Archive for September, 2008

iPod Nano…

{ September 30, 2008 @ 2:36 pm } · { Misc, UK }
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My birthday came one month early this year! And it nearly knocked me out as well! Upon reaching home yesterday, I was surprised to see the house abandoned, empty and dark.. even though around that time usually the husband is already home! Seeing his mobile on the table, I realised that he probably would’ve just gone out for a short while and would be back soon. And I was right. He did come back soon, only to hand me a crummy looking cardboard box; the kind eBay sellers use… “Open it!”

Nothing could have prepared me for this! As I opened up the box, out came a sleek looking plastic case with rounded edges. I turned it around and saw the top, which had a white inlay and the very subtle grey characters “16GB” written on it. I forgot to breathe and yelled “Oh my god!” at the same time.

For the rest of the evening I was completely useless, trying to get together as much music files as I possibly could, and loading them into iTunes and then into the iPod.

Anecdotes aside, let’s focus on the product though.

Styling & Design: looks quite a lot like the old iPod Mini I used to have, only much sleeker and slimmer. The colours are absolutely amazing! Radiant and beautiful and so much choice, if I had bought the thing myself, I wouldn’t have known which colour to buy.

Functionality: It is as easy to use as the rest of the iPods (cannot say anything for the iPod Touch because I haven’t tried it). I really like the fact that the orientation of what’s on the screen changes when you tilt your iPod. I also liked the fact you can make it shuffle by roughly giving it a shake; it needs to be emphasized here; Rough! Jogging, running, walking, swaying will not set it off. You almost have to smack a mosquito out of the air with it in order for the shuffle function to work.

Sound/overall quality: I guess I do not have to say much about it. It’s standard Apple stuff; looks and feels very solid. Sound quality is great, the earphones are one of the very few types that will actually stay in my ears (somehow my ears like to evict other less worthy intruders!) Because I’ve only had it for maybe 15 hours, I wouldn’t be able to comment on battery life yet, or on potential problems with it.

Overall I couldn’t be more happy. I had secretly been eyeing the ads for the new Nano chromatic range for a while now. I’m surely not leaving it out of my sight any time soon!

North Indian Food Pt. II

{ September 26, 2008 @ 9:38 pm } · { Food, India }
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It’s about time for my second post about easy North Indian food! And this time another one of my favourite after work quick fix foods: Kala Channa. (Black Chickpeas)

I realize what I’m making is not authentic, and people will hate me for it, but seriously; after spending all day at work; rather than soaking and boiling dried chickpeas, I opt for canned ones..

First a little background information: Indian Food relies heavily on lentils, beans and other legumes. Because they are usually dried (canned foods are not very widespread in India), it is very easy for people to keep them in their pantry, ready to be used no matter which season. A traditional North Indian meal consists of either a Chicken/Mutton dish, a Vegetable dish and a type of Dal (lentil). These dishes are then eaten with Rice or Chapatis (flat unlevened breads) and often some yogurt and pickle.

Kala Chana – Tangy Black Chickpeas

Ingredients:

2-3 Red Onions - finely sliced

1-2 Green Chillis – finely chopped or slit, whichever you prefer

2 cans Black Chickpeas – drained

Red Chilli Powder (optional)

1 tsp Turmeric Powder

1 tsp Cumin Powder

1 tsp Coriander Powder

Lemon/Lime Juice to taste

Salt to taste

Vegetable Oil

 

Heat the vegetable oil in a wok. In case of slit whole green chillis, add them first (If they’re finely chopped, then add them with the onions). Fry for around 30 seconds until they get blisters. Add the onions, fry until brown. (To shorten frying time, add some salt once the onions are translucent). Season with salt, turmeric, red chilli, cumin and coriander powder. Add the drained chickpeas, toss and fry until ingredients are mixed well. Season with Lime juice, Salt. This dish is not supposed to be mild in flavour at all, so you can be as generous with the spices as you like. If you have any; garnish with some fresh coriander leaves and a lemon wedge for those who like it even more sour!

Serve with any type of Indian Bread, but traditionally this dish is eaten with Pooris (Deep fried chapatis basically). 

