Note: If you’ve landed here from a Search Engine looking for the URL to the Satyam Reservation, here it is https://www.thecinema.in. Wait!!!, before you visit the site read this post and be prepared for the worst.
I had a hell time with the Satyam theatre’s website for online reservation. Its the best example for a badly designed website. I spent one entire day trying to book a couple of tickets for the movie Dasaavataram. The design of the Flash based website is pathetic. Some of the irritating things I’ve experienced in the website are,
- There is no link to the login screen in the home page. For checking your booking history you’ve to go through a reservation cycle to reach the login box.
- The reservation confirmation prompt takes minutes to load and waits for just 15 seconds before you click yes/no. You can’t switch to other windows till you see the confirmation prompt. If you miss the prompt, the session times out and you will have to repeat the whole process. Why is this system designed to be so secure, when banking websites have kept session timeouts to a minimum of 10 minutes. After all, the tickets aren’t blocked in this stage.
- The seat chooser screen waits for a good enough 60 secs, but you will end up spending most of the time scrolling the seat layout to see the availability. The scroll bars can’t be dragged but have to be hovered over to scroll up or down.
- Once the payment is made, the page is redirected to the source website, but it is less likely you see a status message. I got only blank pages most of the time.
- If you are lucky and go through this process successfully, a final screen allows you to take print outs of the tickets. I pressed the “Print” button and it opened a popup window. Since my IE was blocking popup windows, I had to select “Temporarily allow popups” from the top bar. Alas, it refreshed the page and the flash page lost its state and I was taken to the home page again.
- Though there is a “Order history” screen, I didn’t see my booked tickets listed there. In such cases, you need to note down the order number from the confirmation mail (if you’ve received one) and generate the ticket from a Satyam theatre window.
I could see few references about the Satyam online reservation systems by some bloggers, who have hailed this initiative as a good thing in Tamil entertainment industry. But I would say this reservation system is a shame to the IT industry. Go and check out yourself at https://www.thecinema.in(I refuse to add link), why I’m so disappointed. You will also realize why there are no credits mentioned on the site.
Never listen to anyone who says that India is an IT super power.
In continuation to the Adade Cartoons site and feed, I’ve created two similar sites for aggregating cartoons from English and Tamil magazines.
The Toons of India site pulls cartoons from Times of India, Economic Times, Indian Express, Deccan Chronicle and Hindu, while the Tamil cartoons website aggregates cartoons from the popular Tamil magazines of Dinamani, Dinamalar and Dinathanthi.
View Toons of India
View Tamil cartoons
As explained here, these custom aggregators were created using Yahoo pipes, a free tool to generate custom feeds.
Why my Yahoo Pipe shows “No Results” on running it?
Beginners in Yahoo Pipes may end up getting this error message while running their Yahoo Pipes. There are two reasons for a Yahoo Pipe not showing any results.
The Pipe Output is not wired.
Make sure that the Pipe Output is wired. Verify the raw output in the debugger.
No description element
Make sure your pipe has an element called “description”, which is required for any HTML based feed output. Output the HTML code of your pipe only to the “description” element. Having your HTML output in any other element will make your pipe output go unrecognized by feed readers.
If your pipe still shows no results, ensure that your pipe sources, i.e. modules like Fetch Page, Fetch Data and Item Builder, pull data needed for the pipe. If you find nothing fishy, debug the pipe starting from “Pipe Output” module and navigating upwards.
Finding it difficult to Regex multi line text?
Simple. Convert it into single line and Regex it. Use a Regex command to replace the new line characters with empty text and apply your Regex commands on the single line text. Do like this,
Noted the option boxes checked in both the commands? Its ‘g’ and ‘m’ for the new line replacement and ‘g’ for remaining commands.
How to add more elements to the feed?
Use the Rename module and copy an existing element. You can remove the source element’s contents by using a Regex module as below.
