Pratik Bagaria » Internet

A free online collaboration tool.

Pratik — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:22:21 +0000

QIKPAD is an online app that allows for collaborative document creation as well as chat.
If you need to quickly collaborate with a bunch of people on something that could be done via text, for example discussion on a few lines of code or maybe general chit-chatting, then you might want to try QikPad.

Features of QIKPAD

Collaborate together in an online notepad.
Different text background colors show who’s typing what.
No registration required.

DEMO

Amazing Deals for Web Professionals

Pratik — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 16:04:46 +0000

Mighty Deals offer unbelievable deals and discounts for creative professionals. The deals include products and services that are heavily discounted, exclusively for Mighty Deals customers, usually from 50% to 90% off. Each deal stays on the site for a very limited time and is available exclusively for purchase directly through our site.

I have benefited from the deals from Mighty Deals. I bought “Learn Android App Development in only 2 weeks!” which has helped me a lot. The price offered was great and quality can never be a doubt because the team behind Mighty Deals is the same team behind Webdesigner Depot, a very popular blog for web designers.

Few key points:

Every day Mighty Deals features amazing products or services at unbelievable prices, discounted exclusively for Mighty Deals’ customers (as much as up to 90% off).
Each deal is available for a limited time only, with a countdown timer showing the time remaining until the deal expires.
Once a deal has expired it can no longer be purchased.
The best way to be informed of our latest deals is to sign up for our newsletter and to follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

Watch Movies and TV Shows online Anywhere, Anytime

Pratik — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:22:20 +0000

Yahoo! Video is here. Watch TV shows, News and Movies anytime, anywhere. Yahoo! India with a massive reach among online users now launches HQ video experience. The list of video partners is quite commendable which includes Sheraroo, Ultra, NDTV, Headlines Today, Aaj Tak and many more.

Yahoo! Video ad in Bombay Times

And as there print ad communicated “It’s no fun if it’s not real” Get original videos only Yahoo! Video.

Thousands of videos, ranging from full-length movies, TV shoes to breaking news, celebrity interviews and more.

Yahoo! India Video

Professional Hosting – Indian Servers

Pratik — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 19:41:58 +0000

This is the first time I would be reviewing a hosting company. Till date I never felt like reviewing any web hosting company I had dealt with.

There was a big empty space in the Indian Web Hosting business. This space is filled up very well by Hostgator India. The reason I am in for Hostgator are many and I will discuss this more in detail.

Hostgator is not new in the web hosting business. It is running successfully in the US for many years and many of my clients are happy with Hostgator US. Many of my Indian friends also use Hostgator US for hosting some of there busy websites; reason being that they could not find any professional hosting company in India who can offer them services which they required. In India, Hostgator came with the same expertise as in US.

I recommended one of my client to try Hostgator India for his business finance website. The technical team at Hostgator did a good job of transferring the whole site well within 48 hours. The overall downtime of the site was just about 1-2 hours because of the nameserver change. Even the sales team was very helpful while suggesting the hosting plan and in the process of placing the order.

Another thing which I liked about this company is that they have face. Unlike many Indian Hosting company Hostgator as its own office setup as well as an active Facebook fanpage which can be used to get more information about the services they offer. The pricing and coupons offered by Hostgator India is very good.

As an all I would suggest that if you have a site which has majorly Indian traffic and currently using US servers, please migrate to Hostgator or if you are planning to buy a new hosting for your website I highly recommend Hostgator India.

Twitter – An easy way to stay in touch!

Pratik — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 07:10:20 +0000

Staying connected with people from across the globe had never been so easy. With the ever increasing span of social media, the world today seems to have shrunk on my computer screen or mobile in that case. No longer it is required to check time before contacting or messaging people residing in a country other then yours. Just leave an email, a message on Facebook or a tweet on Twitter. The person is sure to receive your message instantly without getting annoyed.

Lets dig into
“How Twitter can help you stay connected and in turn help you learn a lot?”

Firstly lets know about Twitter. – Twitter is an information network.

It is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting. Simply find the public streams you find most compelling and follow the conversations.

You just need to follow the people, company or brand you want to keep in touch with. As soon as the person you follow posts an update on his profile, you are notified immediately. So today I can stay connected with Adobe and learn about their new products and developments. I follow Adobe Photoshop profile and it has kept me abreast of the latest developments and also tips and tricks of the software usage. Likewise I follow many individuals which includes fellow designers from around the world. I can stay updated with the latest design trends followed by many designers.

This site is monetized using Google Adsense and InfoLinks. Here I would like to share with you a true example. InfoLinks too have a Twitter profile. After setting up my account with InfoLinks I thought why not follow them and say “Hello”. I did just that. And to my surprise instantly I got a reply from them. This shows that getting in touch with the company is not that difficult. I can ask them for suggestions or tweet them stating any issues I am facing and I am sure they will reply with a solution. But the best part about tweeting is that the feedback which I will be getting would be under 160 characters. Which means the feedback would be to the point and precise.