I regularly make these black chickpeas, so a photo will soon follow, I promise!

Google Base – Second Try!

{ September 22, 2008 @ 4:23 pm } · { Business }
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Generally I am a fan of Google products. I can’t help it; until now I have found it to be the best search engine (although results are deteriorating, but perhaps that is a general trend, not just Google’s fault!), their Webmaster tools and Analytics are extremely helpful for anybody running a commercial website. A while back I was also using AdSense on one of my sites. I did earn some money with it but because I was forced to give up my site, I couldn’t keep earning from ads either.

One product I have not yet used is AdWords but I’m on it; once my site(s) are settled in a bit and optimised properly, I will try running and Ad Campaign with the voucher my hosting company so graciously provided me with (£50! and all I had to do was pay around £10 on hosting.. now that’s a bargain!) Oh and not to mention the kind people at Google gave me a voucher as well… £70 after all I did was use Analytics for a while.

Either way, that’s not what I wanted to discuss here… My point is: I generally am biased towards liking Google. So I wanted to try Google Base; a tool for submitting your products to the Google shopping search results. And I don’t know about anybody else, but I use it quite heavily, mainly for comparing prices of products on various websites.

So I happily and naively went into Google Base, opened an account, and read up on how to add products. Because my site has LOADS of them (and I do mean LOADS!), the datafeed option was my salvation. I created a tab delimited txt file in Excel, containing around 2500 products. And I submitted it. That was around a week ago. The first thing that happens is, Google base tells you the file is being processed, which could take up to an hour. After an hour it tells you how many errors there were, and how many products were submitted. And then you get a list of products and their status is “Published … searchable soon”. As long as this displays, you should sit patiently and wait for up to 48 hours until the products are in the search results. Then the status will say something like “Published and searchable”. Right on time, within a day or so the status changed to searchable and I got excited. Could not wait to find out how many people search for my products on google shopping. Guess what: none!

Not a single visitor… absolutely nothing. So I logged in, and tried searching for some of my own products. No result; all I get is competitors’ products. Then I went through the help files… They tell you a way to search for your own products using your user id. Nothing! Not a single product of mine was in the index.

Strange isn’t it? And if you search through help files and forum posts, all you get is pointers on what you could’ve done wrong; set the wrong country, item type, submitted items without prices etc. Well I did everything exactly as described, still nothing in the search results. So I’ve waited for a week, thought maybe I need to be more patient. But today I’ve had enough, deleted all my products, and my feed, and uploaded a new one. (exactly as the Google troubleshooting page told me to; resubmit and see what happens).

But as it stands now, I don’t like Google base as much as I thought I would. To me it seems like a buggy product. Good thing it’s free, because if I had wasted more than a bit of time, I would’ve been quite pissed off!

CMS Made simple?!

{ September 22, 2008 @ 4:08 pm } · { Business, Work }
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Today I’ve spent most of my day researching a CMS. I am in desperate need of a good, stable and easy to use CMS for two applications; my office requires a website and my boss wants to update content, and I am planning a new site myself that will focus mainly on content, rather than 100% ecommerce.

So as I started searching this morning, I came across a blog post describing 13 CMS’s that I had not yet heard of. I cannot really pinpoint why out of all of them, I opened one window for Silverstripe CMS, and another leading me to the CMS Made Simple website. I ended up looking through CMS made simple, tried out the demo install, and noticed some interesting features. For some reason I didn’t go beyond the frontpage of Silverstripe, perhaps I will look into it some other day.

Previously I have used a few Opensource CMS’s both for my own projects as well as for customers. Working as a freelancer, I was asked to do a few Mambo templates. That is how I got a little familiar with that system. I didn’t like it that much because it had many limitations and whenever I would find a module I liked, it turned out development had stopped on it and no support was given. But just like CMS made simple it was also based on PHP and MySQL. Mambo’s limitations grew me accustomed to problems having group permissions for various users, as well as some templating limitations.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that CMS made simple had inbuilt functionality for some things that were very hard to do in Mambo; Group permissions seem to be easy at first sight. I have not fully tested this yet but I will definitely do it within the next week or so. Templates are easily selected and different pages can have different templates assigned to them. I could straight away think of various situations in which I needed exactly this functionality and in the end gave up on my ideas because it was simply too difficult to do.

