We had posted sometime back about a click tracking issue with unknown third party providers, that we were facing with OpenX.

We tried approaching different people, including OpenX forums, third party freelance sites, etc. A consistent answer we received was, if the third party advertiser does not support the extra parameter in their ad code, there is no way to capture the clicks from their ads. We were puzzled at realizing that such a simple requirement might not be handled in OpenX.

Very interestingly, someone from OpenX Services wrote to me a few days after the last post was published, saying that they could solve this problem for us.

[Read more →]

Apple’s Steve Jobs has launched iPad, Apple’s version of the tablet, which has a very sleek design – as usually expected from Apple after their successful launch of iPod, iPhone, iMac and iTouch.

iPad is just half an inch in thickness and weights just 1.5 pounds. It has a 9.7 inch touch screen interface and looks as sleek as any other Apple device. It uses hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics and hence the resolution is expected to be amazing.

[Read more →]

OpenX announced the release of the next version of their ad serving tool yesterday.

There are quite a few good features announced, but all of them listed so far, appear to be related mainly to OpenX Market integration – not a bad idea though.

For those of who, who are not familiar with OpenX, it started as an independent open source community project and went through many name changes before it became OpenX. Around this time, it got good funding from venture capitalists and now they are trying to make the product better as well as make it revenue generating by using alternate ideas such as offering consulting services, a hosted version, etc.

In this version 2.8.4, some of the key non-OpenX market related features are:

[Read more →]

We are happy to announce that Aravind has been selected as the Employee of the Year 2009 at Auro Infotech.

Aravind has been with Auro Infotech for five years now and has grown from the role of a Server Administrator to Manager of the Server Support Team.

In this role, he has gone above and beyond his basic job responsibilities and has contributed to various initiatives at Auro Infotech.

In 2009, Aravind was instrumental in leading the efforts in engineering various solutions such as Wordpress MU, Magento, OpenX, etc. He has also been managing various client initiatives in different projects we delivered to our clients.

As a result, in 2010, Aravind is now also overseeing the design team and is on track to managing the operations of Auro Infotech, Chennai.

As a part of this reward, Aravind gets a special gift of his choice from the Auro Infotech Management team. I hope he will write about his gift in the near future.

Please join me in congratulating Aravind on a job well done and wish him all the best in all his future initiatives.

As many of you know, our ad server runs on OpenX.

Two interesting things happened yesterday:

1. We upgraded to the latest version of OpenX (2.8.3)
2. We also moved our adserver to a new server.

Right after these changes, the statistics stopped getting captured.

[Read more →]

Nexus One is the latest phone device from Google, which is being called by many as iPhone Killer. The Nexus One phone has a few good features such as a very sleek design with a 3.7 inch screen supporting a resolution of 800 by 480. With the weight just at 130gms, this phone is slightly lighter than iPhone. Also, this phone has a battery life of five hours, with full internet usage – with a standby life of around 250 hours – it appears to be quite robust.

(Image from Google Website. Link to the official Google website for Nexus One phone with full specifications at the end of this post).

[Read more →]

Auro Infotech is happy to announce our New Year Special offer on Shared Hosting where you can get our 1GB package with free domain and MS SQL Server for just Rs.999/- a year.

Our standard 1GB package is now only Rs.999/- per year (19.95USD per year) as a part of the New Year offer until 15-Jan-2010. (Service tax of 10.30% applicable).

This package also comes with Microsoft SQL Server databases included in it – besides the usual MySQL database. The features in this package are:

• Free domain registration or transfer
• 1GB Disk Space
• 10GB Bandwidth usage per month
• Unlimited MS SQL and MySQL databases
• Unlimited Email Accounts
• Unlimited FTP accounts
• Unlimited sub domains and parked domains
• Control Panel (Plesk on Windows server and CPanel on Linux server)
• SMTP/POP3 with Webmail
• Weekly Backups included
• 24 by 7 support

This offer is applicable to new registrations as well as domain transfers. The offer is valid for the life of your account, which means that you just pay Rs.999/- each year during renewal and nothing more.

Also, this offer also qualifies for our Annual Auro Shared Hosting Customer Loyalty Rewards Programme.

