Oinam's Blog

Smashing Magazine is a website that delivers useful and innovative information for web-designers and web-developers with an aim to inform readers about the latest trends and techniques in web-development – clearly, precisely and regularly. In one of their recent article, they have listed 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Have’t Seen and KISS was one of them. It is nice that Smashing Magazine feels KISS is a beautiful theme.

Note : It is listed at No. 25 in the article.

We may like to remind you that KISS is not just for Wordpress but the theme is available for Movable Type, Typepad, LiveJournal and Blogger.

One of our xhtml/css web standard design project – Indian Geeks Organization was highlighted on Web Creme recently.

View iGeeks entry at Web Creme.

The discussion of a general design theme came up amongst the team and we realized that we wanted a simple, a very simple design. So, we decided to have a KISS theme. The final verdict was to do a universal template so it can be used in WordPress and Movable Type. As we followed the Six Apart’s Movable Type Template Schema, the template can also be used on TypePad and LiveJournal installations.

PREVIEW, DOWNLOADS & DISCUSS

• Preview, Installation, Related Links and Notes available at the Kiss Template Page
• Download Movable Type, Wordpress or Blogger Themes
• Technical Forum Discussion

Lately, during a project development involving PHP 5, MySQL 5 and AMFPHP 1.1 Remoting, we realized that there is an issue with the PDO Adaptor that comes with AMFPHP with respect to the MySQL DateTime datatypes. Well, we would like to term it more of a missing feature than a bug/issue and hope to see it included in the next release of AMFPHP with the updated PDO Adaptor bundled.

Basically AMFPHP comes with various recordset adaptors depending on what database/abstraction layer you are using, like mysqli, PDO etc. The adaptors that currently comes with it, do not convert datatypes correctly when returning the recordset to Flash. Selecting a datetime datatype returns a string date to flash as opposed to a date object.

And since the timezone offset is not included in the date string, the flash client parses the datetime with an incorrect timezone offset.

I have known Hussain for his simple yet pleasing, efficient and effective websites confirming to Web Standards, valid (x)html, css. I have been in discussion with him off and on on how we can work together and finally yesterday, the 14th February, 2006 he finally agreed to work fulltime with Oinam Software.

ChugsDesigns is perhaps one of the only few web development entity in India which concentrates on web standards, valid codes, emphasize on structured semantic markup. ChugsDesigns already have an impressive portfolio.

Oinam Software is extremely glad to welcome ChugsDesigns to the team. We expect to push the possibilities of giving the best of Web Standards, Effective and Accessible Designs, Valid Structured Semantics realm and to provide the best experience for our Clients and their projects.

The thing I love about our team and the people involved is that, we do what we really love to. We are very fortunate to get the best opportunity to push forward our passion for these technologies. Driven by the urge to push the envelope beyond, way beyond and to compete at the highest level of quality and standards, to be in the forefront and a precursor of the technology we are involved with, Oinam will try to strive more and more towards developing high quality Software Applications for the web, desktop and other varied medias.

23hq is a web application which makes it easy to share your digital photos. They have tried to put together a mix of old and brand new ways of sharing stuff. You can share your photos via the web or with prints. You can share with blogs, use mail or subscription-based sharing and more. Share your photos with whom you want, private or public or both.

Recently 23hq contacted us so they can implement the multiple file upload feature of Flash Player 8. Finally, the result is a cool way of provinding the users the ability to upload single or multiple photo uploads and at the same time allowing them to preview uploaded photos, tag them while the remaining at still being uploaded. You will be experiencing the cool combination of Flash and Ajax.

23hq have a an article describing their new feature in details, Flashy Uploads. Test out their Upload Feature or keep a tap of their discussion on the topic.

As promised, here is a quick rundown of the client side part of AjaxCFC.

The first part in the client side of AjaxCFC is to include the javascript files.

_ajaxConfig = {'_cfscriptLocation':'echoTest.cfc', '_jsscriptFolder':'js'};

_ajaxConfig will store the location of the listener CFC and location of the “js” folder which is included in the ajax.zip file that comes with AjaxCFC. The use of _cfscriptLocation variable is optional as you may specify the CFC location directly in the Ajax call.

You will have an ajax calling function and a call-back function; however, none of them are mandatory, because depending on your needs you may not need to know the result of your call, or you may not need to enclose your ajax call in a function.

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We are ready to beta test LSD, an online Live Speed Dating Application. Sign Up for the same and start LiveSpeedDating online.

During the first phase, the LSD are event-based with events lined up every 30 minutes. There will be 24/7 LSDs and much more in the upcoming phases of deployment.

Currently, during the beta, all events are set to be “Gender Neutral”, so you might get paired with your own gender. Once user count grows, we will pair you with your choice mate – male-female, male-male, female-female et al.

We are looking for US-US, cross crountry, cross continent pairing test and to see how our FCS Load Balancer can balance the load/bandwidth.

Please sign up for Live Speed Dating to enjoy this unique dating experience and if you would be able to help test out and give us feedbacks, please sign up for the mailing discussion list separately at LSD Beta Mailing List.

Please remember to check your Junk Folder as we have received notifications from subscribers informing us that the confirmation mail were caught in Junk Folders.

More Details about LSD

We are open to criticism, suggestions, anything that you wish to say.

AjaxCFC is an Ajax Framework for ColdFusion from Rob Gonda. Well, my reaction after going through it was AWESOME and huge thanks to it, lately have been able to finish up a small Messaging System integrated inside one of a Rich Internet Application, Live Speed Dating.

With AjaxCFC, a generic ColdFusion Component using the facade pattern was created which contains all the methods for the Messaging System. It made it so easy for me that I had to just take care of the functionality of a single method; DWREngine._execute() with the respective arguments. This is the method which handles passing of the data and also the method calls to ColdFusion. The arguments required are also quite simple and easy even for a newbie to understand.
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Descendant Selectors

I am a big fan of Descendant Selectors and use it rather profusely. It is made up of two or more selectors cascaded by separating them with whitespaces. It helps me to match an element that is the descendant of another element in the document tree.

#myID { }
#myID .myClass { }
.myClass { }

Here in the above code, the attributes defined in the second line will be applied to .myClass elements in the document which is a descendant of the parent ID #myID. Whereas .myClass can be applied to other totally different set of elements that are not descendant of #myID.

div * p

will match only the paragraph elements that are grandchild or later descendant of a div element.
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