8 Things You Didn’t Know About Me

Blog, Internet, Personal No Responses »
Jan 042008

Dennis McDonald tagged me in the “8 Things You Didn’t Know About Me” game so here goes:

  1. I love Chai and drink a lot of it (not the Starbucks kind…the regular Indian kind which is way better).

  2. I am a digitalmediaholic. I have over 6 terabytes of ripped movies and 100 GB of music.
  3. I am a dot com bubble survivor. I founded a venture-funded startup called iWidgets.com that created widgets for web pages. Unfortunately, the technology was six years ahead of its time.
  4. My un-Americanized name is Nikunj, pronounced nick-ooonj.
  5. I have never had any alcoholic beverage…none.
  6. I became a vegetarian in 2001…did it cold turkey (pun intended).
  7. I grew up in Bombay and came to the U.S. in 1987 for my undergrad education. Never went back, and became a U.S. citizen a few years ago.
  8. I enjoy the creative aspects of brand development, especially logo development, tag line creation and messaging.
Posted by nik at 8:00 am

Websites built on DotNetNuke

Blog, DotNetNuke, Personal No Responses »
Jan 302007

Many businesses that develop websites for customers using DotNetNuke have to field questions about reference sites. Here is the answer —

Computer Hardware:

Manufacturing:

Software:

Pharma:

Travel/Logistics:

Education:

Financial Services:

Non-Profits:

Entertainment:

 

Posted by nik at 8:00 am

DotNetNuke Factoid

Blog, DotNetNuke, Personal No Responses »
Sep 052006

DotNetNuke forums user odontech has posted an excellent collection of DNN-related links which I am reproducing here:

 

DotNetNuke Factoid

Community

· A community of over 300,000 members

· [link] Within the top 25 Open Source Projects at SourceForge.net (by Page Views)

Â

Performance

Scalability

· [link] Web Farm Support

· High Traffic Reference Sites

· [link] DotNetNuke itself handles ~ 15 million pageviews daily

· [link] Georgia Institute of Technology > 10 million pageviews daily

· [link] WildVoice.com > 6 million pageviews daily

· [link] Transperth > 6 million pageviews daily

· [link] National Rugby League > 4 million pageviews daily

· [link] South Australian Central > 4 million pageviews daily

· [link] Vinum Canada ~ 1 million pageviews daily

· [link] University of Texas El Paso ~ 1 million pageviews daily


Security

· Public Registration
Allows the general public to sign up for accounts.

o [link] CAPTCHA
Prevents people from writing programs to create accounts.

· [link] Security Groups
Allows site users to be placed into groups.

o Group Settings

§ Auto Assignment
Automatically assigns new users into the role.

§ Public Role
Allows users to subscribe/unsubscribe into different roles.

§ Private Role
Prevents users from changing their assignmment to a role.

· Page Level Security

o Allows security settings on a page level basis

§ Ability to View Page

§ Ability to Edit Page

· Module Level Security

o Allows security settings to be set on modules placed on pages

§ Ability to View Module

§ Ability to Edit Module

§ (Custom settings available on a per module basis)

Skins

· [link] Over 70 skins listed on Salaro

· [link] Over 500 skins listed on SnowCovered

Modules

· Over 30 Core Modules

o [link] Account LogIn

o [link] [project page] Announcements

o [project page] Blog

o [link] Banner

o [project page] Chat

o [link] [project page] Contacts

o [link] Discussion

o [link] [project page] Documents

o [link] [project page] Events List / Calendar

o [link] [project page] FAQs

o [link] [project page] Feedback

o [project page] Forum

o [project page] Gallery

o [project page] Help

o [link] [project page] IFrame

o [link] Image

o [link] [project page] Links

o [project page] Map

o [project page] Media

o [link] [project page] News Feed (RSS)

o [project page] Reports

o [project page] Repository

o [project page] Store

o [link] [project page] Search

o [link] [project page] Survey

o [link] [project page]Text/HTML

o [link] User Accounts

o [link] [project page] User Defined Table

o [project page] Users Online

o [project page] Wiki

o [link] [project page] XML/XSL

· Community Developed

o [link] Over 100 modules listed on DotNetNuke

o [link] Over 700 modules listed on SnowCovered

Localized

· [link] [project page] DNN Supports multiple languages (currently 25 user submitted language packs)