Get your domain name and hosting account today by signing up today at New Year Promotion Order Online: https://auroinfotech.com/clients/cart.php

Note:

1. 10.30% service tax will apply on all orders.
2. MS SQL Server is available only on Windows servers.
3. This special offer expires on 15-Jan-2010.
4. During order placement, the domain cost will say Rs.450/-, accept it and the promotional discount will be applied right away. The final checkout will be only Rs.999/- as the total amount to be paid for this offer.

Please click here to contact us if you have any questions on this offer

As we come to the end of year 2009, on behalf of the team at Auro Infotech, I want to thank all our clients for providing us an opportunity to serve you.

We take this time to thank you with sincerity. Without each one of you, we would not be where we are today. We hope to be a part of your success stories all the time and will continue to do our best to contribute to the same.

Please pardon us for any mistakes we might have done in the past year on your websites and please consider this assurance that we are learning from them to make sure going forward we will continue to do our best to meet and even exceed your expectations.

Once again, we sincerely thank you for your business and hope to continue taking care of your online needs in the years to come.

To all our shared hosting clients, we want to remind you that with your yearly hosting renewals, we always double your disk space (year over year) as a part of our Auro Shared Hosting Customer Loyality Rewards programme.

Also, on behalf of the team, I wish you and your families a very happy, healthy and prosperous New Year 2010.

As we move into 2010, we look forward to bringing in significant improvements in our development methodology, which will help us improve efficiency in the results we deliver to our clients.

The following are a list of some of these improvements:

1. Source Code Control using SVN: All these years we have struggled without a proper implementation of a source code control repository. Starting 1-Jan-2010, all our project source code will be managed using SubVersion (SVN). Along with this, we are also working on automating the deployments so that code from a given release will be moved from SVN into a target environment automatically. We hope to have this in place before end of March 2010.

2. Development IDE – Netbeans: Netbeans has been chosen as the IDE for all our LAMP based application development. After a debate between Netbeans and Eclipse, the decision was taken to adopt Netbeans as the standard application development IDE at Auro Infotech.

3. Unit Testing – Though we have strong QA Testing Checklist and methodologies in place using Mantis and Quick Test, we have never had a formal developer testing / unit testing process. We have now finalized that and will be using a documented Unit Testing procedure performed by the developers, which will also be one of the mandatory inputs going forward whenever a QA test is requested.

Since Netbeans is tightly integrated with SVN as well as many unit testing tools, we hope to have a seamless interface between these technologies, which should help us in delivering more robust solutions at a much faster pace.

4. SEO Enabled Website URLs: All these years we have handled SEO enabling of URLs as a separate task in the development process. Going forward this task will be tightly integrated with the development process and hence will be a mandatory deliverable from all our projects.

5. Social Media Aware: With the growth of Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, iPhone, etc, we have made it a standard in all our projects to consider features for social media as a part of the basic project.

We hope that the above plans should help us deliver applications which help the online websites of our clients to perform in a much more efficient manner.

At Auro Infotech, we have a informal programme that has been going on for over three years now. Today we are giving it an official name:

Auro Shared Hosting Customer Loyalty Rewards Programme

Most of our shared hosting customers pay us on a yearly basis and we have customers with us for over five years now. As a measure of rewarding them, for the past three years, every year, with the renewal of their yearly shared hosting accounts, we have been doubling their disk space as a recognition of their loyalty with us.

The other features that come with all our packages are:
* Free domain registration or transfer
* Unlimited MS SQL and MySQL databases
* Unlimited Email Accounts
* Unlimited FTP accounts
* Unlimited sub domains and parked domains
* Control Panel (Plesk on Windows server and CPanel on Linux server)
* SMTP/POP3 with Webmail
* Weekly Backups included
* 24 by 7 support

With technology improvements, we have been able to get state of the art hardware platform for our hosting clients. As prices of hard disks are continuing to drop, we are able to take advantage of it and hence are able to give back to our loyal clients in the form of doubling their hard disk space year over year.

Going into 2010, we are continuing the Auro Shared Hosting Customer Loyalty Rewards Programme and hope to continue this in the future as we move forward.

Click here to sign up for any of our shared hosting packages now