New Design : Pulse Exhiliarated

Pulse Exhiliarated is a design that I had created for a design competition hosted by a site called whatpulse about 5 months ago in June. I wanted to upload it but due to my studies and stuff I never got the time. Nevertheless its now up for you all to download. It follows the web standards. Now go ahead and download it and put it on your website :)

Some of its cool features are

• Valid HTML 4.01 and CSS.
• Tabbed navigation
• Great support for tabular data
• Beautiful Forms
• Support for blog-like interfaces
• And many more...

You can download it from : OpenWebDesign

Create "Smart Links" that dont suck

How many times have you come across a link like:

http://example.com/Stuff?id=dcv668&act=8v_20dsf23

Let me ask you something, can you get any idea of what the link is about? Can you type the link by yourself? I am sure most of you will answer 'no' to both the questions. Clearly these links 'suck' and so as webmasters its our duty to create 'smart' links.

The rise of dynamic sites has made it convenient for new users to create their own sites. These dynamic blogging platforms and other CMS(like Wordpress and PHP-nuke etc.) have made the option of building a site open for those, who don't know much about web development.

I have nothing against these CMS as they are only making the net a better place but I think one big inconvenience these sites create is the automatically generated senseless links created by such sites. These links are really confusing, they use weird characters(+, ? etc) and numbers which make no sense. The user has no idea what page he is being sent to till he actually reaches it and he wouldn't dare to remember or even type it as they are sooo big. And seeing the rate at which the Internet is expanding, there is a need to make cleaner links to reduce the complexity that may arise due to large volumes of sites and links.

In my opinion links should be self-explanatory for the convenience of the user. They should be

• Descriptive of the content
  
• Easy to remember
• Guessable
• And if possible short
• Sans unnecessary usage of symbols and numbers
  

These are the characteristics of what I call 'smart links'

New Design : Opaque Green

Good news. I had uploaded one of my old designs "Opaque Green" on OpenDesign it has been approved and can be downloaded. I had made the layout more than a year ago for my personal site but never used it. Some of its features are:

• Accessibility
• Valid Code
• Cross Browser Compatibility
• Light weight
• Easy to edit

You can download it from:
OSWD
Open Design

My other design hasn't been approved yet because there was some problem with the design queue on Open Designs but I'll put it here as soon as it is approved.

Whatever happened to Open source Designing

I guess you must be knowing about Open Source Software. Taking a leaf from the open source movement, during the last five years or so the open source web designs have been making their marks on the net. Open Source designs aim to provide web templates free of charge.

I entered the Open source web design movement with OSWD. I became really active with the forums and even contributed with some designs. But after some time I had been inactive for 4 months or so and when I came back the front page didn't show any change and its been that even today.

Then I thought of entering openwebdesign(OWD). I had been a member but never really used the account much. I am really dissatisfied with the functioning of OWD. I tried to upload a design but it wont allow me to do because I guess there is a bug in the uploading system. And its really shabby and has many other bugs.

So finally I found open designs, a site which I had been registered with right from some time after its launch but never really used it. At least it allowed me to upload my design and I am really happy that it has a good community. It is not that big yet but it is growing and I hope more people join it and support the open source web design movement.

Know any good open source web designing communities? Have an opinion on the Open Source Design movement? or have anything else to say about the topic then post it in the comments section.

And yes you'll get to see my latest Open Source design soon :)

Exam Time

Hey guys,

Well I am having my mid term exams which will continue till the 26th of this month. So I wont be able to post much stuff on the blog till then :( I'll try to update it if I get any time.

Hello World

Hey people,

This is my first blog post on my new blog. I have thought of giving blogging another try, my previous two attempts were quite all right but I had some hosting problems...so I decided to use blogger so I wont be having hosting problems ;)

I generally write about web2.0, web design and web application development, AJAX and much more!

I am really excited about this...So wish me luck and bookmark this page because there is lots more that you are gonna see on this page :)