Welcome 2010

Wish you a very very happy new year from everyone at Web1

Let’s welcome 2010 with a big smile, lot of happiness and hope.
After all hope is what keeps us alive

Job Openings at Web1

Guys, we are on the hunt for a Senior Web Designer & A PHP Programmer.

Following are the details for the same:

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Senior Web Designer (Job Code: Web1-1109SD)

We are looking for following skill set in the candidate:

-        Knowledge of recent Web 2.0 trends
-        CSS / xHTML Coding (Table-less coding)
-        Flash (Good knowledge of Actionscript will be an added advantage)
-        Should know usage of design tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign etc…
-        Should be familiar with Dreamweaver
-        Good communication skills
-        Good command over English

The person will be responsible for:

-        Designing of Web Pages (General sites, Blogs, Portals etc…)
-        Designing of Logo and Brochures
-        Designing / Developing Flash Based Presentations
-        CSS / xHTML conversion of the web pages from PSD format

Job Location: Mulund, Mumbai (Operations office)

Experience: 2 – 5 years.  (1 year experience is ok only if you are skilled with above mentioned technologies)

Salary: Depends upon your skills.

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PHP Programmer (Job Code: Web1-1109PD)

We are looking for following skill set in the candidate:

-        Knowledge of recent Web 2.0 trends
-        Basic knowledge of HTML is okay..
-        Strong knowledge of PHP and OOPS concepts
-        Know how to play with the frameworks (Mainly Codeigniter)
-        Strong skills in AJAX and JQuery
-        Good communication skills
-        Good command over English

The person will be responsible for:

-        Coding the apps from the scratch as well as working on opensource apps
-        Reporting the work to the client or to the project lead

Job Location: Mulund, Mumbai (Operations office)

Experience: 1 – 5 years  

Salary: Depends upon your skills.

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Please email your resume to jobs at web1 dot in

Diwali Wishes from Web1

Wishing you all a very Happy and Prosperous Diwali.
We hope that this Diwali brings lot of Joy & Happiness…

Happy Birthday Web1..

Somewhere in the month of October in 2004, a guy sitting at his workplace decides to start a company dealing with web hosting and web design mainly.. the plan is set.. the guy finally picks the name Web1 India, places the order for the server and starts off on 13th October..

The hosting business does pretty good in the start.. the guy starts getting queries for the website design and SEO work.. so after juggling around with the job and business, the guy leaves his job somewhere in 2005..  The company is reformed to Web1 Solutions by then.. a better prominent name..

The guy hires first employee somewhere in early 2006.. the journey starts off well.. now the guy’s company just completed 5 years.. the journey so far was very good.. many good as well as bad experiences.. the guy’s company is growing on pretty smooth pace now.. they have just moved to the new office and trying to fill up the people.. (so they can get one more office space.. haha)

5 years gone.. and many more to go.. the journey never stops.. the journey should not stop.. the journey will not stop.. just need the wishes from everyone..

Wishing all my team members a very happy birthday.. without you guys I am nothing.. thanks for being with me, keeping faith in me & my company..

Lots of Love,
Deep Ganatra
Founder – Web1 Solutions

New office.. new people.. more excitement..

After waiting for more than a month.. we have finally moved to the new office.. the level of excitement started increasing day by day.. but it was fun.. the new office is more spacious and a fun place to work.. 

Along with the new office.. we have hired bunch of new people.. bunch of people who always wanted to work on something new.. who always wanted to take the challenges… who always wanted to reach new heights.. We love to have these kind of people in the team.. it adds up lot more fun and excitement in the work..

So, without wasting much time.. here are some of the pictures of our new office..

This one is the main entrance area.. the walls need to be filled up with the paintings though…

That’s the boss’s cabin

Staff room No. 1

That’s another room for the staff..

Guys…

Gals..

and the BEST part.. the cake.. Thanks to Monginis for such a lovely cake..

