Amateur Web Designing

Tiltviewer: 3D Flash Gallery Viewer

Posted Mon, 02/16/2009 - 23:54 by aravind

Tiltviewer is a great flash gallery by AirTight Interactive, the people who made the famous simpleviewer. The interface is great and the installation is very simple especially if you have a Flickr or a Picasa account.

It is not hard to install manually using a xml file that defines the images and their functionality, but I wish there was a Drupal module that would have automated the process for me. Fortunately I was able to find a script (from howtoforge.com) that generated the xml file for me. Attached file is a version of the script that I modified to suit my need.

Yesterday I setup a test tiltviewer galley manually. The gallery looks great and I love it. Check it out! The cons for using a flash gallery are: they are not searchable, non-taggable and have poor accessibility. Nevertheless it was fun setting up the gallery. Do check it out!

The recommended way to view this gallery is in fullscreen mode. Right click on the flash content and select fullscreen.

PicLens

Posted Sun, 06/29/2008 - 17:20 by aravind
PicLens is a browser add-on that lets you browse though media content efficiently and quickly without frequently clicking on links. Check out the YouTube video that shows how it works. I enabled media RSS feeds for my image galleries so that PicLens can be used with my galleries to interactive view my images. Check out my galleries with PicLens.

Snap Shots

Posted Fri, 10/05/2007 - 10:14 by aravind

I recently added a very nice java script to my website. I hate java scripts on other sites but unfortunately in order to provide enhancements to my website I had to add it. The service is called snapshots. Right next to the previous hyperlink you should see a small balloon (black/white). Moving your move over it will shows a preview of snap.com homepage. It is a handy tool. Using snapshots you can quickly provide preview for your links and the user may decide whether or not to visit the site.

Amazon Widgets

Posted Mon, 10/01/2007 - 16:44 by aravind

A couple of weeks ago, Amazon.com announced Amazon widgets for its associates. It is good tool to feature amazon.com products on your website. It is very simple and intuitive. Check out a live demo on my website.

Encode your email address to prevent spam

Posted Thu, 07/19/2007 - 22:03 by aravind

On-line spam robots are becoming intelligent in obtaining e-mail addresses from websites. Even when one has their e-mail address in plain text on a webpage, some robots are capable of deciphering it. There is not a lot that we can do to prevent spams (except for Dvorak who gets no spam) when we post our e-mail address on the web.

CSS turns 10

Posted Wed, 12/20/2006 - 12:21 by aravind

CSS turned 10 on December 17th 2006. Too bad that only now people (that includes me) have realized the importance and the ability of CSS to provide visually rich content on the web. Even now many sites do not follow the recommondations and lose a lot of money due to the extra bandwidth cost of non-CSS site.