search engines and information over world wide web

a search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored over WWW. complex search engines help to minimize the time taken to find information and increases the quality and accuracy of particular information we retrieve.

following is a list of popular web sites currently available:
google.com
yahoo.com
live.com
ask.com

earlier days all search engines were based on HTML meta tags for keywords. so the search results were mathed based on the keywords found in that article matched with the search query. but as the no of web pages which get published in the internet doubled day by day the search results had millions of pages and the relevancy of the particular search result and the initial search query was much lower.

to address the previously mentioned problem a new technology called "Semantic Searching" was introduced. the main idea behind this was to give user of the search engine more relative information based on the search query. nowadays semantic web is being promoted by the usage of RDF or DC for every web page. but as no one can force all the web pages in the world wide web to associate with RDF the assurance of true semantic web is far away from today itself.

the next big topic about search engines is to know how to make the web pages being created to be search engine friendly. this process is named as "Search Engine Optimization". while following SEO process you can make a given web page's visibility towards search engines to increase, thus giving it a higher rank among other results. there are two ways in which you can achieve this. either you can follow "white hat SEO" or either you can use "black hat SEO". with white hat SEO it might take more time/cost to achieve the task of a higher ranking but the output tends to be consistent over time. but in contrast if you follow black hat SEO your web site can get black-listed or banned forever from search engines which results in bad reputation for the brand you promote.

Organizations Behaviour 09th dec 2007 class

it was a pleasure to start my BCS classes again after facing lot of personal problems for 2+ weeks. as usual i was late for my first class because the registration process took a little bit more time than i expected. todays classes were held by Dr.Dayan. even though i didnt knew him before it was a pleasure to have such a lecturer to cover the topic of Proffessional Issues in Information Systems Practice.

i have missed the first part of the syllabus which is named professional institutions. so i have to work hard and study for that part as these are all therotical it will be harder to understand these points if i dont study them now.

today the class started with the topic of ORGANIZATIONS. this was quite interesting to me as i've covered many of the topics in CIMA business law subject.

organizations can be defined as group of people working together to achieve a common goal. there are two main types of organizations,

1. Commercial - (these type of organizations do business with a profit motivation, most of the time selling products and services)
2. Non Commercial ( these are probably having a motivation of social and economical value. there are several types of examples available for this type of organizations)

in order to start new commercial organization in UK you have to follow the legislation of Companies Act 1985. and as in sri lanka you have to follow the New Companies Act 2007. but for non-commercial organizations in UK the approval process is still handled by queen as a tradition. but that Royal Charter State will not be given to non-commercial organizations if they dont prove their comitment beyond reasonable doubt to approving council (privy council).

under companies act of UK there are 3 types of companies that you can start.

1. Sole Proprieter
2. Partnerships
3. Registered Companies

Sole Proprieter
there are not many formal documents and formal procedure in starting an sole proprieter business. but there is no seperate legal existance for this type of business, so the owner of the company is personally liable for all its liabilities.

Partnerships
Partnerships are those where couple of people start working in a group to achieve a common goal. the arrangement for this can be in written or verbal. the problem in partnerships is that all contracts should be signed by a all of the mebers in a partnership and every member is unlimitedly liable for that partnership. all most all of the commercial partnerships among people fail because sharing revenues always become a critical factor. but proffesional partnerships such as with lawyers and GPs are likely to be successful as there is no sharing of invesment or revenue in that. it is all about sharing their client base with members of that partnerships. the no of members for a partnership must be of 2-20 and when the ownership changes the law will treat it as a new partnership so all those important documents should be revised again. and every member in a partnership is having the management powers and the power to act as a agent of that partnership.

Registered Companies (limited liability)
with this type of organizations we can give a seperate legal existance for the comapany which we are starting. so in that case there will be no liability on companies owners and the management to the company it self. the maximum liability of a given shareholder for that paticular company is the money he/she have invested in that company. there are two types of companies which can be formed under registered companies.

1. Private Limited Companies (PVT)
2. Public Limited Companies (PLC)

Private Limited Companies
in this formation there have to be a minimum of 2 and maximum of 50 shareholders. and the ownership is decided by the no of equal shares they own. but there are some restrictions placed in private companies by its constitution.

1. private companies cannot offer shares or debentures to public.
2. when the ownership of shares change first it should get approved from the board of directors.
3. maximum no of share holders cannot exceed 50.

Public Limited Companies
public limited companies dont have those three restrictions which were in private limited companies, but in a public limited company there should be a minimum of 7 shareholdes.

limit of a liablity of a shareholder towards company debts are controlled in three ways.

1. limited by shares (shareholders liability is limited to the amount they have invested)
2. limited by guarantee (members agree to pay a small equal amount in any case the company wound up)
3. unlimited ( every share holder is personally liable for all company debts)

Poeplsenet V1.0 Released

At last we managed to get peoplesnet version 1 to be deployed in production server after doing 5 Quality Assuarance cycles. now we are awaiting the next theme from the client and once we re-theme it it will go live. :)

Features it contains include:
1. Profiles
2. Inviting Friends
3. Photo Galleries
4. Video Galleries
5. Blogs
6. RSS Feeds
7. Private Messaging
8. Address Book
9. Classifieds
10. Events
11. Forums
12. Jobs
13. Dynamic Networks
14. Content Sharing
15. Content view definable Public / Networks
16. Admin Controlled Advertisement system

Some Screen Shots:Home Page

Recent Video

My Network Graphic


Movable Task Window


Classified Listing

How to estimate the cost of a web development project

for web development i think you should move with a fixed price for the time period. once you get the time estimation from the project manager make sure your developers / designers doesn't take more time than expected to finish a job. because this field is so competitive, you have to deliver projects on time to keep up in the business. and a good process should be defined to gather client requirements and the project spec, and you have to make sure not to adopt to any change requests from the customer till you finish the first release.

and at the same time you have to make sure that you have a sound Quality Assurance process to make sure that the deliverables are exact to the client requirements.

filter.php

This is my newest solution on form submit data validation. it was developed in a "developer point of view" rather than "end user point of view". so if you don't have any idea about php development then you'll find it bit difficult to understand. but once you got to know the pattern u'll be loving it and of course you'll be using it to validate all your form submissions.

first we'll see what type of things do we have to validate as HTML form elements.

• textfield
  
• textarea
• checkbox
• radio button
• radio group
• List / Menu
• file field

and with respect to all these fields what we should thoroughly take care of is not letting users submit any values containing <SCRIPT> tags, <STYLE> tags and any other undefined strings.

and one other cool feature of this script is that you can keep the default values of other elements even though one element fail to validate. and it may sounds like a very common and lazy task with javascript enabled pages but remember this snippet will validate and keep the default values nicely even without no javascript at all.

does that sounds interesting?

The Big Day Coming ahead on friday

ya it will be a big day for me becouse friday i have to conduct my first technical session to all my collegues at accura-tech. even though they have given me the title of software engineer im currently educating all other developers about new technologies.

so by friday evening i should prepare myself to conduct this technical session on user input validation. hopefully this will be the first in the row of web security which is one of my favourite topics.

i have already designed and checked the validation code which i will be using to demonstrate the impact.

i'll update this blog with a photo (if available) and the neccessary files once im done with this.

and i know that surely there will be lot of ideas coming in from our developers too. so i'll try to post it back to the blog.

--
Praveen Gunasekara

vote for drupal

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