₦airaland Forum

It'd be nice to have a comparison chart for calculating the cost/standard of living in Nigeria.

Nigerians at home, please post the cost of foodstuffs that you know of.

Let me start off by posting prices that a friend in Abuja sent me:

Rice     16_1/2 Mudus (half bag)  N3,800.00
Beans    10 “        1,500.00
Dawa (Millet)   6 “       720.00
Palm Oil    10 Bottles    660.00
Vegetable Oil   2 Bottles      320.00
Elubo (Yam flour) 15 Mudus     2,250.00
Gari     15 “      1,200.00
Corn Flour    10 “      1,200.00
Kerosine    20 Litres      1,600.00

So many post, where do i start!?

   Ok, Oasis i must addmit that you tend to follow things just 'cause some one said it. Talking about "Get rid of the monter 115K graphic.  A graphic should be a max of 15K, or the SE's will run for the hills.  Unless of course you have plenty of text."

And you like to go against the grain I see.  Being a non-conformist more often than not puts you at a disadvantage in whatever you're doing, as I'll explain further below.

So why would you make your graphics 15k in the first place? Well it's all about load time! Right!? And guess what my target audience all run all DSL, so my 115k image loads up in seconds.

You have a point about target audience there.  However, unless your clients are totally not web-savvy, don't you think they'd take into consideration your design skills before they give you work?  As a potential client, I wouldn't hire somebody who's design is heavy on graphics, because I know that would kill me in the search engines.

For those talking about html, save my site and go through the images and see if you can piece them together using html. I don't just put chunks of images on my site, i break them down and piece them together with my html skills.

215K is still 215K my brother.  Slice and dice it anyway you want, the page is still a monster bandwidth hog.  Why use image that size when you can optimize it with photoshop down to a fraction of that?  One more reason why I wouldn't hire you to design a site for me.  Not you in particular, but generally speaking.

And you want to know why i don't bother about google indexing my site? Well it's not meant to be found online. My future clients want to see my portfolio, and i give them the address. Of course i know how to work with meta tags and all that, but i just don't bother when i don't need to.

Back that statement up by adding this meta tag <meta name="robots" content="none" />.  That'd keep the search engines away completely.  Until you've done that, all you have is a bad design that is not SE-friendly.

Yes i have gone through validating my site and found those errors, but i got caught up with other things and never looked at it again.

   Iframe is still works better than div for me. My site renders the same on Mac OS X, Windows and Unix platforms running Safari, IE, Firefox, Camino, Opera. So i think that's enough.

You keep sinking deeper in this quakesand.  If your site is really meant for your clients, you'd adhere to simple web-design rules that'd demonstrate your abilities.  How would your client assess your skills, unless your website spells it out clearly?

I see why you are on about search engine and search engine, well your site depends largely on it. But not me. I don't need that much traffic for my portfolio site, i get enough traffic from my free news paper ad.

Aren't you grasping at straws here?  Free traffic never hurt anybody, so why wouldn't you want traffic?  Your reason I guess for advertising in the newspaper is so people can visit your site, am I right?  So why not let people visit from the search engines also?

If your portfolio is meant to showcase your work, then do it right.  That'd put you in favorable light with your clients.

As for ajax code, that's cool if you can make it backwards compatible with most browsers.  I do 100% handcoding.  Lack of browser support is my reason for not messing with newfangled technology, unless I absolutely have to.

God bless you my man.  Keep working on those skills, and don't be so resistant to standard practices.  It's the key to success.

I visited http://www.kannel.org/ posted by demmy.

Can somebody answer this for me...

For a cellphone to interract with a website, it has to use the service provider as gateway. In other words:

cellphone <------> gateway (phone company) <-------> webserver

Is kannel replacing the phone company as gateway? I.e.

cellphone <------> gateway (kannel) <-------> webserver

what r u guys griping about? boys, grow up.

What's wrong with discussing the issues?  That's how people share ideas and  learn new things.  Have you been to the US or UK parliamentary discussions?  Would you call the people kids because they disagree with one another?  I don't mind somebody critiquing my work, as long as it doesn't deteriorate into gutter language.

and for the SEO junkies. we all know the SEO market is 'oja okunkun' without a definite answer. you need multitude of strategies to be able to achieve anything.

How much do you know about SEO?  I know many people are in the habit of bandying new terms about without actually having a full understanding of its meaning.

has any of u dudes heard about AJAX? you should go to www.37signals.com. people r talking about usability and accessibility.

