Year: 2011

Best way to beat the cold

Prasad Ajinkya6 Comments

A couple of nights back, it was the coldest dip in Mumbai city ever. A chilly 11 degrees celsius!

I thought, that I might share with you good folks this family recipe that we have been having ever since my childhood. It’s a simple enough drink and it beats the cold and soothes the throat. Here’s what you need –

  1. 1 cup of drinking water
  2. 3 teaspoons of honey
  3. Half a lemon

Simply heat the water to the boiling point and cool it down, while it is hot add the honey and lemon. Serve it hot. It works great with kids, Anasuya is loving it :-)

For the parents, here’s a twist – add 30 ml of brandy or scotch! Have it hot, and it goes down pretty smoothly.

Three guesses what we are going to have for New Years :-), ohhh and here’s wishing all you good folks out there a very happy new year!!

CRM is the new website

Prasad Ajinkya5 Comments

Back in 2000, the dot com market in India was booming. Every company who wanted to have it’s presence online was scrambling to find domain names, hosting, email solutions, etc. Companies such as Net4India sprung up and came up with offerings with ridiculous prices (some of these offerings still exist to date!). Executives bought these websites thinking that somehow building a website would translate into revenues. In fact even today, the average “Indian IT company” continues to dole out development costs of websites propelled by content management systems (CMS) to be around 5-6 lakhs. If you are lucky, then that figure can go as high as 14-15 lakhs :-) !!

What was the mistake then?

The single minded assumption that building a website will translate into revenues.

I still see folks who nurture this piece of ticking bomb waiting to explode and set their businesses to ruins. As a result, all derived-demand business also went bustville. It took a fair amount of years to clear the damage, and come back on track.

So why bring this up Now?

These days, whomsoever that I am talking (and you can include me in this list as well!!), is thinking about having an online enterprise. A sweet setup, where the person can run a business irrespective of where this aforesaid individual is. There are more than a fair share of success stories around, and these people have become heralded role models.

Yes, the online dream can become true. Yes.

Feels good to hear these words, don’t they? These days I am seeing a lot more structured approach, newsletters, opt-in forms, CRM systems, mass emailing systems, affiliate management systems, advertising networks, etc … the systems are all there. People just need to start using them and start churning the proverbial money mill.

But …

Back then it was IT firms, now I am seeing a large growth of Digital Marketing firms. It’s the same plot, just the players are different now. Organizations are again back to setting up websites, now with complex marketing and sales systems. But how are you doing in terms of sales? Is the juice worth the squeeze?

If you do own a website, could you share with me what are the plans that you are thinking of to generate sales? Are you creating value to generate those sales?

Upgrading WordPress

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With the WordPress 3.3 update coming out, I decided that it was about time that I upgrade the wordpress running on our company’s website from the lowly 2.7.1 to the current version. This has been a thorn in my side from quite some time (about a year now). I had earlier attempted to correct this, however direct update options available in WP always resulted in broken themes or worse, broken functionality. It’s a nightmare when you have to consider the SEO juice you would be loosing because of the change in URLs. Even if I put in 301 redirects, it was too much of an effort to consider the update.

Installation

  • Christmas and New Year is always a slow time for any business, the perfect time to update WordPress. Also, using Google Analytics, I noted the time of the day when we receive the least no. of visitors (2am to 7am IST, when the no. is around 300-400 visitors per hour, else it goes as high as 1700-2000 visitors per hour)
  • The first thing I did was ensure that my hosting environment was compatible with WP 3.3. Turns out that my PHP version was not updated. I found this excellent guide to upgrade PHP from 5.1 to 5.3.
  • Once that was done, I double checked to see if my existing packages were compatible with the updated PHP. Turns out, that a lot of the functions in the previous version were deprecated. My error_log was looking like a battlefield scarred with PHP Fatal Errors, and PHP Warnings. Some quick fixes, I was ready for the WP update.
  • Using the awesome 5-minute WP install, I installed a dummy version on a hidden subdomain. I was sure to disable search engines on this deployment.
  • I then exported all the data from our current system and imported it into this deployment. This was the easiest part!
  • I then copied our theme files, and installed it into this new WP package (you have to check the theme files for deprecated methods)
  • I then copied all the plug-ins from the old to the new WP. These were then updated. The good thing about updated plug-ins is that you get awesome set of functionalities and security updates that you so wanted. Note to New Webmasters: There are a lot of plug-ins out there whose older versions contain backdoors (more on this later), trigger false alarms on search engines, etc which need to be taken care of. Earlier I used to this clean-up using shell scripts, but not anymore :)
  • Now with a bit of tweaking here and there, the site had URLs which were function properly (no more worrying about loosing on our SEO efforts).
  • With adding a fair bit of plug-ins into the system, came a new problem – conflicting jQuery!! Earlier this month, I had asked our intern to hand script a jQuery menu, and that was conflicting with the other jQuery scripts. Fortunately, we have jQuery.noConflict().

