After numerous discussions with our vendor and after tonnes of days (and nights) spent by Ravi and me, we finally released the redesigned www.scmhrd.edu on early 4th morning.

Check out the Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development website.

This is just the beginning and we have a long long way to go to make it just the way as we want it… perfect!

Would love to receive feedback on the design etc. Other than major colour changes (which I can’t do) please do let me know what you find lacking in the site.

Several months back I popped a question to my readers… Flickr Pro or Gallery 2?. I got a good response with people pointing me to both sides.

For me the question remained unanswered until now.

Bye Bye Gallery 2

A month ago, I knocked off my photo album which was powered by Gallery 2. Gallery 2 is an amazing software, but I didn’t have the time to actually maintain yet another site. I wanted to have a solution where I let someone else do the dirty work of running the gallery.

Yahoo! Photos?

Since knocking it off I’ve considered two options, the first was Yahoo! Photos. I love the interface of the new Photos beta. I’ve got my Dad to host his pictures out there. The in-browser tool works perfectly in Firefox, IE and Flock.

Picasaweb?

About a week back I started using Picasaweb after the storage for free users was increased to 1GB.

Picasaweb is good. The software is well featured, however I faced a big problem uploading photos. It could very well be my connection, since I haven’t seen reports of it elsewhere.

No it’s Flickr Pro

The turning point to Flickr came yesterday when Flickr introduced Collections.

Honestly, the only reason I was reluctant to use Flickr was the inability to create sub-albums. Yes I know in Web 2.0, we use tags, but I like things of Web 1.0 like sub-folders and sub-albums!

Now, you can put several sets into a single collection upto five levels deep (I need to figure out the sub-levels).

I picked up a two year Flickr Pro account yesterday and have immediately started the tedious work of uploading my photos. Until I figure out how to embed the collections and photos successfully on this blog, you can access the photos at http://photos.ajaydsouza.info/.

WordPress Plugins

I’ve got my eyes on two plugins, viz. FAlbum and Photos-Flickr. I had an unsuccessful attempt at using FAlbum on this blog yesterday. I kept getting an frob error.

I like Photos Flickr from what I see so far, however, it doesn’t have the ability to display sets and collections yet. It is based on phpFlickr and I’m currently studying the code to see if I can extend the plugin. My limited PHP skills have been an hindrance so far.

What happens to ajaydsouza.info?

I was hosting my old album at ajaydsouza.info. I plan on building a site on that domain dedicated to me! (I’m a narcissist).
Jokes apart, it will be a one stop site where you can browse to the millions of profiles I have all over. Am also planning on making it a place to “frame” all my work so far.

Let’s see how that turns out… until then it is pointing to my new Flickr Pro page.

Btw, if you are on Flickr add Ajay D’Souza or Ajay DSouza or ajaydsouza to your friends list.

Being a thorough techie I’m always on the lookout for technology news and updates. Am constantly searching for some good freeware to try out.

But to keep myself up-to-date required me to daily go through almost a hundred websites (and steadily increasing).

This inspired me to start a blog that will get the choicest of technology news all in one central location.

Hence, 30th October 2006 saw the launch of my technology blog titled Techtites.

Why Techtites?

Since the central theme of the blog is technology, for the purpose of SEO I wanted the domain to contain the word “tech”. Unfortunately, almost every technology name I could think of was taken.

Until my astronomy pal suggested the name Techtites, which is a play on the word Tektite.

Any of numerous generally small, rounded, dark brown to green glassy objects that are composed of silicate glass and are thought to have been formed by the impact of a meteorite with the earth’s surface.

Tektites are considered to be of great value and I hope that Techtites will also be of the same value to you.

Today with a new look, I’ve decided to tell the world about it

Do check it out, subscribe to the feed and let me know what you think about it.

And if you have some hot news, you can tip me off.

I have been deliberating doing this for a while now. I haven’t updated Humble Reviews for a few months now.

With so little time on hand it became really difficult to maintain multiple sites, especially one which requires you to constantly update. I still watch several movies a week and would love to review them, however writing high quality reviews for every movie isn’t always possible and sadly, isn’t always the priority.

Additionally, requests sent out for users to contribute reviews have failed, I guess because nobody would like to just write for free and I can’t afford to pay anyone to review. Hence, your review would have to be only out of passion.

So with that I will be shutting down the website. To avoid losing the posts, I will be importing the posts to this blog.

I will be using to WordPress XML Export to perform the move. I believe I will be able to edit the XML exported to file and split it so that I can import a few posts at a time. I am not sure if I will be able to do so. If not, then all probability you may see a huge number of new posts on this blog.

You should see this happen by this weekend.

Now this deserved a blog post a long long time back, but well here goes.

For a few who know, I started out in the field of web design with a site on Sherlock Holmes. This was way back in 2000.

Over the years, this website underwent several transformations and names.

All the time it steadily rose the ranks of Sherlock Holmes websites and today is at the very top of the charts at Sherlock Holmes Web and has been there since early 2004.

Early this year I got together with Melody to give the site a much needed revamp.

And revamp indeed. Got rid of an ancient frames design and designed a tableless CSS design. Have put up all the original content, and there is a lot more to be added gradually.

In addition also started a new TopSites for all mystery related sites. Well, the only site in it today is mine, but if you are run a similar mystery related site do join our topsites.

Also generated a Google Sitemap (more on this in an article I plan to write) and redirected all the .html pages to the .php equivalents (had ported the site from HTML to PHP to save bandwidth and make it dynamic)

Ohh, btw the URL is http://sirconandoyle.com/

So what do you think about the site?