I was also very pleased with the fact that the inbuilt SEO Friendly URLs in CMS made simple actually work on my web hosting. Something I was not able to do on my Zen Cart site for some reason; which actually made me suspect that maybe I have Windows hosting. Clearly this is not the case because I’ve managed it with this CMS. So I have to suspect that htaccess isnt fully supported on my hosting and because CMS Made Simple has an inbuilt way of rewriting URLs through PHP (don’t ask me how; I’m not that nerdy!) it just works out of the box. Great, just what I wanted!

From what I could tell at first sight, there are many third party modules available for CMS made simple. The website has quite a comprehensive list of them. And I could find a handful already which I have downloaded and kept; a Comments feature, RSS feed, Google sitemap module, Events module etc.

Another I downloaded was osCommerce for CMS made simple. It seemed promising and I was very keen on using it but it just didn’t work at all.. So far this was the only disappointment I faced. Sure, I plan on using this system on a mainly content based site, but I will still need some ecommerce functionality. There are some other shopping cart and product catalogue modules available, and I will test them soon, so my final verdict is still pending. However, at least for my office site, which does not need an online shop, I think I will go with this CMS.

My next step will be learning how to create my own templates. That should be fun…

Meta refresh – a life saver

{ September 17, 2008 @ 12:15 pm } · { Work }
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At work I was facing a bit of a problem regarding the company website. And I’m sure there are more companies out there with this issue. Being a small company, we did not have our own website. We’re a subsidiary of a much bigger company abroad, and therefore they had a website, we referred all our customers to that site, and didn’t bother. But that’s surely not the way to go! As our sales are increasing, we require a more professional image. This isn’t just a handful of people who work directly for the parent company; it is a separate company in its own right and should act like it. So we decided to set up a website.

The company already has email hosting because all our business communication is done electronically. The hosting company seems good enough for our email needs, we get a nice system which can be managed through MS Outlook and a webmail interface. For this purpose we already owned a domain name with free 20mb hosting, without scripting support. Now that the website came into the picture; we were facing a dilemma. The web hosting solutions offered by our ISP are expensive and limiting; clearly they focus more on email and needs and wishes of small companies wanting a small (self made) brochure style website. We are aiming higher than that! With me being the in-house web designer, we have plans for a dynamic portal to match our competitors’ sites; requiring support for PHP and SQL amongst other things. And our ISP just didn’t have the right thing. But shifting our domain to a different host would create a lot of problems; we cannot go without email for even a moment! The system we use is appropriate for our needs, and we do not wish to scale down on that. But we do want a better web hosting for our site!

Solution: we bought a new domain name specifically for our new website. And the old one will remain as it is, because as part of our company email addresses, we suspect many people would still visit that domain, in search for our company site. So we have two domains, out of which one will be fully functional. How to get all visitors to come to the correct site? Easy: we put a Meta Refresh tag on the old site, which seamlessly forwards the visitors to the appropriate domain.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0; URL=http://www.example.com">

Include the above code at the top of your webpage; inside the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags. Change the URL in the code to the domain you want to forward to and you’re done! The “0″ next to CONTENT= refers to the number of seconds you want to display the old page. In our case we want our forward to be as quick as possible. And not just that, we don’t want to distract people by the fact that we’re forwarding; To visitors it looks like it’s all the same site. On the old domain we uploaded a page that looks identical to our website’s front page; when it redirects only very attentive visitors would notice that it looks like the site is refreshing.

Personally I’ve chosen to do it this way because it annoys me when you get to a page which says “You are being redirected to our new site at www.blah.com”. It looks unprofessional and messy. Visitors get spooked thinking they visited the wrong site and might close it. Therefore I prefer to have the same look and feel on both pages.

1-2-3 … Launch!

{ September 17, 2008 @ 11:57 am } · { Business, UK }
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I realize very well that title made it sound much more exciting than it actually is; but I’ve launched my site; www.alteregouk.com. It was a silent launch (in fact, it’s been up for a week now and I haven’t told anyone yet. Just trying to get Zen cart running smoothly, troubleshoot and debug. Also, I’ve been planning my marketing strategy; how do I get Google to find a completely new site more interesting.