A whole new World!

  • WordPress 3.3 is breathtakingly awesome!
  • The custom fields have been nerfed, now you have to do a fair bit of tweaking around to introduce custom fields in pages. But that allows me to have a higher controls on them. Earlier custom fields had this nagging way of getting out of control in a wordpress installation. Not any more!
  • Plug-ins like All-in-one-SEO make for better and simpler SEO efforts. All my worries of duplicate title tags are slowly vanishing away!
  • Better plug-in support! Earlier where I would myself script a small workflow on the WP installation, now I can again rely on the huge set of awesome wordpress plug-ins

The good part of this transition was that it took me a little of 3 hours to completely migrate. Of course for some other media (such as videos, pdfs, etc.) which I did not want to migrate to a new folder, I created softlinks and the task was done. All in all, if you are facing legacy wordpress systems, and are worried about upgrading them to the latest version … dont. The best method is to deploy a new version and migrate all the content (however ginormous the task sounds, its a better approach).

Skyrim: Bethesda’s Redemption

Prasad Ajinkya3 Comments

The History

The first time I heard of Bethesda, was when I was playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The game is an open RPG where the player can freely roam about in the world completing quests and adventuring. Throughout the game, there were indications that there is a theme bigger than the game running through … yes, you are the chosen one. Yes, you will do great things, but there is some story thats bigger than you … what will it be?

Then came Oblivion, or The Elder Scrolls IV. This game takes place in the same world, but a different land. I was curious and started reading more of the lore available in the game (there are literally hundreds of books that you can read, NPC’s that you can talk to, etc). There are 9 different major kingdoms, all of them ruled by the Emperor, and each of these kingdoms has a story of its own.

The Mistake

After Oblivion, Bethesda launched Fallout 3, a remake of the classic Fallout series. Sadly, the game was so badly done and so full of glitches, that the company received a lot of flak for this game. Fans wanting to play the remake were pissed, Bethesda fans were disappointed in the low product quality … you don’t just buy a game and not play it do you? You either want your money back, or you endure the glitches and go through the main quest at least!!

In comes Skyrim

Bethesda has been hitting the right notes with Skyrim. Right through the trailers, the launch, the in-game lore, the superb artistic detail of the game. It’s a treat for the eyes, any fan of the The Elder Scrolls (TES) series would be happy with this game. Ohh … and did I mention that there are dragons :-)

Graphics

skyrim_new3 The game itself starts in the northern region of the kingdom (a lot of Nordic inspiration has been considered). The terrain is rough and mountainous, but Bethesda has literally crafted a beautiful landscape often forcing the player to stop and locations and look at the view from certain locations. This is probably the best looking game I have seen, literally forcing the user to take screenshots at various junctures in the game. The game looks good, and does require a bit of hardware to do it justice.

One problem I faced was that the game does not properly render on Directx 9 – WinXP combination. The rendering was patchy and I could not enjoy the game at first. Fortunately, I also have a triple boot (WinXP, Win7 and Ubuntu), allowing me to switch between operating systems as per the need. The game runs beautifully on Directx 11 – Win7, without any lags. I would recommend having a 1GB graphics card and at least 3GB RAM. For those who do not boast of such hardware, there is an add-on on Curse to make it run smoothly on DX9 here.

 

Skills to pay the Bills

Skyrim_SkillsMenu

Some of the game mechanics have been changed (the skill system has been simplified in terms of no. of skills, but the player is allowed to add nuances to certain skills which he/she intends to major in). The one good thing about Skyrim is that unlike Oblivion, you are not restricted to a specific set of skills to level your class.

