Entries Tagged 'Writing and Speaking' ↓

One of the biggest hurdles in mobile web development is to make the site usable on different devices. You can follow the least common denominator approach and use only those features that will work on all target phones. But many a times you want to take advantage of device specific features in your mobile web.

What do you do then?

Well, you adapt the design and content to the device! And how do you do that?

Read the Chapter 4 of my Mobile Web Development book! It shows you exactly how to adapt your XHTML MP based mobile website to different devices using WALL, WURFL etc.

Here’s the chapter outline:

• What is Adaptation?
  • Do I Need Adaptation?
  • Can’t I just Use Common Capabilities and Ignore the Rest?
  • How to Determine the LCD?
  • OK, So How do I Adapt?
• Fancy Pizza Selection
  • What are Those <wall:*> Tags?
  • Let’s Make Sense of This Code!
    • Can I Use All XHTML Tags?
    • Will This Work Well for WML?
• Device Detection and Capabilities
  • XML Processing can Bog Down My Server, is There Something Easier?
  • What About W3C’s DIAL?

• Other Useful Tools for Adaptation
  • Dynamically Resizing Images
  • Quick and Easy Way to Make Your Blog Mobile
  • MyMobileWeb: Going the Semantic Way
  • HAWHAW: As Simple as a Laugh?

Click on the image below to download the free PDF.

So you’ve got a blog. How do you market it? How do you get people to subscribe to that RSS feed you have? How do you keep them coming back?

I looked around the web and found some blogs that give tips and techniques for marketing your blog. Here’s are a few links:

• Lee Odden gives 30 Tips of Marketing Your Blog. And on the same site Jolina covers the 8 Tips to More Effective Blogging from Aaron Wall’s session at SMX West.
• Heidi Cohen offers some Blog Marketing Strategies (especially for corporates) in this 2005 post.
• Blog Marketing Journal has good collection of posts on different techniques for marketing and promoting your blog. They cover SEO, email surveys and more.
• A lot of online marketing techniques can be applied to promote your blog. Check this Wikipedia article for some basic tactics in the right column.

How do you promote your blog? Or do you?

I never consciously marketed my blog, but I think I could use some of the tips in links above

I have a hard time managing comments on my blog! There are a few popular posts, and I keep getting hundreds of spam comments everyday. Interestingly the blog features in top 5 results if you search for entrepreneur on Google.

I have used many anti spam strategies over the years. I used to manage comments by moderating them all when I started in August 2005. When that became too much, I opted for WP HashCash. WP HashCash puts in an encrypted key in each comment message and checks for its validity on submission. This allows browsers with JavaScript alone, leaving most of the spam bot attacks.

But somewhere the spammers got more intelligent and WP HashCash didn’t quite stop all the spam.

Tarique suggested moving to Akismet. So around September 2006 I did!

Around December 2006, Akismet couldn’t catch a lot of spam, but I lived with it. Over the last 1.5 years, Akismet stopped some 1,60,000 spam comments.

But then now, it was getting too much. A lot of purely spam comments were not detected by Akismet, and I had to find something else.

And I think I got the best solution to stop spam comments so far!

Math Comment Spam Protection + Simple Trackback Validation!

Essentially, the Match Comment plugin asks the users to enter sum of two digits on the comment posting form. We assume only humans can understand and answer this. Comment spam bots will not. So you get comments only from humans.

The Trackback validator checks the IP/Domain of all trackbacks you get, and also the page that generated the trackback. It checks for the link to your site / post and if found, marks it as valid comment. Everything else is spam.

I have Akismet on top of it, so if there are humans submitting spam comments, Akismet will catch that.

These three plugins combined, have stopped all spam comments! I now have zero spam!

There will be time when bots will become more intelligent and circumvent the current system. And then I will find something else!

What are your experiences with spam comments? What do you use to protect yourself?

This Valentine’s Day marked the first decade of the Magnet brand! Ritesh, Murphy and I started MagNet as India’s first electronic magazine in February 1998. We launched with a special Valentine’s issue, and even had an ecards sections on the debut website.

