Widgipedia is out on their mission to create world’s #1 resource for widgets and gadgets. It was born out of the need to have a collaborative platform for developers to develop and enhance their widget creation skills and provide a repository of widgets supporting every possible platform.

Let us define few terms before our discussion.

What is a Web Widget?
Web Widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are akin to plugins or extensions in desktop applications. Other terms used to describe a Web Widget include Gadget, Badge, Module, Capsule, Snippet, Mini and Flake. Web Widgets often but not always use Adobe Flash or JavaScript programming languages.

What is a Desktop Widget?
Desktop widgets are small specialized applications that are designed to do simple tasks, such as clocks, calendars, RSS notifiers or search tools. They can run on desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.). Desktop widgets are also called gadgets.

Why are widgets so popular?
One can utilize Web Widgets to enhance a number of web-based hosts, or drop targets. Categories of drop targets include social networks, blogs, personal homepages, and operating system desktops. Although end users primarily use Web Widgets to enhance their personal web experiences, or the web experiences of visitors to their personal sites, corporations can potentially use Web Widgets to improve their web sites using syndicated content and functionality from third party providers.

Widgipedia’s offerings include Web widgets (can be used at MySpace, personal blogs, eBay etc.) and Desktop widgets (can be used on Windows, Mac etc.). Currently they support the following platforms of desktop widgets:

• Yahoo! Widgets (Windows);
• Yahoo! Widgets (Mac);
• Dashboard (Mac);
• Standalone Widgets (Windows);
• Standalone Widgets (Mac);
• Microsoft Vista Sidebar (Windows);
• Opera (Windows, Mac, Linux);
• DesktopX (Windows);
• Kapsules (Windows);
• Samurize (Windows);
• KlipFolio (Windows);
• AveDesk (Windows);

The widgets are available for free from their web site. They allow you to customize the size and look and feel of the widgets.

A snapshot of Widgipedia site (Click on image to enlarge it)

Developers can use Widgipedia to upload their creations, to collaborate with others, to learn or teach through tutorials, code samples, libraries and more. The collaboration is limited to knowledge share and questions through forum topics. I wish they had a social networking component to it, to foster an environment of greater collaboration. I skimmed through some of the tutorials and they were pretty basic in nature. They mention in their FAQs that they are working on providing advanced tutorials soon.

Here are some cool widgets which I tried:

I would have liked them to have some more web widgets but for now they had only around 12 of them. Their site uses AJAX extensively. They seem to be using AjaxRequest library, Prototype JavaScript library and moo.fx library from mad4milk. There were some navigation issues which I would definitely want them to rectify (e.g. I clicked “Most Popular” and then I clicked “Widgets Gallery” but the site does not tell me where I am, some kind of breadcrumb control or “where you are” would be a great help). I liked the overall look and feel of the site.

But for a person like me who is very much into web stuff, this site does not offer much as of now. I definitely would prefer WidgetBox over Widgipedia.

Interested in reading reviews about widgets, try WidgetLabs.com.

Technorati Tags: widgets, gadgets, web widgets, desktop gadgets, desktop widgets, Widgipedia, Widgetbox, WidgetLabs, MySpace Widgets

Popularity: 5% [?]

Bookmark to:

Orkut is celebrating its 3rd birthday. I was introduced to Orkut by my wife and I really liked the ease of usage. I also liked the fact that I could find lot of my high school and undergrad friends out there in India on Orkut.

Some background on Orkut:

Orkut is an Internet social network service run by Google and named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. It claims to be designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Similar to Facebook and MySpace, Orkut goes a step further by permitting the creation of easy-to-setup simple forums (called “communities”) of users. Until recently, Orkut was invitation only, but it now permits users to create accounts without an invitation.

The number of Brazilian Orkut users is just under 59% of the total users, followed by The United States and India, with about 16.5% and 12.5%. As of January 22, 2006, the number of members was over 40.42 million.

I had a believe that Orkut is picking up within the user community, if not in U.S., definitely in India. To convince myself, I did Alexa search for some leading social networking sites (MySpace, Orkut, Xanga, Hi5, Facebook) and here is a snapshot of their daily reach (as per Alexa):

(click on the image to enlarge it)

As you can see Orkut was slow in growth for most of first half of 2006 but after that it has gained momentum and is catching up with MySpace.

