Revamp in order

Over the past one and a half years, my life, perspectives, likes, dislikes and even thoughts have come leaps and bounds. So i believe a quick revamp is in need for my blog also. Feel free to comment me on the changes that you see.

This will be my 49th post. Incidentally it is a number mostly associated with my favorite football club that is arsenal. Arsenal had gone 49 consecutive Premiere League games unbeaten from 2003 to 2005 - a national record. Speaking of arsenal, i have become infected with Arsenalitis it seems. It has become a part of my blood, thoughts and life. So this 49th post is dedicated to the team that plays the best football in all the land :)

I was able to buy a sony cyber shot camera last year and have been experimenting with my photography interests for some time now. Most of my better efforts have been uploaded in mu Orkut and Facebook albums.

Opera has come out with version 10 and i had been following all the great developments from them all throughout. I use Opera mini 5 from my mobile device and it is an absolutely wonderful product. Fantastic UI design, navigation and exceptional usability makes me think that Opera have done it this time. What more can they do to improve. Will have to wait and see.

Will post more soon, chow

The Rubicon Panel - Control Panel

    The Rubicon  Panel is a custom developed control panel for use with the redesigned Mangalam College of Engg site. A number of features have been improvised and implemented into the panel. Shown below are the screen shots of the important features of the panel.

    This is the Rich text editor for managing the news, events and even the static contents for the site. All the data arse stored in the database. Even a person without  any knowledge with web designing can easily add or edit contents with much ease.

    This is the Add new staff member to the database form, part of the staff management module. 

    The Gallery management module has been a powerful module that has been researched and implemented for this project. New album can be created very easily and thumbnails are generated automatically for each uploaded image.

    The uploaded document manager makes it easy to upload documents to the site. It also provides the feature to get the link for each file , so that it may be added to a news or event item easily.

    That covers the important features provided by the panel ....

   

Mangalam College of Engg - Redesign

    I was working on a project for redesigning the website for Mangalam College of Engineering, Kottayam, Kerala. After studying the old site and the requirements put forward by the college, started with the design and layout. A draft was completed in a week's time incorporating all the fine details.

    The details specified included having an interesting layout and provide information to prospective students and parents, current students and their parents, the AICTE and anyone wishing to know more about the college.

     The dynamic parts of the site includes having a Latest News and Events notification on homepage itself, display the details of all faculty members and courses given by the college, a Photo Gallery and a portal for Admission Queries among other things...

    Well, I dont know if this is gonna be implemented or not, but this is the homepage of the redesigned site.

    The design was done using Fireworks, Dreamweaver and Flash. The dynamic end is coded using PHP and uses MySql Database.

    Most of the time was spent on developing the Control Panel for the site. It is codenamed Rubicon Panel and can be features a Rich Text editor, Uploaded File manager, Staff List Manager, Gallery Album Manager.

        There is now question over when or if the redesigned site will get to be implemented. There has not been much further response from the management regarding this. So at the moment, the site lives on "localhost" ........

Mechnova09 - Design almost finalised

    The design for the site mechnova09.com is almost finalised.  Some minor updates to be done. Some extensive design capabilits and an eye catching navigation system is impletemted highlighting the various events for the program. A Flash based count down timer is also installed on the home page ........

So chechk it out .........

New Website Project - Mechnova09

   Hey work recently started on the website for RIT Mechanical departments Mechnova '09. It is a technical festival to be conducted on 14,15 and 16 of January 2009. Ae is doing the design and maintanence of the site. A simple and professional design tailored to the requirements has been done and only minor tweaks are going along at this stage.

http://mechnova09.com/

visit the site and post ur feedback or comments here....

FMA (Flexible Messaging Area)

    An FMA (Flexible Messaging Area) is a Flash banner or an image that is displayed on the Home page of a site for higlighting a product or event, or just to give the visitors a brief overview of the main aim of the site.

   Most sites use a full flash banner that runs the full width of the displayed area of the home page of the site. Some developers cleverly design a JPEG or PNG image to convey the message as well.

   A proper definition of FMA is given by Tony Lopez who worked for Macromedia. Check out what he has to say about FMA.

Tony Lopez: FMA is a term that predates me here at Macromedia. It stands for the Flexible Messaging Area, and it's the section within the Flash portion of the home page where we do important "high impact" messaging. Think of it as an end-cap in a store. It's a display that we hope you'll spend some time looking at, and eventually acting on. We try to tell a simple story here. Sometimes it's about a new product, other times it might be about an event, or a promotion that we are running. We always try to tell this story in a manner that is clear, elegant and engaging. Hopefully we strive to provide some design inspiration, but it's always function over form.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/articles/fma_interview.html

Artistik Expressionz on Eniac '08

    Eniac '08 is a national level technical symposium being organised by the Electrical & Electronics department of Govt. Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology, Kottayam.

   Ae got the opportunity for designing the poster, brochure,flex, website and logo for the event. Most of the work is completed by now.

  For further information go to http://www.eniac08.com

Check back for updated info.

New favicon for Google!

      Hey Google have changed their favicon. For those new to this term,a favicon is a small 16X16 image that is displayed next to the address of the site and propably seen in Opera and Firefox. Blogger has a kindof B in its favicon. It is just a graphic used to associate something with a site.

       Google had been sporting this image as their favicon for a long time. It consisted of a capital G surrounded by four lines that make a box with different colors (those of the Google logo).


     It had a sort of corporate mean look to it. And it also looks boring and a bit complex with the different colors and all. So i guess the google developers have finally decided that its time to change.. Have a look at this :



    This is the new favicon. Its a blue small case g from the Google logo. It also sports a small shadow as well adn looks deliciously fantastic. I guess it signifies some freedom from the old bounded coroprate logo.  This one is more close to the styles of Google.

     To see it for urself make sure you clean your cache and type in any of google.com, image.google.com or any other google based service...

Security tips blog

Hey check this out.. The blog that deals with Security ....


http://tips-on-security.blogspot.com/


You can find out how to clean some nasty virus attacks, registry cleaning and most importantly staying safe ...

First draft of Home page completed

   As i said earlier, im gonna post the first draft of the home page. Finally happy with all the elements and layout. Added scripts for 
displaying some elements on the home page itself with AJAX.



    Please note that this is Work in progress, i just wanted to follow on the developmental timeline of this site. High amount are functionality are expected. Also this design is relies heavily on CSS.Take a look at this, the home page without ay css...



    CSS is remarkable? Keep watching for intersting tips and stuff ... bye for now.