Posted August 18, 2009 at 5:35 pm by Akshay
Spans Envirotech provides planning, design and construction management services to meet the water and wastewater needs of municipalities, public agencies, private developers and industrial firms since 1995. An elegant yet modest and minimalistic design was the idea behind this microsite. This project uses WordPress as the underlying CMS and the theme is carefully designed to meet specific client requirements of a dynamic sidebar. By default the sidebar displays their mission statement, however some pages have their own sidebar content. This has been achieved using ‘custom fields’ within WordPress. If a page has subpages, then the subpages are listed in the sidebar, else it displays the blog category list.
The homepage uses a a custom template (home.php) which draws its content from the about page and the two most recent blog posts. Apart from these, the resources page uses a client side table sorter implemented using the jQuery plugin- Tablesorter 2.0 and a custom JavaScript based download tracker.
Posted June 24, 2009 at 7:56 pm by Akshay
Stock Exchanges around the world currently publish datafeeds in CSV format. This is quite portable and easy to implement, however it cannot be directly used in your web applications without server side code. Also these official feeds are generally very expensive and affordable only by enterprise level developers. Thats where Stock Market Data (SMD) API comes in place. This simple HTTP webservice presents a snapshot of the latest stock market data in various Web 2.0 formats such as JSON, RSS, ATOM, MDDL (Market Data Definition Language – XML for Market Data) or a good old CSV. Currently SMDAPI supports NASDAQ Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and National Stock Exchange, India (NSE) but we are actively working on supporting others soon.
Please note that SMD API is currently released as Beta and is quite unstable in nature. I am still experimenting with everything from the domain name of this service (smdapi.co.cc which is a temperory one) to the API structure itself. I am also very much open to ideas which I can incorporate in this project before it officially released.
Posted June 12, 2009 at 6:51 pm by Akshay
At first there was good old email with petty 5 Mb inboxes. Then we moved to crowded chat rooms on Yahoo. All that seemed as stone age, when came a host of interactive web applications like Blogs and Social Networking applications. Initially Orkut, then Facebook and then micro blogging thru Twitter. Have you ever wondered what could be the next big Web 2.0 trend?
The answer is ‘Collaboration’. Yes, collaboration not only in its own sense, but also a collaboration of all the trends and technologies mentioned above. I know the word ‘collaboration’ sounds too ‘enterprise’ and not at all ‘social’, but as always web has once again taken us by surprise here. What I am referring is not too far fetched. Big boys like Google and Yahoo have already stepped in this domain and grand releases have already been done. Yes, check out Google Wave and Zimbra (by Yahoo, but not much talked about yet) to understand what am pointing at. Google Wave is a new tool for real-time communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. An official 90 minute video demo is already out for a sneak peak into this new wonderland. Don’t have 90 minutes? Have a look at my detailed post on Devil’s Workshop with 30-60 second clips highlighting the best parts of Google Wave.
Posted June 8, 2009 at 6:05 pm by Akshay
This is probably a major milestone in the lifecycle of WP Web Scraper WordPress plugin. Technically speaking, the plugin gets in own ‘module architecture’ to incorporate unlimited extensions without touching the core codebase. Speaking non-technically, this opens WP Web Scraper to a non-techie WordPress user. To startoff, this mod extends the plugin with a specific shortcode to get stock market data from NSE and NASDAQ (to start off with, more exchanges soon to come). The data is scraped with a cache interval of a minute (which can be further increased as per your requirement) and includes data types such as Open, High, Low, Last Price, Previous Close, Change, Change Percentage and Volume information for all active symbols on these exchanges.
The plugin API will provides a simple shortcode. For example – [wpws_market_data market="nse" symbol="acc" datatype="last"] or [wpws_market_data market="nasdaq" symbol="csco" datatype="open"]. NSE data is currently scraped from nseindia.com and NASDAQ data is scraped from reuters.com. The immediate plan is to implement all major stock markets in this API. Later, I plan to extend this modular architecture to other categories of scraps such as Weather, Sports scores etc too.
Posted May 24, 2009 at 11:54 am by Akshay
Web scraping (or Web harvesting, Web data extraction) is a computer software technique of extracting information from websites. Web scraping focuses more on the transformation of unstructured Web content, typically in HTML format, into structured data that can be formatted and displayed or stored and analyzed. Exemplary uses of Web scraping include online price comparison, weather data monitoring, market data tracking, Web content mashup and Web data integration.
Imagine what you can do with all this power in your WordPress blog! Pages and posts can display realtime content from other pages, letting you create a meshup of content. This all is now possible using my WP Web Scraper plugin. Its an easy to implement professional web scrapper for WordPress. This can be used to display real time data from any websites directly into your posts, pages or sidebar. Use this to include real time stock quotes, cricket or soccer scores or any other generic content. The scrapper is built using time tested libraries cURL for scrapping and phpQuery for parsing HTML. Please post all your suggestions and thoughts about this on the WP Web Scraper project page.
Posted May 15, 2009 at 12:57 am by Akshay
Consider this. Our stock market sites gear themselves as Web 2.0 services and start publishing data in the form of RSS, XML or JSON feeds. Imagine receiving corporate announcements in your RSS aggregator or even better… track your portfolio thru your aggregator. Further, picture what the developer community can do using this. Stock feeds can be parsed using widget frameworks like Google Gadgets, OpenSocial or plugin architectures to be dispayed on sites, blogs or social networking profile pages. Basically the possibilities are limitless.
But the reality is that our stock markets won’t do it. Not at least so soon. To fill in this gap I am planning to start a service which will parse BSE or NSE pages and convert them into RSS, XML or JSON feeds. It will be a simple HTTP service which will answer your request in the desired format. I will start work as soon I find a some time off my current projects. Till then, give it a thought and let me know what do you think of this.
Posted May 12, 2009 at 1:22 pm by Akshay
So. I’m officially here. In the blogosphere. Finally.
I struggled with what would be my first official post. It should be prolific after all this time, right? Grand in nature. Broad in scope. So, I struggled. And then I realized it’s just like walking into a room full of people you’ve never met – I’ll introduce myself to you. It seems like the most polite thing to do, right?
First an introduction for the unfamiliar. Web design and development (Web.D) is what I have been doing for a while now. Am sure most of you are not aware of this layer of me, but what the heck… some of you might not even be knowing me. So lets start from the scratch. I am Akshay Raje, a self thought freelance web designer and developer. I love travel and am a great movie buff too. Apart from the above, I try to spend the rest available time with my wife and also try to squeeze out of whatever time’s left for the Gym. Read further »
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Hi, My name is Akshay Raje. I am a self taught freelance web designer and developer. I love travel and am a great movie buff too. This blog is about my projects and experiments with web technologies. 
