I have been using ecademy over the pat 4 months or so by now . Ecademy is a Social Network for Business People founded in 1998 now with over 170,000 member profiles worldwide. As one would expect , i was invited to join , by a good friend, who found the website considerably useful . Ecademy , besides being a great haunt for networking people worldwide , also provides a marketplace with both buyers and sellers of all kind – lawyers , doctors, web developers, lecturers, carpenters, office owners as well as students and authors and hypnotists etc. Whats better is , unlike sites such as orkut , or Hi5 where majority is people from India , Brazil , china etc, here we have members from European countries such as UK , France , and America , Canada , Australia etc.
When my friend invited me till now , i have been contacted for different jobs and projects as well have made some interesting contacts and based on that I upgraded my membership to a power networker and once i get some more time , i would be highly interested in upgrading to a BlackStar member ( which my friends have already ) , and gain entry to various locale meetings and come more closer with hundreds of other Blackstars . The way you can think about it – the cost of a Blackstar Membership is around 100 USD a month , so if a person who has upgraded by paying that just to keep in touch with several other like minded professionals and businessmen , they would surely have the budget to pay for some product you can sell or service you provide pretty easily , at a percentage of that cost . Considering Ecademy has around 170,000 members even if you get a 1% of those interested in the service / product … it is worthwhile anyday .

While writing this post , i received notification that i have received a query from another ecademist , this being the 3rd in past 2 days only

Hi Arindra
How much would you charge (roughly) to develop a PHP, MySQL site like TreatHer.com?
Look forward to your reply.
Matt

I have a fascination with the color blue . Besides it being my favourite color , it also gives a nice and bright look to a blog . Also with this particular wordpress theme , i wanted to keep the design similar to the main website design , dimensions wise . The theme is developed for the latest version of wordpress i.e. 2.3 and supports the default widget options or sidebar and tags. It is also XHTML validated and W3C compliant and created using minimal graphics .

You can see a demo here : http://www.websys.co.in/designblog/ or

view a screenshot here
if you are interested in buying it , you can … for the low price of 20 USD.

Namesecure.com is a dangerous and dysfunctional Registrar . I have had 4 .INFO domain names with them now for the past 2 or maybe three years and by now , I am totally horrified with their lack of support. Even earlier I had seen that it takes around 3-4 days minimum to get a response from them via Email – however little maybe the issue . But over the past 4-5 months even that has become totally absent. Even at this age when domain registrars like Enom , GoDaddy and RESELLERCLUB are adding more and more added benefits and ways and means to come closer to their customers and sub-resellers, it horrifies me to see a domain registrar owned by Verisign , has such atrocious and poor support .

To explain what i wanted to do :

1. Modify Nameserver of 2 of my domain names with them . Inside their control panel , which is entirely cumbersome and requires 5 clicks to reach any required destination, whenever i tried submit my modification for adding new nameserver or deleting an existing nameserver , it shows a generic error – WTF, why should i not be able o modify or add a nameserver for a domain name i own ??
2. The Contact Form on their website , ALWAYS for the past 5 months shows a CONSTANT MESSAGE – “from the past 24-48 hours we are recieving heavy traffic and hence support response time might be slow” . Can you believe how comic that is … i doubt they have ANYONE emailing them for support , by now all must have fled to other registrars .
3. They DONT have a PHONE NUMBER anywhere on their website … imagine !! Not on any public page , nor for any existing customer . And i now doubt they have any employees either …. because the reply to the contact form which came after 4-5 days came from a netsol email id .
4. The Email said , we apologise for the delay andwe grieve for your problem … please explain your issue – which i already had , and we will solve it ourself and update you .
5. That was almost a week back and I still have not heard from them !!

If you wish to find out what happens next feel free to subscribe

DMOZ is the original Open Directory Project, one of the oldest and most reputed directories on the internet. Along with BOTW , Yahoo Directory and Business.com , if anyone serious in getting exposure and enlistment in their topic – it is the directory to be in . Numerous seo tools use a listing in DMOZ as a criteria for evaluating a website’s value. Since it’s inception as an Open Directory Project – meaning contribution can be provided by anyone with an interest and time and energy to devote, DMOZ has kept on enlarging and diversifying into various countries and languages .