And finally.. that’s me enjoying the slice of the cake.. and that’s my wife in the background..

I would like to thanks to Nilesh from our team for being around all the time.. you rock

And, also would like to welcome new team members, Ashish & Sumangala.. keep doing the good work..

That’s it for the day.. will be posting more stuff later..

How to design a site for iPhone..

Recently, we had designed / developed a site for iPhone device. It’s a pretty simple thing to do, so let me share some tips with all you guys..

First, let’s figure out the “to do list” before starting the actual code..

1. Code the CSS for iPhone in landscape and vertical mode (i.e. when you keep it straight and tilt it), the width of the screen area changes, so we will have to code our CSS accordingly.
2. Some kind of JavaScript snippet which would detect the screen orientation (portrait or landscape) and change the CSS accordingly.
3. Some kind of code snippet which would not allow the user to zoom the main web page and disable the auto resizing of the page. (iPhone generally auto resizes the web page when you view it)
4. And finally, a script which would detect the iPhone / iPod touch device and redirect the user to the iPhone customized website / web page.

So now let’s move on to the coding part..

1. Let’s divide the CSS in 3 chunks.. this is what I have done:
   • main.css – It holds all the design elements, basically everything except the width of the whole layout.
   • portrait.css – It holds width of the layout in portrait mode (In this case 320 pixels)
   • landscape.css – It holds width of the layout in landscape mode. (In this case 480 pixels)
     
2. Now it’s time for JavaScript snippet to detect the screen orientation and apply the CSS accordingly. Here is the JavaScript code which you can use. (Nah, it’s not written by us, you can find the same code freely available everywhere on the net)

   function orient()   {
             switch(window.orientation){
             case 0: document.getElementById("iphone_css").href =  "css/portrait.css";
             break;
             case -90:  document.getElementById("iphone_css").href = "css/landscape.css";
             break;
             case 90:  document.getElementById("iphone_css").href = "css/landscape.css";
             break;
             }
             }
             window.onload =  orient();

3. After this, we will have to call this JavaScript function in the HTML file and also call portrait.css. (As our orient function will be called on the load of the body). Apart from this, we will also have to iPhone specific meta tag which will prevent zooming and fit the whole page in the screen width.Add the safari specific (iPhone uses Safari as web browser) meta tag:

   <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0;  maximum-scale=1.0;" />

   Above code will set the width to 320 when you are viewing the page in portrait and 480 if you are in landscape mode. The above code will also set the initial & maximum zoom to 1.0 i.e. actual size of the page. Alternatively, you can try putting user-scalable to 0 too. (I have not tried it but you can play around if you wish to, you can check the apple developer page with info on all the available tags here) Call the CSS file:

   <link rel="styleSheet" href="css/portrait.css" type="text/css"   media="screen" id="iphone_css" />

   In the above code, if you notice, I have set the ID as iphone_css, orient function will replace href content of this ID based on the layout orientation. Call the function in the body tag:

   <body onorientationchange="orient();">

   Above code will call orient function on the change of orientation of the page.

4. Now, after all these points, you will need to setup a script which will detect iPhone device and redirect to the iPhone specific website. Since, we work in PHP, so my code will be in PHP but you can write the code in any language, many people also use JavaScript for browser detection and redirection. I personally would suggest using server side language.

   $agent = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'iPhone');
         if (($agent >0))
         {
         	header('Location:'iphone/');
         }

   In above function, I am checking for the value iPhone in the user agent and if it’s found, I am redirecting the user to the folder called “iphone”

   There might be other ways to achieve this and you can use whichever suits your needs.

So, finally with above 4 steps, you will have an iPhone ready site.. I hope it helps you

How to move your WordPress blog to new address?

This guide intended towards database level changes than the other common changes like moving the files etc..  If you wish to know step by step guide on how to move your WordPress blog to a new URL, please check this link.

I know, there are plugins available to change the website’s URL but I am not sure if the plugins cover the tables which I am going to take care of.

