Published by Preethi on 30th July 2008
Ahh another couple of weeks have gone by so fast, without me posting anything! Well the truth is I was writing but not publishing some of my posts! Just wanted more content in them!
So to add to my “Just Launched” section, I have been working on Tivo Project for Yahoo!7 that lets the Yahoo!7 TV-Guide users to remotely record the programs onto their tivo boxes and its just been launched a couple of hours ago! Check it out at Yahoo!7 TV-Guide Its an amazing project which has seen lots of team effort and also big support from the top management here!
Tivo lets the users record free to air programs onto their boxes! This can be done directly on the box or by using the tv-guide and I personally think its amazing! The underlying technology is a lot of PHP 5, using webservices and its awesome!
So go get your tivo boxes and enjoy it 
Published by Preethi on 3rd July 2008
Yahoo!7 has just launched the new redesigned News and HomePage
The news has been launched last night and I love it for its nice whitish look now and no flashy colours! Its so much nicer and cleaner when compared to the previous site and is emphasising more on the content! The content is amazing with more than 20 providers and 4 bloggers feeding it with worldclass stories and articles. I just find the interface more user friendly and is easier to find the specific content! With much better navigation and more videos on it I think its definitely one of the best news sites!
And the new homepage!! Have you had a look at it yet? If not you should be jumping straight onto it! Its got loads of personalised and localised content on it! The one-stop for the Australian Users! I personally think its a sign that Yahoo! is improving on its cross-property integration problems! The integration of movies, maps, news, entertainment into home page speaks a lot!
So enjoy the whole new personalised experience!!
Published by Preethi on 22nd May 2008
I was going through some blogs and I found this interesting concept of ‘spriting‘ . With a bit research in it I found how handy this technique is for page optimization. A bit of research in wikipedia confused the hell out of me and so I spoke to various experts in that part of the industry and came up with the following ideas:
‘Spriting‘ is a process where 2 or more images are merged to form a single image. Now I can see you all looking at my post and thinking”How the hell does this help in page optimization?” Have a look at the following url: http://nz.finance.yahoo.com/ Now in that if you have a look at the following image Sprited Image is a combination of 3 images. Now when required to show the calculator symbol using CSS this is shown and when required to show the graph symbol you can show it by CSS and hide the rest.
What is happening behind the scenes? If you had 3 different images instead of 1 then you would be doing 3 http requests to load these images. But because its only one image, the browser does only one http request the first time and later on it displays the image from the browser cache. So in this case instead of 3 http requests we have got only 1. And imagine if a page has some 24 images and instead these can be merged into 8 big images. So only 8 http calls instead of 24!! So your page can load 3 times faster!! (well technically it is faster, though not as fast as 3X)
Now this does have some limitations like if you are displaying a list and the images for the <li> are sprited, if the text in <li> is more than the width specified then you see the list is broken. Umm but it should be working well in most cases.
I also hear that there are some public (free) tools to sprite the images (accept 2 or more images, merge them into 1), but I could not find any in the first glance. If any of you have come across any such tools or have got previous experiences in this then feel free to share it here
Cheers
