Samparkh Blogs

Photos, Maps and Bookmarks

ritesh — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 09:27:14 +0000

After almost three months after the release we sent out our update mails. Party due to the fact that there were bugs that we didn’t test and also there were a lot of security loopholes that required fixing. After almost 3 months of bug fixes in between our already packed schedule, we totally forgot that we had to spam you people with our update mails. So we did.

Since we have always relied upon user feedback as a prime source of our developmental efforts, we are again on the lookout for some suggestions for our upcoming release. Our next release in going to concentrate on three essential components Photos, Maps and Bookmarks. We are working away to help you integrate your existing photo accounts into Samparkh( to save you from the trouble of re uploading your favorite photos again and again) . Right now its flickr for us, because of its wonderful api’s. Any Samparkh user who maintains a flickr account will be able to use their flickr photos as albums and slideshows on Samparkh.

Maps came as a recent addition. We believe its hard to build a community around products but its easier to build products around established communities. Take the Gmail example, it started out as gmail and now Google literally has you eating out of their hand. Similarly we will try and experiment with new concepts around our already existing community( thats you, users!!) . Yeah Maps!! so maps was a cool idea, we needed to include the essential Geographical attribute for all data on Samparkh and maps were the right fit. We are still to decide on what the maps will essentially hold , but we have certain ideas that we think you will like.

Next come the bookmarks. Social bookmarking has taken the internet world by storm. Be it Digg or Del.icio.us , people are flocking by the dozens to be able to save their bookmarks and share them with their friends. We realised we already had the friends bit, it was the bookmarks that we needed. We will be giving easy to use mechanisms to bookmark your pages and will also give you accessibility options. Your friends and even you can have all your bookmarks accessible from any corner of the world. Now I personally think , thats just too cool.

Please do give us your feedback and suggestions on how we can improve our offering.

That last release was a killer

ritesh — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 06:01:12 +0000

Yes, making the previous release successful was really stressful. It was the first time that we put in so much into a release, but it was all worth it. We included a lot of functionality and tinkered with almost every page ( both frontend and backend ) to accommodate the enhancements. We have faced this situation before, almost everything that runs picture perfect on our local machines fails miserably on our servers. Given the kind of experience the team brings into the project, its almost certain that we would have tried something new each and every time, some optimization or a tweak, which by default will fail upon releasing. This time around it was an effort to strike a balance between innovation and finishing up on our work, coz we couldn’t compromise innovation nor could we afford to look clueless when things failed on our servers. We had to write efficient code as we knewÂ there would be no time for testing or second thoughts.Â We had absolutely no time to integrate our respective modules and test them out as a whole, thats the reason our release ran into a lot of problems post deployment. We thank all those people who gave us bug reports and exposed some critical errors that we should have spotted ourselves.
There were some interesting incidents during the course of developing this release. For starters, the entire length of this release the team never met, all meetings were online, discussions and brain storming on the phone. This release is a testament to Virtual Teams that collaborate over the internet and work productively. The entire discussions module was developed in a cab by Prateeksha on her lappie whilst being driven to and from office, that was the only time she could find to work on Samparkh.Â This was as unprepared we could go into a release, I remember how meticulously we used to test things out before the big day. It was a different story this time around and we have our reasons for it ;-).

We would like to dedicate this release to Dr Umashankar, Prateeksha’s uncle. Despite being a quadriplegic, he achieved a lot and was the source of inspiration to many people who had lost hope in life.Â HeÂ was the president ofÂ Mobility India , an organization that helps physically challenged people in India. We have created a subset in fond remembrance of Dr Umashankar. Please do use it to share other inspirational stories or write about people who influenced you in some way.
Ritesh

