Web::strategija 05
Posted by seven
We created banner campaign for 5th annual Web Strategy conference (Web strategija) held here in Zagreb by our friends. The theme of 5th conference is - recession in web industry! So, if you see our evil eagle logo on their site, don't be afraid of the eagle. 
We didn't have enough time to prepare our self to be speakers on this conference, but my good friend Goran Blagus will share some of his infinite wisdom with visitors. Definitely worth checking out if you are in the area. Read more...
Interview with the (web)vampire(s)
Posted by seven
Shouts to the girls and guys from kroativ.net for posting interview with us. We were first to break the ice in their new Interview with webdevelopers section. And yes, now when I've read it once more - we sure sound like a boy band. The interview is written in Croatian, but Google translate does excellent job those days for our foreign friends.
Centrala.hr – edited by human not a robot
Posted by seven
We just released your new homepage - Centrala.hr (eng. plānt - A building or group of buildings for the manufacture of a product; a factory.). Centrala is a human powered news aggregation site, where editors hand-pick best information from across the region just for you. In the avalanche of completely automatized rss aggregation news sites in Croatian cyberspace, we think a human touch can make a significant difference. What do you think?
Thanks to everybody for such a nice feedback:
New banner portfolio page
Posted by seven
Couple of months ago, for the need of showcasing our banner/campaign work on Croatian web award called Vidi Awards 2009, we built new banner portfolio page. We got two "best in category" acknowledgments in Web promotion category, but that's not important. Our old banner portfolio page looked like we got hacked and 50 or so banners per page did slow things down a bit.
Go check out new Nivas banner portfolio page, and write us angry comments if some of those banners harassed you too much on Croatian cyberspace.
Recently released projects from Nivas laboratory
Posted by seven
We have been real busy lately. So busy that we didn't have time to share with the rest of the world what have we been working on this summer. Be hold!
- Donacije.info
- Friendzii Facebook Application
- Magmont
- Središnja agencija za financiranje i ugovaranje programa i projekata EU (SAFU)
More new projects coming soon. Meanwhile, you can read more about recently released projects on our corporate one-pager web site (yes, it is getting too heavy to load, but we are working on that too).
A trip to the Google Toolbar land and back
Posted by seven
Couple of days ago I posted an article about the SplinQ Firefox extension we made. Firefox rocks, and building extensions is a breeze, but that only covers Firefox users. Since we need to target wider site audience, therefore next logical step would be to develop Internet Explorer Add-on.
I remember Google Toolbar back in the days Firefox wasn't so hot. It added nice web search ability to Internet Explorer and many IE bundles had him preinstalled. Google Toolbar is installed by default for Windows/IE users whenever Flash is installed or updated from Adobe's website, and the penetration of Adobe Flash appears to be around 99% so I suspect Google Toolbar penetration is quite good. With all this in mind we decided to try extending Google Toolbar.
I have done exhaustive research regarding Google Toolbar and after couple of hours of prototyping I came to conclusion that we CANNOT reproduce desired behavior from our Firefox extension. Only way we could "port" Firefox plugin is by writing ActiveX Internet Explorer Addon control.
I have used Google toolbar v5 beta since earlier versions of the toolbar are completely useless. The idea was to setup the feed to reload every X seconds and to say to SplinQ server an URL of the website where user is right now, and based on that, toolbar button/gadget would know should it show alerts and notifications by icon change or not.
I tried to simulate events by using Google toolbar RSS feed feature which enables toolbar gadget to load a remote RSS feed in certain interval times. Interval can’t be less than 20 seconds (another Google limitation). This feed can:
- change the dropdown menu icons (when clicked)
- replace icon in toolbar
- add alert texts beneath the toolbar icon
The main reason for a failure is security feature from Google toolbar that prevents developers to automatically send in any way URL of current site user is browsing. That is off course serious security hazard, and I completely understand why Google doesn’t allow this. Malicious user could be able to track all sites you are visiting and record that into his log files. Big fail!
However, Google toolbar can send current URL, but only if user:
- used search option within the toolbar
- pressed toolbar button
Both ways don’t enable us to have seamless way of user notification. What we need here are events, which will trigger upon user visit of new site in browser. Google toolbar doesn’t support this.
You can send some data from user by using two mentioned methods by using special tags (more on this on Google toolbar variables reference and scopes):
{query} - <search> element
{url} - <search>, <site>, or <send> element
{url.host} - <search>, <site>, or <send> element
{url.noescape} - <search>, <site>, or <send> element
{domain} - <search>, <site>, <send>, or <feed> element
{locale} - <search>, <site>, or <send> element
{selection} - <send> element
{option1} - Must go in a URL in <search>, <site>, <send>, or <feed> element
{random} – all?
So, what now. This only leaves us with one option, and that is to start writing ActiveX Internet Explorer Addon control.