The name MagNet meant “Magazine on the Net” - Mag + Net. The name stuck, and the ezine too! We had a big fan following and large subscriber base. Those were the early days of Internet in India. We wrote on technology, interesting websites, interviewed tech celebrities, and even had fun sections on the ezine and the accompanying website.

MagNet ezine, and the other ezines we launched, ran till 2001. MagNet WebPublishing Pvt. Ltd. was incorporated in May 1999 to support MagNet ezine and do other commercial activities. Part of the team joined the company.

It was completion of a decade, we decided to meet up! Ritesh, Murphy, Sujeet and I met yesterday evening and caught up! Kapil couldn’t join, and Vaishali is in Australia right now. But we had fun!

Ritesh and Murphy continue to lead Indsoft, their hosting and technology company. They have diversified in a lot of other areas - recruitment to hotel and are having a good time. Sujeet is in the US, working on security. Sujeet is a tech genius and finds immense satisfaction hunting down crackers! I continue to lead Magnet, now as Chairman and Chief Mentor of the organization. Kapil is a brand manager in Mudra now, doing what he loves the most - marketing, strategy and creativity. Vaishali is in Australia now, building rich internet apps with Flash and Flex! Not to forget Bhavin, he generously gave us webspace for free, and is now minting money running Indialinks.

(L to R: Ritesh, Sujeet, Murphy, Nirav)

I took some screenshots of the MagNet website and the stuff we did. Have posted them in the Gallery.

We had a great time making the magazine and running the MagNet Interactive website. I believe those were the founding years that shaped our philosophies and principles. Gave us a solid ground in technology and customer service too!

Thanks to all the contributors to MagNet too - all authors, all readers, all tech guys and all critics!

There are numerous stories of the time! If you were a subscriber, or knew MagNet from then, I invite you to share your experiences!

I received my copies of Mobile Web Development book yesterday. I was excited to hold the book and admired it’s print quality. And satisfied with the result of all hard work put over the last 8 months. I am sure the book will serve as a kick starter to anyone wanting to develop mobile websites. What’s unique about the book is that it does not stop at XHTML MP and Wireless CSS, but covers a whole range of topics that a mobile website will need.

Mobile Web Development shows you how to build a mobile presence for your web applications and sites. It covers targeting different mobile web browsers, sending and receiving SMS and MMS messages, accepting mobile payments, and developing voice- and touchtone-response systems.

The book illustrates every technique with practical examples, showing how to use these development methods in the real world. Along the way we show how an example pizza delivery business can use these methods to open up to the mobile web. The book is fast paced, yet touches upon relevant concepts. I had a great ride while I was reviewing the book. I was actually surprised at how fast the book moved - covering important topics in just enough detail, and moving on to the next!

There is a whole lot of technologies I covered in the book. The examples are done in PHP with XHTML Mobile Profile. But I also covered: AJAX, Wireless CSS, WAP 2.0, Tera WURFL, MyMobileWeb, Mobile Web Toolkit, Image Server, GAIA Image Transcoder, HAWHAW , ready.mobi, Nokia’s Mobile Internet Toolkit , SMIL, Voxeo’s Prophecy server, VoiceXML (VXML), grXML, Frost library, WALL, WURFL, SMS, MMS, mobile payment gateways, mobile widgets, Mobile AJAX, Android, Google Gears, and Dojo Offline.

So what will you learn from the book? Here’s the text from the back cover of the book:

• Build a mobile-friendly front end for your site – learn XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML MP) and Wireless CSS (WCSS), the CSS subset supported by mobile devices; target the full range of mobile browsers; adapt automatically to the capabilities of the device.
• Write interactive mobile applications – present and process mobile forms with different input types; support keypad navigation; get started with Mobile Ajax and JavaScript.
• Accept payments online via mobile web and SMS using Paypal, SMS short codes, and more.
• Integrate your application with SMS and MMS messages – enable users to send SMS and MMS messages to your site, process them, and send SMS and MMS messages back to your users too; set up your own SMS gateway, or choose an existing gateway provider; include slideshows, movies, and sounds.
• Handle voice calls – respond to voice input, create touchtone services, play pre-recorded voice or use text-to-speech to provide voice-based software.
• Future-proof your application – understand the basics of iPhone development, the Android platform, and the implications of other developments in the mobile space.

I would love to get your feedback on the book!