Vijay Basrur

Rewriting to make it simpler

I have been working on some of our mailers to make the content more simple. Ironically it is much tougher than I thought. We are striving to ensure that the user experience is simple yet helpful.

Like Guy Kawasaki says about his 10/20/30 rule and Rajesh Jain shares his thoughts on Public speaking, it does take a lot of effort in keeping things simple.

Google exemplifies simplicity. In the Indian context I think there are very few folks who keep it simple. Cleartrip does a great job. I worked with the folks at Bookeazy and I think their efforts were pretty good. There are quite a few but much less in number that you would want ideally.

For now it’s back to the simple stuff!

Buying Microsoft Office Home Edition in India

Last week, while I was browsing the Internet at home, I spotted what looked like a decent deal.
Microsoft Office Home Edition for a little over 3000 bucks.

I visited their home page and was toying with the idea of buying it online. Here’s a screen shot of the page I came to which asked me to put in my credit card details

If you spot the address bar, there is no “https://” I mean WTF?
Can’t imagine MS goofed up big time.

I cross checked the site today. They have knocked off the “direct pay” model. Instead you first select a reseller and pay online. Thankfully they seem to have got their act in order and there is “https://” in the URL now and has an associated certificate too.

Jeez!

Project 10 to the 100th

Google announced the Project 10 to the 100th. Details are here

They have an interesting video to drive home the point

Google Chrome

So well there’s another browser that hits the road. Yawn? Not really since this time its from Google.

I downloaded Google Chrome yesterday. Considering I have been a Firefox fan for years now, I was not going to be easily satisfied. But I was. In fact I was pleasantly surprised. The fact that Google has kept Chrome at a measly 600kb file it launches in a flash and is very fast. One of the problems I have had with Firefox (and not that I am complaining) is that multiple extensions & plugin slow down Firefox, especially the launch, and it hogs up resources if you are using many of these plugins. Infact I use ScribeFire to write these blog posts.

But Chrome was blazingly fast. The tab sctructuring is neat and the layout is pretty simple. But since the browser has become the portal for your browsing experience, hardcore Firefox fans will find the plain vanilla experience (sans the plugins & extensions) very boring.

While I enjoy the speeds Chrome brings in, most of my browsing will still be on Firefox, atleast for now. But I am going to be clued on to Chrome to see how the open source community takes this ahead.

PHP List and my experience with open source products

We use the LAMP technology stack at my current work place. At my previous work place even though we were using more of MS dependent technologies we experimented successfully with a few open source products. We used Asterix to drive an inhouse VoIP network and Zenoss to monitor our entire network.

At Quikr we were struggling to figure out a mailing solution to communicate with our user base. Enter PHPList. PHPList is a simple program which lets you manage your registered user base and send out mailers as and when required. You can set up filters for collecting data (city, gender etc.) and can send out mailers as and when required. It has an easy interface for your users to unsubscribe, if they need to. If you need a mailing solution give PHPList a shot. But make sure you got a good guy who know how to set up linux based applications.

We also use OSticket to manage Customer Service emails. It works like a breeze but lacks in some features which could have made life a wee bit easier. But ope source products come with some limitations and you have to learn to live around them.

Will post about more products as and when we start using them.