Another example I would like to share with you is of my friend. She had planned to visit a foreign university for her higher studies. She completed all the preparations and formalities needed and received the offer letter from the college as well. Now once you get the admission confirmed that is when the real rush starts. You may have many doubts and queries in your mind. You need to arrange a flight, arrange for room, find room mates, student’s insurance, timetable the list is endless. I suggested my friend to follow the colleges’ Twitter profile and keep a track of the updates and guess what! Everyday she received updates from the college and many of her queries were solved. The updates pointed out each and every minute details. Since the messages were directly from the college representatives there was no doubt on its authenticity too. Also incase of a doubt, the college representative would just be a tweet away.

So to wrap up this long post (I hope it was not boring) I would like you to please help yourself and get a profile on Twitter. Start following the people, company or brand you want to stay connected with.

And if you want to stay connected with me you can follow my tweets too.

Temporary and Disposable Email Services

Pratik — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 07:29:33 +0000

There are times when you don’t want to share you personal or official email id on every website. Today sites require you to register using your email id so that you get full access to data / information. You can use temporary email id and use this id to verify for the sites membership and then forget about it.

There are many temporary and disposable email id services / websites available. The advantage of using a temporary email is that you original id is protected from spam emails. Below are some websites which offer free temporary and disposable email ids.

GuerrillaMail

This is a simple temporary email provider. You get an email id as soon as you visit the site. The email id lasts for 60 mins.

10 Minute Mail

Again a simple site which offers disposable email id. As the mail suggests the id lasts for 10 minutes.

Temporary E-mail Address

On this website you can select to extend your account in increments of 60 minutes before the account expires, if not, the provided email address will be automatically deleted once the time limit has passed.

Mail Expire

This service stands out in the crowd by giving you the option to have a temporary inbox ranging from 12 hours expiry to as long as 3 months

Give & Get Recommendations – Google +1

Pratik — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 08:54:22 +0000

Click +1 next to the Google search result to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1′s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.
Currently +1 will only work on Google search results but Google is working on to implement the +1 button right across the web.

Know more about Google +1 here or,
Watch this short introduction…

Websites for Inspiration

Pratik — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 17:29:25 +0000

www.behance.net

Its a network – a network for the creative professionals. As they put it “The Creative Professional Platform”. The reason I like visiting this site everyday is because of the huge amount of creative projects which are featured everyday. The fields covered is massive and covers everything related to design. I can browse Advertising, Architecture, Branding, Design, Fashion, Illustration, Package Design, Photo Manipulation and lots more. Spending time here gives me many ideas, its almost like exercise for my mind. The work submitted by artists here are top class and very creative.
The site itself is well made and maintained. There is no junk or broken links. The site fits in perfectly as a showcase platform as well as a source of inspiration.
Take the Behance Tour: http://www.behance.net/tour

www.deviantart.com

Its the worlds largest online community of artists and art lovers. One can spend hours on this site and yet never get enough. I find both amateur and
professional work. The best part about this site / community is that its open for all. Amateur designers, photographers and more can use this to showcase there work and get reviews and feedback from there peers. For professionals, this site serves as there portfolio showcase. I myself started using this site around 5 years ago. I would love if you could check & comment my deviantART profile and the work uploaded there.
The site is well built and is truly addictive.

www.coroflot.com

Coroflot works the similar lines as that of deviantART, but is not exactly the same. Here I can search for particular designer and see there portfolio, like there work and comment on it. I even have my portfolio up on coroflot. This site is particularly famous in India as compared to deviantART. I like looking at the works of fellow Indian Designers on coroflot.

www.inspiredm.com

As the name suggests – a site for pure creative inspiration. This site is great when it comes to compilation on any particular design area and tutorials. More like a blog, this site never fails to inspire with its ever updating posts. If there is any particular theme I am working on, I make it a point to search the term here and I surely get inspiration and a path to think on. Sites like these are best when one is going through a creative block and can’t understand how to initiate the thinking process. Sites like this inspire you to do more, and to do so more professionally and creatively.
Designer speak there hearts out while commenting on particular topics. If there is topic you need in-depth knowledge or research on, this is the site to search it on.

www.istockphoto.com

Well this is not a creative site or some online community. Rather this is a site for selling stock photos and vector online. The reason I check this site too often is that the work done by the contributors here is awesome. The vector is good and so are the images. It’s said that, pictures speak louder than words – this site can give you such pictures. Many a times, its only the visual that can make the ads appealing.

www.adsoftheworld.com & www.packagingoftheworld.com

Well firstly, the reason I am taking this site together is because these two work on the same lines and offers the same in there own ways. Adsoftheworld is like an online library of Print, Radio and TV ads. Also there is OOH media and other creatives being put live. Spending this on this site is like reading a never ending newspaper with all creative ads in it.
On the other hand, packagingofthworld is more like a blog, but is again the same when it comes to showcasing creatives. As in the name, this site only showcases packagings which truly stands apart. Its not only about creative packagings but also the usability factory of the packaging is highlighted.

www.google.com

Last but definitely, not the least. When nothing else works – Google does. Just key in your search and start browsing images. I do get many ideas while simply browsing pages on Google Images.