The class creation is more open than the previous versions, allowing the user to customize their skillsets and specialize one particular style of playing. I have been playing two characters for roughly 40 hours now and it has been a very intense experience with you completely immersed in the world.

Gameplay

The game itself handles itself pretty well, but its not free from glitches. Certain quests which expect the player to hit certain waypoints simply wont proceed if you digress from the waypoints. The monsters scale up pretty well, and unlike Oblivion where the monsters scale up with you, there are certain monsters which you need to stay away from in the early stages of the game.

The game also has some pretty cool effects whenever you score a critical hit/killing blow. I particularly love these slow cut scenes when finishing off targets while being a sneak. Certain character customization elements (such as the star sign under which you are born) have been nerfed, and changed to shrine stones, which allow you to shift the benefits depending on which shrine stone you offer your prayers to. These stones are strewn across the land, where the player is encouraged to explore the world. Another such encouragement are the Dragon Words, which give you access to similar powers that the dragons have.

All in all, Bethesda has silenced all its critics and given faith to all its fans. They have shown that it is still possible to create games without having on online multi-player component built into the game (Blizzard, are you listening?). Plus, I think with the launch of Skyrim, the niche audience which used to play the TES series has really gone mainstream. Kudos folks!

Starters guide to SEO

Prasad Ajinkya4 Comments

One part of my role at Pristine is building up the site traffic, be it via Paid Advertising, Referral traffic or via Search Engines.

Anyone who has indulged in Paid Advertising would know how expensive it can turn out to be if you do not know what you are doing. It can be very effective in the short term, however for long term and more sustainable results, relying on non-paid search results is far better. Hence SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

The problem with SEO is that almost everyone who has a website think that they should do SEO, and SEO is playing around with meta tags. Seems simplistic no? In the past month or so, the amount of people whom I have talked to regarding to SEO has shown how less people know about the workings. Add to it the complexity of the ever-changing algorithm of search engines such as Google, Bing, etc.

The idea behind SEO is to target specific keywords for specific pages on your site, so that when your target audience searches for those keywords, your site shows up in the search results.

Here are some tips which I would have appreciated when I started off. Please do keep in mind, that I am no self-professed expert in SEO, just that like all of us around here, even I am learning, and this post is one such humble attempt to share whatever that I have learned, and what I know works to get results. Having said that, I know it would help all of us if you could point out any errors that i have made, or make suggestions and provide additional tips!

  • Read up on your meta tags, some of them are useful. Make a note of the description and author tags, you would be working with description the most.
  • Do not target more than 2-3 keywords per page, since you have to use that keyword in all the different important sections of the page viz., description tag, title tag, h1 tag, main content, etc. you cannot really target 1-2 keywords without damaging the copy of your page.
  • If you are working with a tight budget, then use a free tool such as Traffic Travis, the demo version is free. If you have a decent sized budget, then I would highly recommend Pro SEO MOz, it not only has a very comprehensive SEO tool, but also it has an extensive knowledge base on SEO
  • Search Engine’s maintain the authority of websites, this is generally a factor of how well you write, and how many sites are linking to your content. Google especially is one search engine which rewards regular content creation, in fact the current search algo (don’t know why its called the panda update) also favors freshness of content. So the same page would rank higher if it were regularly updated.
  • Always look at the different search terms via which people are coming to your site. Those are essentially content creation triggers!
  • Many people swear by backlinking, citing different open directories to publish your site links. However, I am skeptical about this approach. The one thing I use this approach for is to check where are my competitors linking, and get my presence their as well. I think if you can create good quality content, then it will automatically fetch the backlinks that you require.
  • Search engines are also influenced by social behavior, so typically the search results shown in Google would be influenced with what your friends are sharing on your social networks. E.g- If I share this post on say Twitter and if you are following me on Twitter, then you would definitely see this as a search result!
  • SEO is a long drawn game, and it requires patience, practice and discipline. Do not expect magic to happen, it’s a slow and gradual process and does not happen over night. To hope for such miracles, either you need to be Larry Page or Steve Ballmer.

Why this Kolaveri Di?

Prasad Ajinkya3 Comments

I am sure that by now most of you have heard of this song.

