For you RSS readers, here is a preview of the new design. To see it in action, visit my site.

The Old Design

The New Look

Some sites I subscribed to recently updated their theme – so I thought that this is a good time to do the same for my site. I had been putting it off for a LONG time. People have been asking me to change the theme from the very first post on this blog.

I am planning to convert Bin-Co to this style as well – after I am done, I’ll publish the old design as a wordpress theme. But I’ll be very surprised if anyone uses it – because its just too ugly.

Any Problems?

I am sure that the new theme might have broken something or the other on this blog – so please keep your eyes open. If you find something out of place, please let me know. Just leave a comment and I’ll take care of it.

Web 2.0 – almost everyone have heard the term – but few are sure about its meaning. Unfortunately, it cannot be defined easily. People in different fields have their own unique definitions for the term. In this article, I will attempt to define the term at three different level – the Philosophy, the Technology and the Design.

Disclaimer: Before anyone reacts violently to the term Web 2.0, let me make myself very clear…
Web 2.0 is an ambiguous buzz word. It has been used and abused so many times that it does not have a consistent meaning – so people are free to interpret it as they see fit. And this is how I interpret it.

Philosophy

The design philosophy of a web site can make it a Web 2.0 site. This is perhaps the key difference between a Web 1.0 site and a Web 2.0 site…

Web 1.0 is a web site where there is a one way communication between the web master to the visitor. A Web 2.0 site is a site where the visitors can communicate with each other.

For example, compare the Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia. In Encyclopedia Britannica, the web master creates the content and gives it to the visitor – the visitor has no way of talking back. But in Wikipedia, the visitor create the content for other visitors.

Technology

The keyword here is “Internet as a platform”. In Web 2.0, the net became the platform rather than just a data transfer mechanism. For a simple example, when you visit a site, the videos in it come from YouTube, the images from Flickr, the search is done using Google API and you can bookmark pages using the API from del.icio.us.

Some technologies that are described as Web 2.0…

• Ajax
• Valid Markup
• Microformats
• Tagging, Tag Clouds
• APIs
• Feeds
• Mashups

Some features that makes a technology Web 2.0…

Speed

For example, Ajax makes simple tasks much faster.

Ease of Use

A good example of this is Tagging. It is a much easier approach when compared to hierarchies.

Enabling Mashups

APIs, Feeds, etc. makes this possible.

Bringing Web Apps closer to the Desktop

Ajax, AIR, etc.

Design

This is perhaps the only area where the term Web 2.0 can be defined with a reasonable level of accuracy. A site with a Web 2.0 design is one that has at least some of these elements…

Simple Design

Lots of white space

Nice Icons

Violators/Badges/Star Flashes

Big Fonts

Gradients

Reflections

Shadows

And More…

Web 2.0 Design Style Guide

For More Information

• Web 2.0 Wikipedia
• Web 2.0
• What Is Web 2.0
• Not 2.0?
• Web 2.0 Design Style Guide

I have seen a lot of pages that lists many icon sets…

• Icons For Your Desktop and Icons For Your Web Designs
• Quality mini icons
• 90 Free Vector Icons Set
• The Top 50 Sources for Free Designer Icons
• Top 50 Supercool Free Icon Sets
• Symbols, Buttons and Icons For Free
• More Symbols, Buttons and Icons For Free
• Free Tiny Small Mini Icons Bullets
• Icon Finder – a search engine for icons

But when I want some icons I have a better place to look.

KDE and Gnome Icon themes.

I prefer using these icons because of the following reasons…

Multiple Size Icons

Most themes provide the same icon in various sizes. The available sizes are 128×128, 64×64, 48×48, 32×32, 24×24, 22×22, 16×16 and sometimes even a scalable SVG set. Not all themes have all the sizes – but most have. I don’t have to tell you how useful this is.

Lots of Choice

KDE Look Icons page have 86 pages with 15 icon themes per page. That makes a total of 1290 icon sets. And I am not counting the Gnome Look Icons.

That’s a lot of choice. Granted, not all will be good. Not all will have the icon I am searching for. Not all have the size I way want. There will be some duplication. But its still a lot.

Free – in both sense of the word

Most of these icons uses GPL and LGPL licenses. So you can use if for your application without paying for them. You can modify them. You can share it with others. You can… you get the idea. The point is there are no restrictions.

Even if you are building a proprietary application, I think you can use the icons because you are not compiling it into the application. But I am not sure about that – if anyone reading this knows, please leave a comment.

I have to warn you that not all icons sets use these licenses – so make sure you look at the license of an icon set before using it.

Great Icons

Most of the icons are created by professional designers. Sure there are some duds among the collection – but the majority of them are good.

Some Recommended Icon Sets

Crystal Project

Nuvola

Crystal Diamond

black + white icons

Crystal Clear

And there are hundreds more for you to find out…

{
"success":"Task done successfully",
"error":false
}

OR

{
"success":false,
"error":"Database Connection Error!"
}

This method is used extensivly in Nexty. Almost all Ajax response in Nexty ares in this format.

Since this is in the JavaScript domain, I thougt it might be better to pubish the details in my OpenJS site. Read more about Success/Error Design Pattern For Ajax.