Furiously analyzing the data provided to me from Google Analytics and Webmaster tools. Interestingly I am already getting traffic from google; for the strangest keyword combos… apparently I rank highly for “chinese sex dolls” when searching only UK sites. surprising; I would’ve thought established sites would get the top few results pages.

My first real step in website promotion has been submitting my URL to the Zen Cart showcase. This was more effective than expected; from one day to the next I got 150 unique visitors! (Previously I had maybe 1 or 2). If only roughly 40% weren’t US based whereas my site only sells and delivers in the UK… As you can imagine I’ve had quite a few abandoned shopping carts.

People keep asking me when my site will be done. And I really can’t think of a good reply. Because anyone who operates a web based business knows this: a site is never done, it’s never complete. You always have to develop it and grow it, or it will die.

Therefore I’m still working on and on, writing content, meta tags, descriptions and keeping an eye on traffic data to see if the effort was worth it. It should be another few months before I can tell properly if my efforts paid off. And that is the very worst part of the whole process: I’m way too impatient to be able to wait and see!

Easy South Indian Food

{ September 12, 2008 @ 12:15 pm } · { Food, India }
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What many people abroad do not realise is how diverse India is, not just in terms of geography, language, traditions but also food. Indian restaurants abroad sometimes mix and match various cuisines to come up with their menu. 

Most basic spices to purchase: Mustard seeds (brown), Turmeric powder, curry leaves. 

Most South Indian meals are incomplete without some form of rice; Rice is processed into dough to make tasty treats like Idlis (steamed rice cakes), Dosas (crispy pancakes) and Vadas (savoury doughnuts).  But of course rice is also eaten boiled or steamed, with some spices and additions to give it a typical flavour. While travelling around Tamil Nadu, I found that many restaurants offer extremely affordable lunch meals involving various rice dishes served with Sambar (spicy lentil & vegetable gravy). But most can be eaten on their own as well. I would like to share a very simple yet tasty recipe of one of these popular dishes; lemon rice. 

 

Lemon Rice

Ingredients:

3-4 cups Cooked rice – preferably prepared earlier and cooled in the fridge

1 tsp Mustard seeds (brown)

2 1/2 tbsp Peanuts – raw

1 tbsp Chana dal (split chickpeas; optional)

1 tsp finely chopped ginger

1 green chilli – finely sliced

1 tsp turmeric powder 

4-5 Curry leaves 

Lime juice

Salt to taste

2 tbsp Cooking oil

 

Heat the oil in a wok over medium heat. Add the Peanuts, mustard seeds and Chana dal. Fry until it crackles; then add the curry leaves. Fry until the peanuts are properly roasted; be careful not to burn them. Then add the ginger and green chilli. Stir fry for around 30 sec. Add the turmeric powder and mix properly in the oil. Then add the rice; mix well, season with Lime juice and salt; serve immediately. 

 

I really love this dish because it is so quick, it can be done within 5 minutes; and it is a wonderful way of using up left over rice. In fact it comes out the best when using yesterday’s left over rice straight from the fridge; the grains seperate nicely then and the dish comes out fluffy and light. The fresher and warmer the rice when you put it in, the more sticky and soggy the end result will be. 

Some other typically south indian rice dishes are: tomato rice, tamarind rice and curd rice. I particularly like the latter and will probably post that recipe soon as well.

Indian Food basics (North Indian)

{ September 4, 2008 @ 10:19 am } · { Food, India }
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Lots of people are fascinated by Indian food and assume it is very complicated. It may seem daunting; reading the ingredients list of many Indian recipes; the number of spices is overwhelming and makes the dish seem hard and time consuming to make. But it need not be that way; there is such a thing as Indian food for busy people as well!

The main principle to follow with all cuisines is very simple: Quality ingredients! You cannot make tasty food if your ingredients are old, stale and tasteless.