Books – Five books have been published on DotNetNuke

· [link] Professional DotNetNuke 4: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET 2.0

· [link] Professional DotNetNuke ASP.NET Portals

· [link] Beginning DotNetNuke 4.0 Website Creation in C# 2005 with Visual Web Developer 2005 Express: From Novice to Professional

· [link] DotNetNuke For Dummies

· [link] Building Websites with VB.NET and DotNetNuke 3.0

Magazines / Media

· Microsoft published a 2 part webcast on DNN 4.0 (March 17, 2006)

o [part1] Overview and What’s New

o [part2] Running on ASP.NET 2.0

· Microsoft published a 6 part webcast on DNN (Jan 10 – Jan 31, 2006)

o [part1] Overview and Installation of DotNetNuke

o [part2] Working with Modules in DotNetNuke

o [part3] Programming Your Own DotNetNuke Module Using Visual Basic .NET

o [part4] Using Security Features in DotNetNuke

o [part5] Creating Skins for Your DotNetNuke Portal

o [part6] DotNetNuke Architecture and Wrap-up

· DotNet Developers Journal ran a 4 part series on DNN (Dec 2005 – Feb 2006)

o [part1] An Introduction to the DotNetNuke Application Framework (Nov 2005)

o [part2] Managing an Open Source Project for DotNetNuke (Dec 2005)

o [part3] When Design and Development First Met (Jan 2006)

o [part4] Rapid Module Development for DotNetNuke (Feb 2006)

· [link] CNet published article (July 11, 2005)

· [link] EWeek published article (April18, 2005)

· [link] Visual Studio Magazine published article (Sept 30, 2003)

Posted by nik at 8:00 am Tagged with:

Public transportation information displays and usability

Blog, Personal No Responses »
Jul 222006

The schedule information displays for public transportation in the U.S. tend to range somewhere between ho-hum to crappy. Either you have the paper schedule posted under plexi-glass or you have giant, ugly LED or OLED displays. On my recent trip to Melbourne I was totally impressed with the displays at the tram stops.

Melbourne tram schedule display

This display rocks! It is clear, concise and most importantly, real-time (note wireless antenna at top). And the unit itself is compact and not an eye-sore.

There was one important UX choice that puzzled me at first. The display is sorted by Route # versus arrival time or destination. I pondered this for a bit and the decision does make sense. If the display were sorted in descending order by arrival time, you would have scan down the list to find when your tram or bus would be arriving. This way, you can quickly skip the Route #’s you are not interested in and quickly find the time your tram will arrive.

This made me think about the sorting choices in Windows Explorer. When you are in Details view and sort columns, no matter which column you choose, there is an implicit primary sort by type (i.e. folder or file) before the selected sort is performed. I faithfully reproduced this functionality in my Posted by nik at 8:00 am

A world of widgets

Blog, Internet, Personal No Responses »
Aug 082005

It seems like there are widgets everywhere. Apple added widgets to Tiger through the cool Dashboard feature. Yahoo has a whole section of its site devoted to widgets.

I greet widgets with a mixture of emotions. In 1999, when I created my venture-funded startup, my world-changing idea was to bring the web to people in the form of mini-applications that provided identical functionality with a web browser, a mobile device or a telephone. Not only that, the mini-apps had collaboration built-in so you could decide who could view/edit your data etc.

Yes, the mini-applications were called “widgets” and my startup was iWidgets, Inc. Unfortunately, the world wasn’t ready for widgets at the time and I didn’t know as much about running a startup then as I do today, and so iWidgets joined thousands of other dot bombs when I turned the lights out in early 2001.

But seeing all the buzz about widgets today gives me a good feeling — I had the right world-changing idea, just at the wrong time and perhaps a little flawed in the execution. I felt nostalgic enough to go digging through the archive DVD’s to pull up some promos we had created. Here are four of them, each focused a specific target market.

Janet |  Hannah |  Johnsons |  Rob

Posted by nik at 8:00 am Tagged with:
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