What I personally like about Orkut is the ability to connect to people from various countries, which MySpace lacks to a great extent.

Orkut has recently introduced a new service Orkut SMS. With Orkut’s new SMS feature, you can scrap your friends, look up their contact information and receive scrap notifications. Now you can send scraps from the bus, bar or bathroom, and your friends can get notified of those scraps when on bicycle, beach or bed.

Considering the fact that SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange lots of text messages, and companies provide alerts, infotainment, news, cricket scores update, railway/airline booking, mobile billing, and banking services on SMS, Orkut should see substantial growth in near future in India.

TechBuzz has an article covering Orkut’s birthday and the new SMS feature.

answers.com carries a list of various kinds of social networking sites with their user count here.

Technorati Tags: orkut, alexa, hi5, myspace, facebook, xanga, social networks, birthday

Popularity: 6% [?]

Bookmark to:

One of the blog directories got back to me saying that my blog was not behaving well in IE. I am using Wordpress 2.0 along with Andreas04 2.0 by Tara Aukerman.

Myself being an avid FireFox user, had not done extensive testing on IE for my site. What was happening was that thing were getting squeezed when you decrease the width of the IE window and they were not even stopping at the min-width set to 760. The result was that all my sidebars used to drop out.

It seems that this due to difference in the way IE and FireFox understand min-width CSS property. I found a fix for it here.

Here is what you need to do:

1) Put the following style tags in your Style sheet file:

/* changes to fix the min-width problem */
.fixcontent {
border:0px solid #000;
padding:5px;
}

/*\*/
* html .minwidth, * html .fixcontainer, * html .fixcontent,* html .fixlayout  {
height:1px;
}
/**/ 

2) Modify the container id style so that min-width = 920 (you can choose any other number but make sure all .minwidth and .fixcontainer above have the same number (920 in this case)

3) Modify your index.php and Single.php files from the ThemeEditor on the Admin Panel to create nested divs like this:

<div id=”container”>
<div class=”minwidth”>
<div class=”fixlayout”>
<div class=”fixcontainer”>
<div class=”fixcontent”>

Make sure you close all the divs at the end of the page.

That should solve your problems and get you going. I hope that this fix is made an integral part of the template.

Technorati Tags: min-width, CSS issues in IE, Andreas theme, Wordpress

Popularity: 4% [?]

Bookmark to:

I ran across a news about a new iPhone clone and buy, it looks even better than LGs Prada. It is Meizu’s M8. Here is a picture (click on image to enlarge it):

The device, according to the posting at techeblog, has a 3.3-inch touchscreen display, an ARM11 CPU, 3.0 megapixel camera and Bluetooth.

I think this was bound to happen and it is good as well as bad. Good because there won’t be any monopoly and people will have choice (which in turn will control the price of the devices) but bad because Apple might run into a chance of not being able to get its foothold in Asian countries.

Let us wait and watch the story unfold.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Meizu, M8, Clone

Popularity: 4% [?]

Bookmark to:

In a lawsuit filed by Sify in Santa Clara Superior Count in December, it has accused Yahoo Inc. of unfair practices - “misappropriation of trade secrets, raiding its management organization and theft of Sify corporate opportunities”.

Sify is yet to provide comments on this to the media but the public details of the case can be obtained by following this url.

Sometime back in November, 2006, Sify Creative Head Hanumant Mane has registered a police complaint against six Yahoo! employees, who were caught allegedly with forged identity cards, and taking pictures at the Lakme Fashion Week in Mumbai. Sify was the official Broadband partner of the event. The complaint mentions top Yahoo! India officials, including MD George Zacharias. George Zacharias and content head Ajay Nambiar are in trouble and they had to take an interim transit bail from Madras High Court to ward off the arrest. Yahoo! India had denied any involvement. What makes is interesting is both George Zacharias and Ajay Nambiar are former Sify employees.

As it stands, the details on the case are not clear. I will keep this post updated with latest and greatest on this news.

