Added a few photos at our Google+page
today! One of these days, we will do a full-fledged photo shoot, but until then these pics should give you an idea of how we look.
Say cheese
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Out site is linked to Google+!
Our website http://durbarresidency.com now has a Google+ badge and +1 button! If this proves popular enough, perhaps we could retire this blog and use our Google+ page exclusively.
‘Tis the season to be jolly
Ho ho ho, Christmas is here! Check out our tree and crèche in the lobby.
Inviting Maveli over this Onam
Don’t let those cheesy commercials fool you…Onam is much more than a made-for-tourists festival to us Malayalis. Case in point: the pookalam and Onam sadhya organized by our staff every Onam.
Obituary to the Durbar Residency site on MS Office Live Small Business
Not that I am going to miss the old Durbar Residency site too much, but it must be said that it did a great job for – what is it, two years now? – with almost no hiccups and for the price of free. Of course, there were some limitations (the inability to add custom JavaScript being the foremost) and I was never able to get the banner logo to look good; but one really can’t beat the value for money. As with all successful ideas on the internet, Microsoft is shutting down this free service and wants us to take a paid subscription plan on their Office 365 platform. Nothing wrong with that, of course, there are mouths to feed even at Redmond; but I just felt a redesign was in order and it was a great opportunity to brush the dust off my web developer hat.
The Live Small Business platform has been rock-solid all this time, and I can’t think of a single complaint. Assuming its successor Office 365 will have the same reliability, I think it is a good deal even at its price of $6/month for a small business, especially if you don’t want to mess with coding. Yes, it is relatively easy to get a decent HTM
L template online and add your content to it; but unless you want to put in the time, you are going to find (like I did) that the real pain is in stitching all the ancillary services like emails, calendars and what-not together.
I will be pulling the plug on the old site in a few minutes (with some Muscato Canelli at hand to sweeten the memory), but here is a screenshot of the old home page in case anyone wants to see what durbarresidency.com used to look like. Adios, my friend.
WP Super Cache plugin dramatically shortens this blog’s load time
Until a few minutes back, this blog used to take about 7 seconds to load on my browser. Now, thanks to this WP Super Cache plugin that I just installed, the load time is down to a second. This plugin caches the site’s pages as static HTML (and does a few more tricks …it’s all detailed on their site), effectively bypassing the need for this website’s host (GoDaddy, in case you’re wondering who) to do the php loop dance while serving this blog.
Put it simply, if you have a self-hosted wordpress site that has mostly static content, I would highly recommend you to install this plugin.
Reservation and Contact Us pages working now
It’s been a reasonably productive weekend if we discount the time wasted trying to get MVC remote validation work nicely with jquery posts… sorry for the geek rant but that issue is still bugging me. On the plus side, the Reservation page, the Contact Us page and the Rates page are fully functional. All that remains is to swap out some stock images and Latin.
Onto more important matters…
My wife and I watched two really nice movies this weekend… “The name of the Rose” and “The Oxford Murders”. What I find interesting is the fact that while I found the Oxford Murders movie slightly better – just a wee bit, mind you – than the older Sean Connery flick, Rotten Tomatoes gives the Oxford Murders a mere 10% approval while it rates the other at 75%!
Reservation page skeleton is done
Finally, the reservation page markup is done. Most of my time was eaten up by Photoshop and a few tweaks to the datepicker jQuery UI control. The Submit process doesn’t work yet….need to wire up the model and validation etc. As of now, I’m thinking about a plain-Jane form submission process, but perhaps I should make it an Ajax post? Hmm, let’s see if I have time to waste on such niceties…
Hopefully will be done with the Location page too tomorrow.
Alpha site for the new DurbarResidency.com is here!
Hello there
After a ton of time spent getting the ducks lined up (and learning enough .NET MVC3 to get me in trouble), I’ve put out the first cut of the new DurbarResidency.com site and blog. More on this in my next post, but for now, I’m off to Venice to celebrate this milestone (well, it’s more like spending the last bit of this weekend outside instead of being cooped up at home with my laptop 