Redeveloping a WordPress Blog.

Pratik — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 07:21:08 +0000

No doubt WordPress is the easiest and powerful web software available for making a blog. It’s powers are enhanced day by day with the introduction of many new plugins. Today WordPress is not only used for blogging but also for portals, job boards, membership sites, online stores and much more.

So its pretty natural that many people have used WordPress for making there blogs or portals. WordPress as a CMS has developed a lot. It now has lot more features and options as compared to its older versions and its time we take advantage of these features. There is one such work/feature that I would like to discuss today.

I was presented with a nice and big financial portal powered by WordPress. The site was almost a year and a half old With 10 posts added each day. It contained lots of categories, tags, images, plugins and what not. I was to redevelop it. A new theme, new features overall would make it more polished. It was to have features like job board, a forum, ads integration and memberships. It all seemed much nicer to me. Make a local installation of WordPress on my Mac using MAMP, add theme, plugins and get the data. But things started getting ugly. Here is the full story.

I downloaded MAMP and installed in on my Mac so that I can get to run WordPress easily. Once MAMP was installed and running, I downloaded WordPress 3.0 and installed it. It was very easy to install WordPress. Once the setup was done I changed few options in the WordPress setting menu. Do Remember while redevloping a site, u need to copy the same permalink structure as that of the existing site/blog. This helps in keeping your search engine visitors. At this point I also logged into my PHPmyAdmin and exported the WordPress database. This is not required, but I always do it so incase things go wrong I can just delete and import the database instead of installing WordPress again.

Then the theme was added and minor changes were made to suit the portal needs. Plugins where added for funtionalities like job board, security, videos, spam protecion, forum, memberships, etc. Once all this was done the last part left was importing the data from the live site to my local wordpress blog. The reason I wanted to get the data was because I needed to set category menus in the theme and also test the full site before it went live. Now there are few methods that can be used to export the data one WordPress installtion to another. One can use the WordPress export/import feature or one can also direcly export / import the MySQL database. I was more comfortable with the WordPress export / import option.

I exported the wordpress XML file using the export feature from the live blog. The size was 49MB. So while importing I had to change my PHP limits on my local machine. Also while importing the XML file there is an option called “Download and Import file attachments”. I checked this option as almost all of the post contained images which were taken from the live site while importing. This made the importing a long task. Importing over 7000 entries does take time. So instead I found an easy solution. I Googled and found out that there is a program called WXRspliter to split the XML file into small parts which can be easily imported. Thanks to Ranger Pretzel for making such a lovely program. I splitted my XML file into 10 parts and then imported them one by one and the importing went smoothly. All the posts, tags, images, categories were imported perfectly.

Now the site is fully ready on my local machine for testing.

Epic Mobile Battle Again – Apple & Google

Pratik — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:07:45 +0000

The next battle in the epic was between the Apple and Google is about to begin with Apple unveiling its iAds feature some time back that, for the first time will allow advertisers to put their ads near apps made specifically for iPhone and iPad. Apple already sold $60 million worth of iAds to companies like Disney, Unilever PLC, Missan Co, Citigroup Inc.

Apple Inc. is facing some early challenges, with some ad campaigns experiencing delays as agencies attempt to learn the new system and Apple’s tight control over the creative process. Part of the reason some marketers are experiencing delays in getting their iAds to market is that Apple has kept tight control on the creative aspects of ad-making, something advertisers aren’t used to. It also also made the creation of the mobile ads laborious, taking about 8 to 10 weeks from brainstorming to completion, which is longer than normal for most mobile ads. With Apple handling the production of the ad unit, agencies don’t necessarily know what it is capable of or how to use the technology. The iAds is designed in HTML5 technology, and Apple has yet to distribute a developer kit to agencies so they can understand how it works.

Competition is increasing as other mobile ad companies like Millennial Media and Google start to offer similar services. While Apple plans to pass on 60% of the revenue generated to developers, Google has hinted at a 50:50 sharing approach. iAds may be expensive for the advertisers, with packages starting at $1 million, it also offers them new targeting and interactive elements. Who will win this epic battle still is some distance away but innovation, creativity and better IT and Communication choices is making consumers emerge the ultimate winner.