Groupon Clone Script
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  1. Agriya’s Airbnb Clone Gets A Facelift

    Peter on January 12th, 2012

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    When we launched our Airbnb clone script, Burrow, back in the summer of 2011 we didn’t realize just how much of a demand there was for a platform which connects people for the exchange of services or expertise. The feedback started pouring in via our support desk and more recently via our bug tracker and while we have eliminated any major bugs one lingering concern amongst customers was that the admin area could be improved.

    We’re pleased to announce that for our 10th release of Burrow we have completely overhauled the admin area to give a cleaner, more friendly and intuitive backend. You’ll find the new admin area to be completely unrecognizable to the previous versions and the time and effort we have put in to crafting it is thanks to our ongoing efforts to ensure that every part of our products exceeds expectations.

    The new admin area is a lot cleaner as you can see in the screenshot below. The emphasis is giving you a brief snapshot of the important information that you need while making the option to dig deeper in to the data much easier and simpler.

    Humans love to visualize data because it gives some kind of meaning and representation to what is going on. You might have had 15 orders yesterday and 18 the day before and 14 today but it’s only when this information is plotted on a graph do these numbers start to have some meaning. The Burrow admin area now comes jam packed with graphs and charts to give you a visual representation of what’s going on in your business.

    Previously we had all our admin menu options listed down the left hand side of the screen which became a bit too cumbersome as more management pages were added and sometimes it felt like you had to endlessly scroll to find the menu option you wanted. This has all changed in the new Burrow script where all the menu options have been grouped together under eight logical headings. When you roll over a heading it expands out to reveal the advanced management options that are available to you related to that heading.

    With each property that’s listed on your Burrow website there is an enormous amount of data that is generated, most of which you don’t actually need to know unless you are administrating a particular property. Now when you load the list of properties you get the information that is most important to you in a quick snapshot but more indepth data is just a click away and the listing will expand out to reveal inside information about the property you have selected.

    User management is another area which generates huge amounts of data, most of which isn’t needed on a day to day basis so once again the developers have constructed the member management page in such a way so that you get all the important information you need at a glance like how much money you have made out of them while keeping more detailed information hidden away but can be revealed at a click of a button.

    There have also been a number of under the hood changes which you won’t see but will definitely feel. Innovations such as cutting edge caching, use of css sprite images and SASS all serve to speed up the loading and rendering of your Burrow website. Another new feature that has been added recently includes the ability to pay your hosts offline instead of via PayPal as we found many businesses are setting up a website to serve a market that doesn’t have easy access to web based payment solutions and prefer offline methods like cash and cheques. This is now fully supported in the latest version of Burrow.

    If you haven’t checked out Burrow for yourself headover to our Airbnb clone script page which explains more about what it does and request an unrestricted demo so you can see for yourself how powerful this software is.
     

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2012 at 5:20 am and is filed under Burrow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. Why We Don’t Need Google’s WebP

    Peter on October 6th, 2010

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    Much cheer, Google has announced yet another open source project that is designed to move the web forward and make browsing a faster, better experience. The new project is called WebP (pronounced “weppy” according to Wikipedia) and it’s designed to be a new image format for the Internet that makes file sizes smaller and thus quicker to download.

    The highlights of this new image format are:

    • Lossy compression (like JPEGs)
    • Uses block prediction to ‘guess’ the missing colours
    • Google claims that WebP can compress a standard JPEG image by 39% and retain the same picture quality
    • Still under development and no browser (or image editing software) currently supports this format
    • Alpha support is planned (enables transparency)

    If you want to see some examples of how much WebP can compress an image without affecting the quality, Google have put up a WebP comparison page here.

    However, feedback from the community hasn’t been particularly great so far with many professional photographers claiming that the new format produces more blurry images, has colour loss and saturation problems. But who knows, since this is an open source project maybe these problems will be fixed before the WebP format is adopted en-masse.

    Now the question that web designers and web developers need to ask ourselves is: Do we really need a new file format? Let’s be fair, if we properly optimized all our images before uploading then speed would be less of a problem. What’s the difference between saving the image as a WebP file if it’s just going to be the same size?