If you haven’t yet heard the song, then do give this video a look-see –

There is a huge hype around this song, for a multitude of reasons –

  • It’s written and sung by the son-in-law of Rajnikanth
  • The main keyword of the song, kolaveri actually has no meaning per se. It’s sort of an accepted slang which means rage … murderous rage to be exact
  • The song is half in tamil (no frilly lyrics there), but simple casually strung lyrics, and half in english … in fact I do not understand Tamil, yet I could make out the gist of the song
  • The gist of the song itself, is identifiable by the multitudes of youth
  • The beat of the song is catchy, in fact I can imagine this song being put on full blast on speakers on a lazy afternoon in the locality
  • Is this simply a good song bolstered by viral social media or is this an internet meme ala Rebecca Black’s Friday? Well, it’s a viral phenomenon for sure.
  • Dhanush seems to be enjoying the creation of this video as well, and you can see the support of other stars such as Shruti Hassan in the background
  • The part where the song goes “pa pa pa paan, pa pa pa paan … ” that’s enjoyed by both my daughter and wife :)

Parenthood and the Education Mafia

Prasad Ajinkya3 Comments

Anasuya is two years old, and it was time for us to get her admitted into a good nursery for her schooling. Little did I know the amount of efforts, planning and arm-twisting that is required for acquiring admission for your ward!

Prelude

Being a student of Ramabai Paranjpe nursery, I naturally assumed that by de facto Anasuya will be welcomed there with open arms. My first mistake was not bothering to talk to the powers that be regarding her admission.

Interestingly, I was not the only one who had made such an assumption! Amongst the waiting line, I bumped into some familiar faces, and quite a few of them harboured such expectations. The one thing that any new parent should get used to is waiting in the line. Waiting for forms, waiting for interviews, waiting for results, waiting for your child to come out from class … get used to the waiting.

Well deserved candidate

The D-day came for the interview, and Anasuya aced all the questions put in front of her. Things like separating veggies and identifying them. We (my wife and I) had prepared long and hard for this day, and it seemed that the fruits of our labour were close at hand. Another mistake a parent should never do, is assume its over … it’s not done until the fat lady sings!

Horror of horrors!

When the results did come out, we found that to our chagrin, our daughter’s name was not listed anywhere. How can my school reject my ward? This question was hounding me for the next 3-4 days. It’s not that I was the darling of the school or anything … but nursery school was probably the only time when I had excelled academically ;-)

Analysis – Paralysis

After denial, the analysis-paralysis stage started, where we tried to examine what could have possibly gone wrong. And we starting reaching out to our contacts who could be of help. The one thing about pulling strings and setting up contacts, is that it needs to be done prior to the actual event and not after. Having never resorted to such tactics before, this was a revelation for me.

Pulling Strings and the Education Mafia

It became increasingly frustrating for us to know that we knew so many people and yet we did not do anything about it. However, we did not stop .. a word here, a word there, calling up old-friends to ask for favours and calling up strangers and begging and pleading with them. I was literally shameless, and was trying every option available to me. Including meeting with local politicians to see if they could help out with the admission.

Friends whose families were related somehow with the school, seniors who knew people at the school, friends whose parents were influential, the local ward controller … we talked with nearly 10-15 people who could have individually made a difference … but we were mostly told that it was too late.

Opening other options

Obviously, this is not the only nursery school in the world, or the city. So we started looking at other good schools and approaching them. However, it was too late for most, but for those who still were taking admissions, we got all other forms and initiated the process. ICSE / SSC / IGCSE … it mattered naught. As long as my child gets an admission in a school, the rest could be sorted out later!!

Sitting at home was getting to be more miserable, since the mood in the house was always bleak. There was no other talk, but about the admissions.

Mafia to the rescue

Someone made a difference. I do not know till date who made the actual difference, but I thank everyone whom I had approached, and god bless your souls! Anasuya now has secured admission in my nursery school and we have just paid the up-front annual fees to the school. The Ajinkya household has heaved a huge sigh of relief as the high-strung tension wrought from the past week is washed away.

For all parents, learn this lesson, prepare for the battle of admissions from as early as 2 years.

It’s no wonder Indians become so competitive. There is not respite for us, right from the age of 2 years … till we finish our formal education … we have to compete for good education. Some of the most competitive exams in the world are Indian examinations! IIT-JEE (10,000 seats for 400,000 applicants) and CAT (3,000 seats for 300,000 applicants) are prime examples of such examples. Not even ivy league b-schools such as Harvard or Oxford can boast of such ratios.