Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Usability of Indian web sites




we have changed six addresses in last seven years and that is one of the reasons I keep trying to move more and more of my life online. To make ordering and tracking things easier. The things can include tata-sky subscription, LPG-cylinders, credit card bills, share trading , shopping and banking to name just a few. While most of the organizations in India do have online presence and websites, usability or a good user experience is pretty low on most of the sites. (even circa 2007)

Now, I will try to collect and post examples of bad website designs from time to time. The first one is from iocl.com (indian oil corporation) I am a domestic LPG cylinder user and want to locate the distributor in my area. I know my address. should be fairly simple? What with google map and all? Answer is a big *No*. When I click the distributor list, I just get to select state (imagine that, state). Then i am shown the name/address of all the distributors in karnataka. Now, how helpful is that?

Thursday, September 20, 2007

T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM

Today I was working with youtube API and PHP. During development time, I opened the error log and completely freaked out when i saw this message

[Thu Sep 20 14:58:59 2007] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM in D:\\video\\web\\search.php on line 114

By chance I forgot my specs at home today so I really rubbed my eyes hard before looking at the screen again and No, No mistakes, this is the error. Quick googling revealed that this message is Hebrew . Both suraski and gutmans appear to be from Israel Institute of Technology according to zend management profiles page
© Life of a third world developer
Maira Gall