    Another reason why so many people are perplexed about Google’s decision to introduce a new image format is because we already have the perfect alternative to JPEG in the form of JPEG-2000 (.jp2). While this is not very well known about outside the professional photography industry, JPEG-2000 provides superior compression while maintaining a high quality – effectively you can continue to compress a JPEG-2000 image well beyond the point where a normal JPEG image starts to take on a blocky effect.

    JPEG vs JPEG-2000

    So the WebP format claims to be able to offer a 39% compression while maintaining image quality, so in theory a 100kb JPEG could be replaced by a 60kb WebP image. How does that compare to using JPEG-2000 images?

    On the left we have the standard JPEG image and on the right we have the corresponding JPEG-2000 image. Please note that since most browsers still do not support the JPEG-2000 format we have saved the image as a PNG file as this is a lossless format – it preserves the image EXACTLY as it looks as a JPEG-2000 image.


    JPEG File Size: 162 kb


    JPEG-2000 File Size: 166 kb

      


    JPEG File Size: 61.2 kb


    JPEG-2000 File Size: 59.6 kb

      


    JPEG File Size: 48 kb


    JPEG-2000 File Size: 46.9 kb

      


    JPEG File Size: 39.3 kb


    JPEG-2000 File Size: 39.1 kb

    As you can see the lossy compression (which to be fair was designed in the late 80′s!) in the original JPEG images starts to distort very quickly. In technical circles the ‘blocky’ effect you start to see around the edges is known as ‘artifacts’, left over from the sampling algorithm as it tries to remove pixels and guess the colours instead.

    On the other hand the JPEG-2000 images retain much of their quality even when the file size has been compressed by over 75% of the original image!

    We would even argue that the quality of a 30.2kb JPEG-2000 image is virtually the same as the 61.2 kb JPEG image – which is just over 50% compression. What do you think? Can you tell much difference between the two?


    JPEG File Size: 61.2 kb


    JPEG-2000 File Size: 30.2 kb

    Agriya does appreciate the initiative Google is taking to try and get web developers to use images with smaller file sizes, but when we already have the existing technology that can deliver 50% compression with the same image quality, shouldn’t they be focusing their resources on promoting it rather than trying to reinvent the wheel?

    Add your thoughts below…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 6th, 2010 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Developers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. Is it worth optimizing your site for Yahoo and MSN?

    isaivani on March 28th, 2009

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    Search engine optimization is essential for getting top ranks in major search engines. We know that implementing optimizing strategies effectively will help us get loads of traffic and higher rankings in Google. What about Yahoo and MSN? Is it really worth optimizing your site for Yahoo and MSN? Let’s take a detailed look at it.

    Optimizing site for Yahoo:

    According to one study, 25% searches are done through Yahoo. It means that if your site is not coming up on Yahoo, you will lose 25 percent of your potential visitors.

    The following things are the current generalized specifications to achieving better rankings in Yahoo.

    The yahoo search engine gives more importance to keyword density. Placing right keywords in the content is very important. Use keywords in link text, while linking pages to each other. Remember keywords with catchy titles will attract maximum number of readers.

    Sometimes, Yahoo may fail to index dynamic pages so try to have static pages with keyword-rich content; it will increase the rank of your site on Yahoo. If you have some important dynamic pages on site, prepare a site map or quick links with links to all Web pages. This will help the Yahoo spider to crawl all your pages.

    Try to avoid using frames on your site, as Yahoo spider finds it difficult to crawl them.

    Optimizing site for MSN:

    Optimizing for msn can certainly increase your site rankings on MSN. If your site has fresh & original content that is being added regularly, you can receive tons of traffic to your site.

    In order to get better search engine ranking on msn, you have to follow the MSN search engine optimization rules.

    Don’t forget that MSN is a keyword sensitive search engine. If you have strong keyword density throughout Title, Description and Keyword Tags, MSN will reward your website with strong search engine rankings. Keep in mind that, you have to place your most important keywords in the title. Keyword rich link text helps in good msn ranking.

    You ought to add fresh content on a regular basis to your site so that you can get top rankings on MSN.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 at 5:26 am and is filed under Webmaster Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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