Screenshot 1 – Alternate search provider:
Screenshot 2 - RSS feed icon changes and alerts:
|
|
Screenshot 3 – clicked button / plugin config screen:
The sound of summer
Posted by seven
I think it's time to break the radio (erm. blog) silence, and write new post. It's summer time in Croatia and the weather is hot. Life is a bit slower here at Nivas so we updated our website with few latest project we have been working on. Some of us returned from vacation, some are still on seaside, other are yet to leave for long waited and definitely earned vacation.
Until next post, enjoy this picture taken by me couple of weeks ago on island of Hvar. We had great time there, but it seems like it was 10 years ago.
The timewritter
Posted by seven
Big up to our friend Tino for stitching this one together! Great work mate. City you are watching is Dubrovnik, and music in background is made by Matt John - Teleparty.
We spend a large amount of time in optimizing frontend of each site we produce. Yes, everybody knows about famous yahoo's 14 rules (plus recent 20 new rules), but how to successfully reach them is another, story.
After some thinking and pimping, you can get straight A out of yslow. That's a fact. But then one day client comes and says - I need this banner here and that banner there and this tracking code and that tracking code.... 5 days later your straight A page becomes bullseye F. Why? Because you had to put tons and tons of inline javascript which not only broke your wonderful w3c compliant markup, but also completely f*cked up page loading/rendering time. Each page render now has to coup with inline javascript (even iframes) and loading of external javascript, images and flash files from different slow and overcrowded ad servers.
Until today I was mislead by thought that only we have that kind of problems, but my recent try to browse www.bbc.co.uk encouraged me to write this post.
Guys at BBC use (like many other) DoubleClick for banner management. There is nothing wrong with DoubleClick, or any other banner management software. In picture below you can see what timeout did to a bbc homepage. After 60 seconds or so, page eventually loaded, but was missing banners:
On our recent project, we didn't liked the fact that ad server is slowing our page render time by 300-500%. OpenAds didn't update their banner publishing scheme for at least 5 years so we did a little trick.
There is a placeholder that holds layout and displays "loading..." msg where banner should appear. Then we load the banner at the bottom of the page and once the banner is loaded we append it to the placeholder on top of the page .
This technique works well but can't be used in every configuration. Btw, if you are using jQuery, just be sure to use v1.2 since appendTo later on contains a bug. Eventually you could patch your current with this fix.
This won't solve all of your problems, and will off course introduce new ones but will help your page render time slightly and make your visitors not so annoyed. You should reconsider how to solve bottleneck to your ad server by making a farm or something.
What have we been up to lately?
Posted by seven
So, what have you guys been up to lately? You can checkout a little 'colague' on flickr called nivas::random(2). In few short words:
We sold our computers:
We listened some pretty damn good music...
We accidentally uploaded on flickr some secret documents and schematics
We contemplated...
We had meetings...
We had presentations...
... and we had fun doing presentations!
We crashed cars on ice (damn you zagreb winter service)
We put some bling on our xmas tree
We had fun with our Christmas presents...
...lots...
... and lots of fun.
Hello Santa!
We did some pretty serious shit...
...and we had fun doing it.
See you all in 2008!
Caption this!
Posted by seven
Checkout more strange moments from the office at nivas:random() flickr photo set!
We released two new web sites last week
Posted by seven
Aždaja Boutique is an online shop where anyone can dress up from head to toe! Under a small condition that you like black leather boots with sharp spikes, dresses and pants with vampiring aftertaste, shirts that radiate high society of barons and kings, and jewelry & accessories that will leave a spark in everyone's eye. Not for the faint hearted.
This one is a real beauty. We developed special z-commerce modules for our vudu engine to power Aždaja web shop. We have products, combined products, attributes, sets of attributes, price and stock status based on variation of attributes, tons of statistics and reports, FULL T-Com Pay Way integration (credit card processing, article export to T-Com Shopping Centar), and tons and tons of supporting features. Actually Aždaja doesn't use half of the features, but we felt like we just had to implement id.
Barke Bonom produces high quality retro yachts, whose main characteristics include; high quality build, attention to detail and a long nautical experience.
Busta Gjurassic did crazy new design and we implemented it together with tons of materials written in 3 languages in our vudu engine in no time. But, we spent at least 2 days debugging javascript for ie6. Then I made decision I'll never ever use any 3rd party xyz-moo-gallery EVER. var myGallery = new gallery($('myGallery'); gotoHell(); We made nice loop of the boat sailing for the front page, but the video quality was so low that we had to compensate with too many effects. At the end we had to drop it because the boat was more like a ghost ship from Pirates of the Caribbean than luxury yacht.
new quick and dirty nivas.hr banner portfolio page
Posted by seven
I have just updated our banner portfolio a bit. Take a look. Browse trough portfolio with top frame menu.