Our Biggest Release yet …… Read all about it

ritesh — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 08:58:17 +0000

Yes, our third release is the biggest yet. We have added tons of features and also lot of changes to the existing ones. Of course, this release was also based on all the user feedback that we got and also a lot of ideas that people directed our way. So whats new you ask ?
Samparkh subsets, Colorize your profile, put your blog in your profile( not quite there yet, some issues), randoms got better, discussions, Invite friends from gmail, yahoo, outlook,orkut etc.
Samparkh Subsets, your own community feature is added in this release. Be sure to check out all the subsets that are created, join a few that you are interested in and also create a few for you and your friends to join. Both public and private subsets can be created. Private subsets wont show up on searches and will be completely invite based. Only the people you or your friends invite can view and join the subset. Great for a bunch of friends who want to hang out in private, talk and share without worrying about other people reading. We also have public subsets, which can be moderated or open, you decide. To keep the network healthy, we the administrators have to approve public subsets that show up on the network and we will reject subsets that we feel are filthy, racist or just inappropriate.
Tag your subsets: Tags have become quintessential for managing or grouping information and to keep up with the world, Subsets brings in a TAG based feature. Please add appropriate tags to your subsets so that people can discover related subsets by tag searching. Just try searching for subsets and you will know what I am talking about.

Colorize your Profile : Every person is unique and its justified even their profiles should be. You can now add you dash of color to your profile. Choose from one of our templates or just make your own. We will be adding more and more templates down the line, so get your artistic talents rolling and suggest a few combinations.
Randoms is finally persistent: After numerous complaints about randoms mysteriously vanishing, we have reworked sections of code to make randoms persist in memory. Stay tuned, we just may add in a feature to view randoms archives, the next time around.

Discussions: Finally a place to have open discussions with the community, you can now start your own discussion or join,view and reply to other public discussions.

Invite your friends wizard : don’t worry, we wont take your username and password. Just follow a couple of simple steps to invite all your friends from orkut, yahoo, outlook, gmail or any other service that lets you export your contacts.

Phew . Think I will stop here, but you go ahead and give all these features a whirl. We are sure you will like what it has to offer. And like always, do keep those bugs and suggestions rolling in .

From the developers hut

ritesh — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 08:55:22 +0000

Long time there has been no word from our end, so we thought we will give you an update on the state of things at Samparkh. We are currently developing some cool new features for Samparkh, that might interest you. We are bringing In subsets a mechanism to form communities in Samparkh, but unlike other networks, Samparkh subsets will have to be approved by the Admin team, this is a preventive measure to keep the network healthy. We are also working on a system that will let you colorize your profile, so if you dont like the blue interface that we offer by defualt, wait for sometime, you can change it.

We also realise that handheld devices are flowing into the market at a large rate and with Wifi, Munifi networks coming up plus the existing GPRS network, internet access through handhelds is getting. Now we dont intend to be left behind now, do we? There is a micro version of the site that is being developed so that those tech savy + mobile crazy folk can enjoy Samparkh functionalities through their mobiles.

There has also been some requests for migrating contacts from other networks and I think its only fair that we cater to it. Our next release will have wizards to help you migrate yoru contacts from Orkut, Yahoo Gmail , Outlook etc.

Since the concept of sharign has already begun, I thought I would share a piece of Information with you. One of my friends asked, who are the users of Samparkh and where do they come from. Well I think the report below gives you the picture(courtesy Google Analytics).

New Feature : Samparkh Randoms

ritesh — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 02:25:51 +0000

I have been an avid user of social networks and if there is something that i miss, then its the fact that i cannot talk directly to the entire network. The goal of such a feature was to provide a global billboard for the network to see, make sure everyone reads it and also make it lightweight, so that it doesn’t invade the users space. The answer to all that is Randoms.

So what is Randoms ? its a place where you can talk about anything to the entire network. What can you random? anything… share a thought, a review , a slogan, a motto, a proverb. Announce your entry into the network, introduce yourself, write about your latest experience and what you are currently doing. Do all this and more but make sure its less than 75 characters. why 75 characters? Coz Oxford says that an average english sentence is about 15 words max and that average word is about 5 characters, so you do the math.