Please read these news postings for more details:

• Yahoo MD, executive get bail in Sify case
• Sify Vs Yahoo: Zacharias and Nambiar Granted Interim Transit Bail By Madras High Court

About Yahoo:

Yahoo! Inc. and its subsidiaries provide Internet services to users and businesses worldwide. It offers online properties and services to users; and a range of tools and marketing solutions to businesses. more…

About Sify:

Sify Limited and its subsidiaries provide integrated Internet, network, and electronic commerce services in India. The company offers corporate network/data, Internet access, and online portal services. Its corporate network/data services include Internet protocol based virtual private network offerings that consist of Intranets, extranets, and remote access applications. more…

Technorati Tags: yahoo, sify, portal, lawsuit, misappropriation of trade secrets, raiding its management organization and theft of Sify corporate opportunities

Popularity: 3% [?]

Bookmark to:

• Toshiba Gigabeat 60GB Portable Media Player - $199.99 (woot)
• Western Digital 500GB USB 2.0 Drive $178 at NewEgg.com

  NewEgg.com has the Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB USB 2.0 Instant Storage Drive for $170 + $8 shipping = $178 shipped. Included Google software lets you search your drive, manage your photos and simplify Web searches

• Labtec Media Desktop Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Free after $20MIR. RadioShack has the Labtec Media Desktop Wireless Keyboard and Mouse for $20 - $10MIR - $10MIR = free. Select in store pickup to save on shipping.
• CompUSA midnight Vista Deals and more tonight. Please refer to this  post here for details on location of stores participating in this promotion.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Bookmark to:

When Jack Fowler moved to San Diego to join his new job, he had limited commute options as he was new to the city and without car for sometime. He definitely wanted to stay closer to his work place which was downtown. His quest for a sublet or an apartment nearby his office was proving a painful exercise as he had to look up houses in San Diego downtown and once he found some decent posting he had to do a Google map lookup to find how close they were to his work place (outside 1-2 miles radius was a big no no). It was not a pleasant experience for him as after doing a map lookup he used to find that the house was not near his work place.

One of his dear friends suggested HousingMaps.com. To Jack’s amazement, the tool was very simple to use and saved him so much time and energy, besides getting him a house of his choice near his work place.

HousingMaps.com, created by Paul Rademacher, a 3-D graphic artist from Santa Clara, California, is a mashup that combines craigslist real estate listings(houses for sale, apartments for rent and sublets) with city maps from Google Maps. It lets users pinpoint locations, along with one-click access to photos and descriptions, of dozens of available apartments in more than 20 North American cities.

Jack could choose the city as San Diego, he opted for rental houses within a price range of $500-$1000 with any number of rooms (he had other options too but he went with default values). Here is what his search returned (click on image to get a bigger picture):

Read more »

Popularity: 3% [?]

Bookmark to:

Dr. Helen M. Sang, from the Roslin Institute (the same institute which brought you Dolly the sheep, the world’s first cloned mammal 10 years ago) in Midlothian, UK, and her associates have succeeded in producing multiple generations of genetically altered, or transgenic, hens that produce drugs with the potential to fight cancer.

“But it is still early days yet,” said Sang. “We’ve made significant steps in developing a process that we hope will be an alternative production platform for protein drugs.”

Sang hopes that using transgenic chickens to produce therapeutic proteins will “bring down the costs of drugs that currently are prohibitively expensive.”

Sang is working in collaboration with gene therapy company Oxford BioMedica and bio-tech company Viragen.

They even have a term of this: “Pharming”. Pharming is the production of human pharmaceuticals in farm animals.

What are transgenic animals?

Wikipedia says:

Transgenic animals are animals produced with externally introduced genes. Transgenic animals can be used in many fields and as models to test the effect of certain genes on health. They can be used to produce “enhanced” versions of an animal.

They can also be used as bioreactors: animals that produce an extra substance we want. Imagine having a transgenic cow that is modified to produce insulin in large quantities in its milk. This insulin can then be purified from the cows milk and used in replacement therapy for treating patients with diabetes mellitus.

An example are transgenic flies, which are flies produced with externally introduced genes. Transgenic flies can be used in many fields and as models to test the effect of certain genes on health and development, similar to the usage of transgenic animals. As the fly genome is in general simpler than that of vertebrates, the effect of introducing an external gene is usually more pronounced than in vertebrates.

Legal and ethical issues apart, this seems to be a rapidly growing method of producing drugs.

Technorati Tags: Roslin, Sang, Dolly, transgenic hens, chickens, Oxford BioMedica, Viragen, therapeutic proteins

Popularity: 3% [?]

Bookmark to: