Harshad Narvekar

Recently I saw twitter tool integrated on 1 of the blog. I thought to my self what a well-chosen plug-in it is to be used on your blog. I immediately integrated the plug-in on to my blog.

The features were simple and straight forward, however very effective.

1) You can Post tweets from the blog itself.

2) You can show the last few tweets on your blog.

3) (The most adored one) You can make post of your each tweet, or you can post the entire weeks or months tweets as a post on the blog and that too automatically.

Here is a snapshot of the settings:

Thus we can keep updating our blogs daily, or weekly basis. This means you keep track of your daily rather min by min detail. Isnt that great!! Keeping a track of min by min details on your online diary?

I think this tool is great and will post blog post on your behalf. Increase in the post shall increase the number of pages and that in turn may increase your seo ranking, isnt it?

Recently was working on a social networking project, where site was divided into subdomains based on states. Thus if user wanted to swtich from 1 state to another (i.e. 1 subdomain to other), system had to pass the user session from 1subdomain to another subdomain.

Here is the solution:

1) If you have the access to php.ini file then you need to add this line to your php.ini file

session.cookie_domain = .mydomain.com

2) If you dont have access to the php.ini file then you need to add the following before the session.start() function on any page which creates the session cookie.

ini_set(”session.cookie_domain”, “.mydomain.com”);

Incase there is any better or alternate way then kindly share with me.

Thanks for reading!

I am sure you must be using google for searching anything/something on internet (What a foolish question). While doing that you must have noticed a new arrow button to each search result (1 shown in the above image). Yes that arrow up and arrow down button is called the google promote buttons. This is a new google gizmo which is introduced again to make user experience better on google.

It is rather simple button, when we click takes that search result on the top. But people (where I mean ‘I’) thought that is another SEO antic which Google might have introduced to help increase the page rank of that site and that so instantally. Hurray!! Isnt it? Hmm….Not quite so…the Google promote button is meant to be a personal button, a way to ensure that sites you like stay at the top of your search results. It does not mean a credit card affiliate can type “credit card” in Google, click their site, and think that this further optimizes the site for that search term. If anything, it’s just a way for webmasters to get a little ego boost seeing their results at the top of the page.

But does this promote button have any SEO value? Will it help increase the SERPS or SEO of a page? What if 1000 of people click the promote button for a site/page and increase their chance on google? There are so many black hat SEO techniques which already are doing it and this will engage people into a new SEO war.

Do you think Google thinks the way we do? Or has google already contemplated these point? Google must have already chalked out a solvent to all these problems. Google is not dump. Google just kept these buttons - promote and remove per-user. These are not yet digg or hot or not tools. They are just mean to organize your search results. The fav ones on the top and the less fav ones below.
Isnt it this a out of box feature or just a simple feature but affective one? Thats what google aims to - Make life simple. God! Please give me brains 1% as Google has.

Problems Using Absolute Paths with SSL

If you are borrowing use of an SSL certificate, such as the one provided free of charge to Internet Connection customers, when a webpage changes from http protocol to https (SSL), if you embed any images by absolute paths without domain names (/images/o.jpg), they will be broken.
If you embed images with full URL absolute paths (http://yourdomain.com/images/o.jpg), the images will show up, but the user will get warning messages that the page is a mix between secure and non-secure items.

On web pages that make transitions between http and https, one should use relative paths to avoid these problems.

We had build an online dating website with a online chat functionality/feature.
The client had a requirement to show an user offline once user clicks on either Logout button
or closes the tab or browser. The first part was easily achieved, however for the 2nd part I had to spend
around 2 hours to find out the solution.

Problem:
When the user forgot to log out and closes the browser directly, the
session stil exists because when the user opens the browser again and comes back to the site
user is still loged in. And client does not want that to happen.
I/Client want the session to be destroyed when the user closes the browser
immediately.

There were a couple of solutions which came across, however i tested and used the 2nd option

1)

<body onunload=”destroy()”>

<script lenguage=”javascript”>
function destroy()
{
window.open(’destroyCode.php’); <– this page would have the PHP Destroy session code..
}
</script>

PHP file (destroyCode.php):
session_destroy();

2) In your php.ini file, set the value:

session.cookie_lifetime=0

Or, before EVERY session_start() call, use:

session_set_cookie_params(0);

—
I had a conception that if you set a cookie (or session), the session automatically destroys on browser close. Howerver this did not happen as I had the session/cookie available in my temp folder.