Randoms are not stored in the database. Only the latest 4 randoms are in memory and on the network. Also, Randoms can only be written in your homepage but can be read across the length of the application.

Another thing you may have noticed is that the Chat is currently down. We are facing a lot of problems in Samparkh post relaunch and will shortly bring up chat again. Thanks for your patience and support.

Cheers to all

Samparkh Team

Finally, its out!! :-)

prateeksha — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:36:19 +0000

The ‘oh so anticipated’ new improved Samparkh is finally out.. Boy am I glad its done??whew

Lot of work has gone into this release,some visibly apparent, some others not so obvious.

The complete GUI rework,multi browser compatibility, the easier image uploading mechanism, and ofcourse INSTANT CHAT will be among the improvements that you will first notice.. But then again behind the scenes, the whole site has been moved to a more stable struts framework and lot of modularization etc has helped the site become more easily maintainable now

There are a few people that we have to acknowledge here.

Tc, more formally known as T Chaitanya from iiitb has contributed abundantly to the frontpage design including the flash that you see when you open Samparkh .

Not to forget Malcom, who specializes in web page design, who constantly helped us with his knowledge and experience..

Then ofcourse there is Kiran, the third member of our team. Kiran brought with him, not just excellent development skills, but also core knowledge,professionalism and like Ritesh mentioned in the previous blog, a hell of a lot of enthusiasm and encouragement.

And like always, Ritesh has been the strong backbone of the whole project. Most of the work for this release has been put in by Ritesh and Kiran.. So kudos to all that helped make this release possible.

Do be on the lookout for more releases/features, while you enjoy the current ones.

Take care.

Samparkh Team

Re-launch at arms length

ritesh — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 09:27:41 +0000

We are very excited about the new release, which is just a few days away. Lots of work and cleaning up has been done in this release and you will definetely find the site being more user friendly, clean and compatible. I would also like to announce the entry of our third team member , Kiran. I call kiran the core expert, his interests are more on the core concepts( backend stuff) which even to this day give me nightmares. For starters, Kiran has strengthened our base framework and has made me rework the entire site to fit into a more maintainable structure( ouch!! my back ). Changes can be made to just one file rather than a dozen, like before.

More than anything else Kiran brought some relief to some really demotivated members and brought back the enthusiasm. Thank you Kiran, this release is dedicated to you. If I let the details of the current release slip, then i wont have anything to write the next time around, So let me just keep quiet and let the site do the talking. Please do make sure that you comment and write to us to tell about your new experience. Looking forward to your comments

New and Improved Samparkh ….

ritesh — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 07:24:05 +0000

Its been a very hectic week and finally we have moved. If you had noticed the url on Samparkh, you would know that it would get redirected to a different domain, but now we have moved to a domain of our own. For the record, we did have our own domain but since we are novices in this field we were (shall I say conned) misguided by our old hosts. The technology and the features they provided were limited and those limited features were also down most of the times. We then began a search for our new hosting providers and boy we sure are happy with what we have found.
Another new change is the fancy new blog that we have incorporated. To be honest, I felt that our old blog was unfair to people not on the network. Imagine not being able to comment or speak your mind, It defeats the entire purpose of having a blog. Also the definition of a blog has changed radically with concepts of archiving, syndication etc and our primitive blog page could not match up to those standards, we could sit for about a week and try and implement all those features( probably succeed even), but we chose a better option. Why reinvent the wheel ? was the criteria. A quick roundup of all the Open Source Blog frameworks and we were left jostled between nucleus and wordpress, we preferred wordpress for its sheer simplicity in customization and great admin panel. If you are looking to start a blog of your own then might we suggest wordpress framework.

Moving to our own space finally brings some relief to us control starved developers. Imagine having to run a site from Filezilla and people expecting you to churn out one release after another. This new move only gives us all the control and technology we need and let me be the first one to tell you, you can see a lot of improvements on the Samparkh front. For starters new look and feel, IM and customizable profiles.