Connecting feed output to a string module
Yahoo Pipes doesn’t allow you to wire a port of type “items” to a port of type “string”. But in many cases we require this wiring to process the strings in the feed items. Here is how you should do this…
Add a loop module and place the string module within the loop module. Then connect a module’s “items” output with the loop module. Now the fields in the string module, which is now hosted on the loop module, will be populated with the elements available in the input feed. In the loop module’s field ‘For each’, select the element which has to be processed by the string module. This element in each item of the input feed will be processed by the string module and the string output can either add on to or replace the elements in the input feed, depending on your selection between “assign results” or “emit results”. Here is a sample Pipe that demonstrates Loop module.
தினமணியில் வெளியாகும் அடடே கார்ட்டூன்கள் பற்றி அறிந்திருப்பீர்கள். தினமும் அந்தக் கார்டூன்களை பார்ப்பதற்காக மெனக்கெட்டு தினமணி.com போய் மூன்று நான்கு கிளிக்குகள் செய்து விளம்பரங்களுக்கு மத்தியில் உள்ள கார்ட்டூன்களை ரசிக்கிறீர்களா? இந்த வேலையை எளிதாக்க விரும்புகிறீர்களா? அப்படியென்றால் உங்களுக்கான தளம் http://adade-cartoons.blogspot.com, ஓடை http://feeds.feedburner.com/adade-cartoons.
Yahoo Pipes-ல் இது போன்ற ஓடைகளை எளிதாக உருவாக்கலாம். நான் உருவாகிய இந்த Yahoo Pipe, தினமணி தளத்தில் உள்ள கார்ட்டூன்களை சுரண்டி ஓடையாக மாற்றித் தரும். அந்த ஓடையிலுள்ள கார்ட்டூன்கள் பின்னர் http://adade-cartoons.blogspot.com தளத்தில் பதிவுகளாக வெளிவரும். இதில் கொஞ்சம் manual work-ம் உண்டு. கீழே உள்ள படத்தில் தெளிவாக விளக்கப்பட்டுள்ளது.
Adade Cartoons blog - How it works? - இந்த பதிவில் அடடே கார்ட்டூன்கள் தளத்தின் இயக்கத்தைப் பற்றி விபரமாக எழுதியுள்ளேன்.
This question arose in my mind after I designed the embed code of my Google Analytics Widgets based on inline frames. The iframe based design was more comfortable because I could keep the widget’s dimension under my control without depending on the embed code. Rather, I can do anything within the frame’s source page like adding dynamic hyperlinks.
My big mistake here was that I wrongly guessed that search engines treat these hyperlinks as back links as the iframe is embedded on another site. But what I saw was that the search engines treated the links to my page from within iframe tags worser than the nofollow links. I didn’t find any back links in Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site explorer. Next, Ravi gave a feedback that iframe in the embed code made him wary.
Finally, I decided to break the embed code into plain HTML without any iframe in it. Now, to the crawler’s view the embedded widget code appears as if it is originating from the same site and the links in the embedded code have now become back links. This also gives an an option to the user to remove the back links, if he/she doesn’t want to add credits to the widget creator.
Compare the two embed codes yourself,
iframe based embed code :
<iframe src='http://www.yemkay.com/apps/SiteAnalytics/GAEmbedImage.aspx?wid=07d59e9b-f1aa-4511-a0a6-b66b4e7a08a6&vars=%26daterange%3d1%26from%3d%26to%3d%26subreport%3d3%26sparkline%3dPageviewsSparkline%26summary%3dPageviewsSummary%26width%3d200%26height%3d200&width=200&height=200'></iframe>
Plain search engine friendly embed code :
<a style='text-decoration : none;' href='http://www.yemkay.com/apps/SiteAnalytics/' target='_blank'><img style='border: 0px none;' alt='Loading…' src='http://www.yemkay.com/apps/SiteAnalytics/HitCounter.aspx?wid=7b2bc7bf-17b1-41c3-968b-6b66499a6f7c&vars=%26subreport%3d3%26summary%3dPageviewsSummary%26since%3d20070101' title='Google Analytics Widgets' title='Hit counter powered by Google Analytics'></img></a>
But I’m yet to find out how search engines treat iframes? Do they index the frame sources as well? And if they do so, do they treat the links on the source pages as back links?
Chat