However in the past – because of its basic slowness and often inactivity among volunteers , it has become the point of anger for numerous webmasters . People often read about horror stories of not getting listed for months and years , people also hear stories about corrupt DMOZ editors – who allegedly or maybe even truly taken bribes for enlisting websites. DMOZ , like WIkipedia , is not operated by a single group of people ( as far as my knowledge goes) , rather from different ends of the Internet – thus demystifying all the theories and stories might not be possible , but to come somewhat closer to its active audience – they had opened a Public Forum . It did serve some purpose and i believe several actual rules and guidelines are better explained in there , as I was just visiting it . But since past 2 years they closed down the DMOZ Site Submission Status forum , which once again angered many a people . On visiting it today I found out that AOL staff governing DMOZ has initiated a Official DMOZ Blog . Undoubtedly this is another step in having a more public face for the ODP , keeping with the current day trends for every well known websites as well. But it remains to be seen if this will become another bloodbath between the Editors and the Webmasters and also die a unnatural death like the forum. Be as it may , I am still planning to subscribe to it’s RSS feed to stay updated .

Since 17th October till 21st October , we have the biggest cultural / religious festival in kolkata / west bengal – DURGA PUJA. During this 5 day period most of the offices , shops, institutions and even banks and government departments remain closed and everyone spends a nice little holiday. Writing about Durga Puja / Dushera in detail would be totally beyond the scope of this blog and you can learn more about it from the Wikipedia link or just by typing it in Google.

However , explaining it to clients / employers is an important task , one should not forget. The American’s have the 4th of july / memorial day , the British have their Christmas / New Years day and many others have their own customary holidays , hence everyone more or less understands even if you have got some unfinished project during this time , but nevertheless it does not harm taking preparations for such a extended break if you have got a steady inflow of web designing / programming / outsourced web development work. Some of the measures one should take are :

• Start mentioning about it casually to your regular clients and request the break
• Surely you would not be able to chat with all your clients , so a email to all your existing clients or more specifically the one with current projects would help – explaining the reason and the time duration
• If you have an active Elance or Guru profile , it would also be better if you change your screen identity to reflect your on Vacation Status – i put myself as “myname – on vacation till 22nd october ” . Yes , it does look odd and unprofessional but hey , i am actually helping them .
• And of course there is the Vacation mail setting , on your email account – almost all ISP’s or hosting providers , allow you to create a vacation mail – which might be something like “Thank you for emailing me , I / We are on vacation till date MM/DD/YY . For emergencies , call Mr.Y at xxx xxx xxxx “
• If the previous points  were for what to do prior to the vacation , there are also things one should prepare for after the vacation – such as how to handle the backlog afterwards i.e when you return to work .  A chart / list of works that needs to be resumed based on priority, would be a good thing to start with . This will help making the life easier and with less tension of “oh there’s so much to do , who to tackle first “
• I don’t know about you but i am a computeholic hence my PC gets little or no rest or and even in office there’s hardly any chance for the computers to go on maintenance mode . So , thinking that way , this would be a good time to put the computers up for maintenance – things like running scandisk , anti-virus , defragment , disk cleanup , hardware check … basically the works.
• buy postcards … if you are going on a trip and remember to put up a gallery on flickr after you return and blog it or send the link to your friends , clients even… get them interested in your culture . Since postcards are almost a lost tradition , especially with the new photo sharing websites coming up , if you have a digital camera , that might be good too.

Saying all this , if you are working on with very high valued clients, or customers who deserve some respect , you surely should not leave email accounts totally unattended … what with the rise of broadband , Gmail , Blackberry be sure to check once during the night – even if you don’t reply fully , it will make you feel good knowing that you have got some Puja Greetings back from that satisfied customer , whom you emailed about the request for leave.

Over the past 2 weeks , we have developed vbulletin skins for 2 different websites / clients . One for a flower discussion community forum and now currently a Spanish fantasy gaming website . The 2 new templates that have been developed are quite a bit more colorful than before , especially the Spanish forum .

Developing custom templates is naturally costlier than regular templates, because they are uniquely designed for 1 single customer to maintain their individuality . These templates we do not allow for download directly from our website. Among the last 2 clients i was mentioning, one of them provided their own PSD and our work involved converting the Photoshop design into a fully coded vbulletin template , which could be imported on their existing forum , which also used vB CMPS , along with 13 other vbulletin Addons / Plugins / Modifications. The odd thing , however , is that both times the client / customer requested their “unique vbulletin template” to be a clone of a existing forum site design !!

I have been discussing about the legality of doing this design with a few web designer friends of mine and have also posted on webmaster forums . As of yet , people are of the idea that since the liability of the content – design and text copy , is of the owner of the domain , it should not concern me , as the designer. However , as the designer it should be in my best interests to let the customer / site owner know that he is opting towards probable legal hassle. My friend suggested that i get at least a email confirmation , if not in writing , that it is by his idea the design is being cloned . Furthermore, he also suggested that I should not include a link back to my website / portfolio page – proudly claiming that the vbulletin clone design was done by me / us, thus alienating ourselves from any complaints or such.