So, without wasting much of the time, let’s get the ball rolling..

Note: Please take backup of your current database before making any of the changes.

1. Update the site URL in the wp_options table. – This table holds the values which are very important to run the site. (specially values stored in siteurl and home fields)

   UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = REPLACE (option_value,'old_url.com','new_url.com');

2. Update wp_posts table – This table holds all the post related data.

    UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = REPLACE (guid,'old_url.com','new_url.com');

   UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (post_content,'old_url.com','new_url.com');

3. Update wp_links table – This table holds all the links (blogroll) related information, you might want to change the links where the URL is pointing back to one of your site pages or you have link image URL belongs to the old URL.

    UPDATE wp_links SET link_url = REPLACE (link_url,'old_url.com','new_url.com');

   UPDATE wp_links SET link_image = REPLACE (link_image,'old_url.com','new_url.com');

4. Update wp_comments table – This table will have all the data posted in the comments. It is highly possible that some of the users might have posted the links to your site pages. And author URLs and email might be pointing to the old site.

    UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_author_url = REPLACE (comment_author_url,'old_url.com','new_url.com');

   UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_author_email = REPLACE (comment_author_email,'old_url.com','new_url.com');

   UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE (comment_content,'old_url.com','new_url.com');

5. And, finally last change in the htaccess file of the old site, so that all the requests made to old site gets redirected to the new one

    RewriteRule ^(.?)$ http://new_url.com/$1 [R=301,L] 

And that’s it.. you should be good to go after following above steps. And yeah, do not forget to replace new_url.com and old_url.com to your respective site addresses.

I hope these tips help you..

Phew.. a heavy day ended.. finally..

Phew.. a big day just ended.. there were some huge core updates to be uploaded on the Monginis website. They introduced shop for their Cairo store, so we had to make sure that we don’t end up repeating the main core files and make provisions to add new shop without replicating the code.. (Just the template files replicated)

Few challenges on the coding front, but eventually everything went pretty smoothly..

We will have a security testing and few bug fixes over the next week.. but so far, everything seems to be running just right.. finally, the hard work of programmers paid up…

That’s about it… will have more updates soon

Wordpress all the way…

These days, we are doing lot of development work in WordPress.. and infact, we are using WordPress as CMS for many of our sites.

In the earlier development phase, we started with Textpattern, then we moved to modx (At this point of time, we were using WordPress just for the blogs) but after Wordpress 2.7 we have actively started using WordPress as CMS. We tried Joomla and Drupal but for us, WordPress was the way to go as it allowed us to stretch it as we wanted.. (Though Textpattern and modx too allowed us but WordPress community is more active, more plugins and more advanced)

The recent examples include, website for the band Raghu Dixit Project and for artist management firm called Only Much Louder.

Our work mainly included slicing up the designed files, create neatly coded HTML files and WordPress integration. We have used custom fields for some of the blocks and also used some plugins to display required output. (e.g. Twitter tweets)

We have couple of WordPress based sites in the pipeline which includes, heavy AJAX usage and modifications.. we will put them up here at the right time

We are going to cover more portfolio sites in this category in the course of time..

That’s about it..

Go Mumbai Indians go..

We are in full IPL mood these days.. everyone decided to go for IPL match at local sports bar, Bond Bar.. but eventually we 4 (Nilesh, Amit, Dilip and Me) – all Mumbai Indian fans – went for the match.. (Other guys could not make it for some or other issues)… and yea.. my wife, Megha too joined us.. but she was having her worst time ever, as she is not at all into cricket and we were making her sit and watch the match haha..

I must say, we had great time out there cheering for Mumbai Indians.. the other guys surely missed it.. (and we missed them too.. )

Had planned to click some pics but like always, I forgot to get the camera but I will make a point to click some pics next time we go.. (hopefully for the final match..)

That’s about it..

Go Mumbai Indians go.. get that trophy for us… (so that we get another chance to celebrate )