Naushad . Product Designer

Author: Naushad

Rains – The season of blessings

It’s June and people can’t bear the heat anymore and everyone it’s wishing

Baarish kab hogi (When will it rain)

I saw a small shower today and was relieved. Rainy season is the season of blessings, we get the most essential part of our geo cycle. It rains, we get crops, good yield and so on.

Do you not see that Allah drives clouds? Then He brings them together, then He makes them into a mass, and you see the rain emerge from within it. And He sends down from the sky, mountains [of clouds] within which is hail, and He strikes with it whom He wills and averts it from whom He wills. The flash of its lightening almost takes away the eyesight.

In the above verse of the Quran and few other verses Allah (SWT) describes the formation of rain and the scientific details. Just amazed that these details were delivered to Prophet Muhammad (Sallallahu Alaihi wasallam) 1400 yrs ago when im not sure if Geography was even studied.

And we should also keep in mind that this Rain can also be a tool of destruction from the Almighty. Hence it is must for Muslims to offer special Salat (Namaz) to ask the Allmighty to keep it as a Blessing and Not a Curse.

Do let me know what your religion says about in comments below.

June 7, 2012
Improving the Navigation Amazon Web Services

Since AWS was launched in July 2002, there have been a ton of updates features and services added to it,

And since time as the services started to increase the Options on the AWS Console, began too-much to serve the purpose of an easy Navigation menu.

Here it is, how it looked with Lots of Services:

Old Navigation

Clearly visible, the Navigation menu was overwhelming and I was really thinking that AWS must do something to clear this mess.

And as any product developer would be doing, AWS team were already working on it and I saw an option “Try our new navigation”, Now this was interesting, contrary to other service providers who enforce the changes to users (you know its Facebook, yes) AWS was asking users to try and then seeking feedback and then the adoption.

AWS Seeking Feedback on Navigation

The new Navigation menu is amazing and serves the purpose,

The New AWS Menu

Most importantly, you can Edit the Navigation as you wish and make the Shortcuts for the most used services at one-click.

Navigation Shortcuts

Navigation Edit

And we have a better UI

June 1, 2012
Website Uptime Monitoring – Uptime Robot
It will obvious that you host a website on Cloud or a web host providing guarantee of 100 % uptime. You need to test it at times or to check the Downtime that your host provides, you cant do that by checking the web-page 24*7*365. As for problems, we have a solution someone has already worked upon.

Here comes. Uptime Monitoring services,

How does it work:

These services, check the availability and response from the designated domain names, repeatedly within specific duration. Once it detects that a webpage is not responding it creates a log and sends notification if required.

There are host of solutions offering Uptime monitoring service and URL Port, ping checks.

Like:

Pingdom, Mon.itor.us and more can be found here at Mashable

The best one that i have found useful is UptimeRobot, why do i love this service ?
1. Yes, Its FREE
2. It checks uptime every 5 minute (Really awesome considering its free)
3. You can add multiple domains
4. Email, SMS and Twitter DM and RSS push (i devices) notifications.
Screen-shots here:

Dashboard

Adding a New Monitor

Official feature list:

Monitors your websites every 5 minutes, totally free.

Add up to 50 websites. Get alerts by e-mail, SMS, Twitter, RSS or push notifications for iPhone/iPad

via Free Website Uptime Monitoring – Uptime Robot.

UptimeRobot is continuously evolving and it has its own API for third party integration.

This actually helped me monitor my host DreamHost that the uptime that they *promise* (100%) is not delivered, still what can you expect with shared hosting. Will test it sometime with an AWS instance.
May 31, 2012
Get your own deal site on Drupal- The beauty of OpenSource

Snapdeal, Dealsandyou, mydala, crazeal and so on development of such websites can be a huge task and consumes significant amount of manpower and time.

OpenSource softwares exists which can significantly reduce the time and cost required to get such deal site up and running. I found this project while browsing Drupal distributions called “Open Deals”

About Open Deals

Open Deals is a Free Deals Site distribution, based on Drupal 7, Drupal Commerce and other modules.
You can use the distribution for you or your clients and you can modify it at will.

We hope that the distribution will be beneficial and useful for you.

We’ll be glad to listen to your comments and feedback.

Open Deals is a combination of Drupal Core and many Modules which in a complete sense create a ready site for Deals. Anyone, literally anyone who wishes to create his own Deal site and get it up and running in minutes. (Obviously, you should know that Drupal is and how it works)

If you are new to Drupal, let me give you a brief about it:

In simple words its a combinations of lots of PHP code woven together to create a software system. This can be used to create sites of all types, be it a blog, corporate site, e-commerce site Or anything you wish. If you wish to extend the ability, you have a list of modules choose your feature and install it. The repository has everything from Facebook buttons to complex systems. Dont like the color, layout, you have lots of themes too install one and you can have the look changed.

The beauty of this CMS and other CMS is that you *dont* need to learn coding at All to get started and make the basic usage.

Created originally by Dries Buytaert

May 18, 2012
WordPress “too many redirects” resolved

This is just to note down a recent issue that I was facing with my WordPress blog.

Issue: I was unable to load the Homepage, which was set to Static Page in the Reading Settings as shown below:

I tried to search over WordPress.org forums, but did not get any effective answer to my query. However, this post helped me understand what could be wrong.

I went over to the Reading Settings in my blog and saw that the Front Page was set to a “Static Page”. However, the front page was missing from the dropdown list. Reason: I had foolishly set it to“Draft”.

So this caused the whole ordeal and it wasn’t any issue with Any Plugin Or the awesome CMS WordPress.

It was finally resolved as soon as I Published the Draft FrontPage, Reading Settings were already working only the page wasn’t.

What made me understand the

May 18, 2012