Since a long time I wanted to channel my creative dabbling into something more productive. A discussion with Vamsi led to an idea of making and selling greeting cards. This led to my holiday project.
I plan to make 25 cards by Jan 14 then sell them and give the amount raised to Asha (http://www.ashanet.org/), adding some more of my own and getting it matched as well.
The challenge is to make each card unique and different. I will try to use all of the card-making techniques I have learnt so far for this. Keep track of my progress on this post or on my site http://sites.narla.net/handmade-cards
Friday, December 31, 2010
Sunday, July 11, 2010
The Great Indian Wedding - Part 1
I'm getting married!
Its definitely a memorable time for every bride-to-be. And most brides-to-be would start planning for their wedding trousseau and/or their wedding venue.
Not me! Being a geek myself and having landed with an equally geeky guy, our first thought was "we need a wedding website!"
Since this was planned to be a typical Indian wedding anyways, we weren't much help with any other planning, being literally halfway across the globe from Mumbai (our wedding venue). So while our parents took care of the day-time, venue, decorations and other such logistics, we focused on the wedding website :)
So what should a wedding website be like? It must be scalable, sleek and completely built using everything open-source and free. After some research, we settled on using Google AppEngine to host the app since it provided everything including database access, running server-side scripts and a web server all for free! Anyone who has struggled with setting up and using Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL knows what a lot of trouble it is to get a simple web server setup. AppEngine took away all that headache!
Then there was the part that the site should look pretty. After some more Googling, we came upon Flashmo, a site that offers free flash templates. This triggered off a learning spree for Flash CS5 for both of us!
After numerous Flash and AppEngine tutorials, lots of weekends spent coding and debugging and some debates over the site content; our website was ready! It has a photo gallery, a guestbook, a wedding countdown and lots of sleek touches. More importantly, it is a reflection of who we are as a couple and everything that brings us together. It is now proudly hosted at http://chaitaliandvamsi.appspot.com!
However, I must admit that the power of the human sub-conscious mind is immense. How else can you explain our use of Flash that meant our site wouldn't open on iPhones and iPod Touches? And our mistake of unknowingly generating an HTML that didn't work in IE? Yes, the human mind is very mysterious indeed... ;)
Its definitely a memorable time for every bride-to-be. And most brides-to-be would start planning for their wedding trousseau and/or their wedding venue.
Not me! Being a geek myself and having landed with an equally geeky guy, our first thought was "we need a wedding website!"
Since this was planned to be a typical Indian wedding anyways, we weren't much help with any other planning, being literally halfway across the globe from Mumbai (our wedding venue). So while our parents took care of the day-time, venue, decorations and other such logistics, we focused on the wedding website :)
So what should a wedding website be like? It must be scalable, sleek and completely built using everything open-source and free. After some research, we settled on using Google AppEngine to host the app since it provided everything including database access, running server-side scripts and a web server all for free! Anyone who has struggled with setting up and using Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL knows what a lot of trouble it is to get a simple web server setup. AppEngine took away all that headache!
Then there was the part that the site should look pretty. After some more Googling, we came upon Flashmo, a site that offers free flash templates. This triggered off a learning spree for Flash CS5 for both of us!
After numerous Flash and AppEngine tutorials, lots of weekends spent coding and debugging and some debates over the site content; our website was ready! It has a photo gallery, a guestbook, a wedding countdown and lots of sleek touches. More importantly, it is a reflection of who we are as a couple and everything that brings us together. It is now proudly hosted at http://chaitaliandvamsi.appspot.com!
However, I must admit that the power of the human sub-conscious mind is immense. How else can you explain our use of Flash that meant our site wouldn't open on iPhones and iPod Touches? And our mistake of unknowingly generating an HTML that didn't work in IE? Yes, the human mind is very mysterious indeed... ;)
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