While that can be true for cookies (depending on the settings), that is not true for sessions. Sessions are stored on the server, the server has no way of knowing when you close your browser. Sessions are destroyed after a certain amount of time of inactivity.

You cant destroy a session when the browser closes. It requires a server side command to do close a session. That mean, you could have javascript make an ajax call to a script when the browser closes.

I was recently reading few articles and I learned few new things in php, which I would like to share with you all!

What are classes?

Classes are nothing but a template or blue print for an object. if you say in common language classes are nothing but noun.

So it would be not wrong to say functions would be called as verbs. Right?

Example:

class UserManager{ //This shall be the class name which is a noun.

function getUserDetails ()

//This shall be the function name which is verb.

{

function definition here

}

}

What are Objects now? (in object-oriented PHP) objects are just like the bricks used to build a building:
Objects are the building bricks of object-oriented PHP projects.

Objects in a program means - imagine there are mini programs in a bigger program.

OOPs mostly is done because of having organized code, that is the most important thing which i felt.

Advantages:
1) Re-usable blocks/code
2) Since it is in model it is easy to update aspects of your software
3) Allows many programmers on same project. Since it is segmented it allows many programmers to work on same project without fearing of breaking other users code.
4) Good for bigger project
5) Can build up personal library and reuse it in different project
6) Crucial for programmers

Disadvantage:
1) Small projects are effected because for OO we might have to write more code which would not be suitable for small projects
2) OO php can be little slower at run time.

Hope this will help!

Will like to learn from your comments!

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step…

Requirements analysis is critical to the success of a development project

What is Requirements Gathering/Analysis?

Definition:

Requirements are a description of how a system should behave or a description of system properties or attributes. It can alternatively be a statement of ‘what’ an application is expected to do

Why is Requirements Gathering necessary?

It is proven that inadequate attention to Software Requirements Gathering at the beginning of a project is the most common cause for vulnerable projects that often do not deliver even on the basic tasks for which they were designed. There are instances in my career that, even after spending time and money on software projects where the end application eventually does not perform the tasks it was intended for.

Small and Medium companies are now getting into this practice by investing time and resources into effective and streamlined Software Requirement gathering process as the initial step.

The key to successfully completing a project is align with clients business goals and meet the projects requirement specifications.

5 most important questions to be asked?

Why is the need of software?

What is realizing (earning) model of the client?

What are the end users (stake holder) of the project?

What is the wish list of the client?

5^th Ask question until you are have further questions.

1) Identify the boundaries:

This initial step helps in identifying how the new application integrates with the business processes, how it fits into the larger picture and what its scope and limitations will be.

2) Knowledge transfer/Gathering phase

Information is gathered from multiple sources. The Requirement Analyst (BA or Project manager as per the hierarchy of the company) draws out information from respective sources on their requirement from the application and what their expectation are from the application.

Problems while gathering information from various sources:

1) Conflicting inputs

2) Ambiguous understanding of processes

3) Insufficient information from sources

4) Changes in requirement after this phase (which we cant stop J )

Thus to overcome these Requirement Analyst (BA or PM) should have strong communication skills, people skills and sound programming knowledge are prerequisites.

3) Tools used in requirement gathering

Tradition methods of requirement gathering are meetings, interviews with end users, on-site analysis, market research and competitor analysis.

Other methods include flowcharting of business process, existing user manuals or docs, current process models, process specification.

The most current and the medium sized companies style which are better equipped to handle the complex and often changing requirements are:

* Prototypes

* Use cases

* Data flow diagrams

* User stories

* Transition process diagrams

Once the requirement gather is done, the most important is making a model of the requirement.

This should be followed by documenting the requirement into SRS.
There is no silver bullet, no one answer, no perfect approach method or technique to requirements gathering. Developing a good requirements document is about giving your project the best chance of success. To do so, you must reduce the risk of common mistakes that arise from a lack of communication or understanding. Keep this in mind as you gather your requirements, and the documentation — and project as a whole — will have the best chance of success.