You need fresh and ripe vegetables, fragrant spices and good quality meat, or you’re going to end up disappointed. Disappointment happens to me as well, and I have been cooking Indian food for quite some time now; I tend to get demotivated and frustrated if the food turns out bland, but what we need to remember is that these things happen; and it does not necessarily mean you’re a bad cook, or the recipe was inaccurate. It could just be that the ingredients were at fault!

If you’re going to venture into cooking Indian food at home, and you do not want to go all out buying spices right away, there are some basic supplies to stock up on and you can get cooking right away:

The bare minimum: Turmeric Powder (“Haldi” in Hindi), Red Chilli Powder, Cumin seeds, Coriander powder.

Jeera Aloo (Cumin Potatoes, no gravy)

Ingredients:

approx. 400gr Potatoes – peeled cubes

two medium sized Onions – sliced evenly (Optional)

one Green Chilli (fresh) – finely chopped

Vegetable oil (neutral in flavour, like Sunflower Oil)

1 tbsp. Cumin seeds

1 tsp. Coriander powder

1/2 tsp. Turmeric powder

Salt & Red Chilli powder to taste

Chopped Coriander Leaves as garnish

 

Have all your ingredients ready for use. To save time, boil the Potato cubes in salted water for a few minutes, until they are almost cooked.

Heat the oil in a Wok on medium heat, add cumin seeds and fry until they crackle. Add Onion. Fry until onions get translucent, then add Green chilli and Coriander Powder. Fry for a few minutes more, then add some salt. Keep stirring so the onions don’t burn. You want the onion to get brown (in case of white onions, or dark purple in case of red onions). Once onions are nicely browned and getting softer, add Turmeric Powder with two tablespoons of water. Mix well. Add Potato cubes. If they stick, add a little more water.

Cook until the potatoes are done. Adjust seasoning; If you want more flavour; add more salt, Coriander powder and some Red Chilli powder. If you prefer a tangy flavour; add some lemon/lime juice. Turn off the flame and top with chopped fresh coriander leaves.

Serve hot, with roti/naan (store bought if you’re in a hurry).

 

The recipe above is one of the most simple Indian dishes to cook, and quite tasty! Purists would say that actually Jeera Aloo does not contain Onion, but decide for yourself; I personally like the flavour with onion a lot. You can vary and adjust and add different ingredients as well. For a better flavour, do not pre-boil the potatoes, instead chop them into smaller pieces, not thicker than 1cm and put them in raw. Add more water while cooking to slightly cover them while cooking, and let the water evaporate to required consistency in the end. This way it will take considerably longer to cook them, but they soak up more of the flavour and you do not end up making them too mashy.

You can also add French beans to the dish or garden peas for more variation. Basically any vegetable can be added, as long as it’s chopped into bite-size pieces and does not take longer than the potatoes to cook. Traditionally, if you add other vegetables, you use less cumin seeds or none at all. But again it’s up to you to decide!

One.com – Quantity vs. Quality (Hosting Review)

{ September 2, 2008 @ 11:03 am } · { Business, UK }
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Ashamed to admit it, but unfortunately it’s true; I’m cheap when it comes to Hosting. Fine, so you put a couple of servers in a secure room, protect them from hackers / power cuts / internet downtime, which is quite an achievement. But I do not want to pay an arm and a leg for it!

So researching hosting providers for my latest business venture, www.alteregouk.com, brought me to my current choice for webhosting and domain names; One.com.

They have a great introductory offer for UK residents/businesses: First year basic hosting completely free. You only pay a setup fee of £9 before VAT. After that the charges are quite reasonable; £0.90 per month for the hosting, and for a domain, depending on the TLD; around £8-9 p.a.

Now this sounds quite al right as it is. Maybe a bit limiting because I used the term “basic hosting”. When I signed up I got 1gb of web space and all the database/scripting support I needed. There are some added feature in the control panel such as a blog which you can install within a few clicks and a sitebuilder which I haven’t used yet. Yet after just two weeks they upgraded the basic hosting package to 3gb of space, no extra charge.

