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Rashid Idris
It was one fine morning, when I came to office and started my work on ZEPRS [an under development project], suddenly phone RANG, I picked. Who is this? I am here, sounded familiar to me, I thought for a moment and realized that my CEO is on other side. Yes Sir, was my second reply.
“I need just 2 pages, one where people can add a company and another page they can post for that company. There will two categories of post, In Favor and Against. And I want to show those posts side by side, something like Zebate
and that’s it. No design, No formatting nothing else……………” CEO’s Words
I really wasn’t in mood of working on this “something like Zebate” thing, but it was CEO’s order so …………. that day and it was now, this ping, that ping, that ping, this ping, ping, ping, ping.
PingMyCompany was initially RateMyCompany but A great developer’s mind got PINGED and it was changed to PingMyCompany. Also after first release it was noticed that “PING” is only in our logo and no where else in the site, so it was decided to change all “comments” & “post” to “PING”, just to have PINGY touch across the site.
Well, now it’s PingMyCompany.com, and let me share some of technical aspects of the site. Here it goes:
Firstly, why CEO got this idea to develop such a platform? It was Zigron’s review on Green & White, where there been a long debate on Zigron’s hiring process. It meant, people talk about companies, and when they talk so, they would definitely love to ping for or against a company….. Isn’t it?
Now development: PMC is developed in PHP/MySQL (v5),It was started on 18th April 2008, and first release was online on 24th April 2008. It took 3-4 days exactly to put this this Live for 6 Billion people. Wow….! Well, this was the first release and contained very simple interface and features. Here’s the very first layout:
And after this first release, many revisions came and in each revision new feature pinged in it, making it simpler, user friendly, SEO friendly and lot more features. The summary of all those features is as follows.
Few of web 2.0 features it currently have are RSS feeds, DIV based interfaces, AJAX Postings, Sharing, Clouds, etc. It also has Translation Feature and Twitter integration. A bit of detailed description of these features is as follows.
I have used AJAX & DIV based interfaces so that users can have better User Xperience & quick response time. AJAX has been involved where ever it was feasable like paging, sharing, pinging, adding company etc… I have used Prototype JS toolkit (v1.6) for all ajax related work. I will soon be integrating Scriptaculos toolkit (v1.8) for better and cool AJAX affects.
I took the full advantage of MySql fulltext search features to give a better search results for users. However there has been few limitations as well in fulltext for which I am writing a custom solution to eliminate those limitations.
Through RSS you can get Latest PingMyCompany feeds. Right now we provide full text feeds. Of the multiple RSS formats that exist today (RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0), PingMyCompany supports only the 2.0 specification for now. You can get PingMyCompany feed from http://www.pingmycompany.com/rss/feed.rss
It also supports Twitter postings for all those who want to follow all updates on Twitter. You can follow it from http://twitter.com/pingmycompany
A full blown Admin panel has also been written to control everything. This is currently a small scale web application, yet with latest buzzing web features and this is not the end, we’re on the go to add more n more….
“To be very honest, I was not interested working on this application at first but now, after working on this for a month, It looks like that i fell in kind of love with PMC. It really made me learn lot of news things, and polish my existing skills. After working on this project, I really see a significant improvment in my skill set. Thanks to PMC for Pinging My Mind”.
PS: Special thanks to CEO (Haris Khan) for His this nice Idea and a bundle of thanks to Zigron Admin and everyone who were involved directly or indirectly in this project and shared there views, suggestions, appreciation, improvments from time to time to make PMC more consistant and reliable.
NEWS
Kashif 6:56 pm on June 29, 2008 Permalink
Cool. Nice work you did there and good to learn about the making.
Zigron Inc. Blog » Technology + Transparency + Ideas = Help you hire better 10:39 pm on July 26, 2008 Permalink
[...] PingMyCompany.com was started with a pure and simple intention to gather more data about ourself as a firm and know about others too. I have explained it before and Rashid also shared his development story. [...]