I don’t want to sound overly positive about this hosting provider though; there are some bad bits; the control panel has some statistics functionality but I find it a little bit basic for my needs. You definitely need to install something more complex to fully track traffic on your site! Also, you can make numerous email accounts for each domain, but the mail server is quite slow! I have found delays of around 5 or 10 minutes, sometimes more, before email would reach my inbox. Also, the control panel is not  fully compatible with Firefox (my browser of choice); only Internet Explorer is supported for features like the Filemanager. Also, when you sign up for the hosting, rather than an instant detailed email; you will only receive your hosting details up to 48 hours later when the account has been activated.

But on the other hand, rather than having to open support tickets, or email Tech support, if I’m facing a problem, I simply open the Live Support chat and usually within 30 seconds, somebody will be there to help me. This is by far my favourite feature of One.com hosting!

Overall I would say, I am satisfied with this host, it is very good value for money, and they seem to have extremely helpful support staff on their Live Chat. I will definitely be a repeat customer!

E-Commerce & Me (My Zen Cart experience)

{ September 2, 2008 @ 10:23 am } · { Business, UK }
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I am not new to the world of E-Commerce and IT. For years I have worked as a freelance web designer, building other people’s business websites from scratch. During that time I have also created and run multiple of my own websites, however due to circumstances outside my control, my pet project of a couple of years ago; an e-commerce website, never really took off. Basically I built it, designed it, coded everything myself, added products to it and people ordered before I even expected it! My concept was as follows: Sell Indian ayurvedic/herbal beauty products which I would source from local shops, package them and send them off to my customers.

The main issue was, that living in India at the time, I had a very hard time dealing with the post office. They somehow refused to help explain their charges for overseas shipments. Therefore I was not able to calculate the shipping rates properly. Two other problems I faced contributed to my decision of taking the site offline; 1. Product availability problems; whenever I added a particular product to the site, chances were, when the order for it came in, it was near impossible to source it because of supply issues. 2. The tiny scale on which I was operating meant I could not invest in buying packaging material in bulk, so packaging became a very time consuming and expensive affair. Bottom line: I made losses on orders that came in, took a very long time getting the products together and packaging them and faced issues with some orders getting stuck at customs.

Most online businesses abroad do not face the same issues. Shipping costs are very transparent in most of the world. Product supply is handled by a wholesaler; people would rarely buy from retail shops and sell online because they would be too expensive. Packaging might still be an issue; but even that can be solved; selling through a dropshipper rather than a wholesaler, can be more convenient because you do not need to worry about the hands-on process of getting the products packed and shipped yourself.

So because I felt quite comfortable with the idea of building and managing my own e-commerce website, a few months back I decided to give it another shot. I found a dropshipper, researched some open source shopping cart scripts (honestly; if a team of people has already done all the scripting for you, gone through various versions and upgrades, why would you reinvent the wheel all over again?!) and got started on my latest project; www.alteregouk.com

It’s always a steep learning curve, dealing with a new system. I have had to do this a couple of times already, when asked to develop templates for various content management systems during my time as a freelancer. But Zen Cart I found a little bit different. It is not as user-friendly as some of the other systems I have tried. But it seems to be quite versatile. It has quite a few options right out the box, but certain other supposedly simple tasks can be time consuming and frustrating: the configuration settings are vast and it’s easy to get lost in them. Also, the way the language system works is quite complex; there are numerous files strewn around the directory structure of the site which allow editing of various wordings and phases used on the site. It would’ve helped to have a nice user interface to allow quick&easy access to the words/sentences people most commonly want to change.

With the help of some Third Party additions to the main software; I think my online shop is taking shape quite nicely. I can add products in bulk with the help of the Easy Populate Addon, create Google XML Sitemaps with just a few clicks, display my full size product images in a neat looking hovering box…

I could really only ask for one more thing; SEO Friendly URLs, but as I’m on Windows Hosting, that is never going to happen I’m afraid…

So now, after around two months of working on the website, I have over 2200 products, and am scheming my marketing campaign. My To Do list is getting shorter each day. I cannot wait to launch properly.. then play the waiting game to see if anybody actually orders! But don’t think I’ll just be sitting idle waiting for this site to take off; there are a few more ideas up my sleeve. Because in today’s online marketplace; you should definitely NOT put all your eggs in one basket!