Funny you should mention usability/accessibility and ajax in the same sentence.
The fact is, careless use of ajax could render your site unusable.  Only the newest browsers support ajax.  Depending on your targe audience, ajax may not be the solution.  So, test your ajax design well on all browsers before you launch it.  Unless I have a compelling reason to use ajax, I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

Being the conservative person that I am, I'll stick with Intel, whether Pentium or Celeron.

Any other concrete reasons beside being a conservative person?

The best is mikebuddy joo.

www.mikebuddy.8m.net
4get the sub-domian name na style

Alhaji mikebuddy, what's with the self-aggrandizement? 

www.mikebuddy.8m.net?  Please! 

I enjoy the comedic relief though...

first time i checked out www.oasisoflove.com i don't think i spent up to 15 seconds on it.

Thanks for the feedback.

My log analyser gives me all the info about user-behavior on my site, including how long they spent on the site, and what page they exited from.  Most visitors actually stay long, so I'm not concerned.  Perhaps the reason that you didn't stay around was because you weren't looking to use the service I provide in the first place, rather you were looking to see some exotic design.

www.sexynaija.com on the hand may not be as properly engineered but i'm sure people actually spend more time on the site. it looks more professional.

I agree it looks professional.  I could grab a template myself anyday and have a better jazzy, pizzazzy look.  But I don't care.  Beyond the first page, www.sexynaija.com quickly falls apart.   Why would anybody hang around on a featureless site?

In the dating industry, it's not so much the looks of your site, as it is the effectiveness that'll gain people's loyalty.  What would you say about the design of this site plentyoffish.com?  Poor right? Yet, it's the fifth largest dating site in the world. 

Maybe you guys just don't know what really matters online.

you guys should encourage one another.

i think this is his emphasis here.

That's exactly what I try to do, by pointing out changes that need to be made to a site that is not search engine friendly.  Sometimes people hold erroneous believes strongly.  And unless you knock them over the head with the facts (which may seem harsh at times), they'd continue to think they're the best.

Timmy, please feel free to say what you feel. The only thing bad about my html is that it's not xhtml, and that's all. Apart from that there's nothing else. Or what exactly in my html is bad?

Go to http://validator.w3.org and correct the html errors on your webpage.  You're using doctype HTML 4.0 Transitional, and you still don't pass validation.  Check the doctype on my website.

Using iframe is not bad,

Problems with iframe:

1. Not very well supported by older browsers.
2. Not search engine friendly.  SE's can't navigate inside frames.

even google indexes my page well, and i only want it to index the front page, so what else!?

Nope, your site is not indexed by google for the following reasons:

1. I don't see a <meta name="robots" content="none" /> on your inner pages.  So your claim that you only want google to index the front page is incorrect.  Google didn't pick them up because there's no information on them.  To google, those pages are blank.

2. No meta keywods.  Bad.

3. No meta description.  Bad.

4. No text on the pages, just a huge graphic.  Very bad!  There's no way to find your site online without text on the pages.  I typed christopher kalu into google, and your site is nowhere in the results.  You should be the first.

5. You have frames on the pages.  Very bad for search engines.

Bottomline, get rid of the frames.  If you want remote navigation, use <DIV> tags instead, and use the STYLE property overflow:auto in it.  That way it'd be scrollable.

Get rid of the monster 115K graphic.  A graphic should be a max of 15K, or the SE's will run for the hills.  Unless of course you have plenty of text.

Fix your metatags.

Get text on your pages.  No text, no search engine, period.

Hi Oasis,

I browsed around your site for a while, no dissin meant but you have way too much information beign thrown at a brother at the same time. I really advice you to re-design it, even cnn or yahoo don't give you that much information at a time.

Unfortunately, you're a rookie in the world of web engineering. Nothing on my webpages are there by accident. They're either for human consumption, or for search engine optimization. SEO is a completely foreign term to most webbies. Until you can build websites with search engines in mind, you're just a kid playing with a toy.

Hi Oasis, thanks for your post, but i think that isp is just showing the old stuffs still. I did the search on google and i've save images of my result, which i will post below. The result i got for mine is just the same for yours.

It's not the isp.  You just did not type the command correctly in google.

You typed
www.christopherkalu.com

instead of:
site:www.christopherkalu.com

You see the difference?

Your site is listed on google, but it's not indexed at all.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=www.christopherkalu.com&btnG=Search&meta=

As you can see, the site is not indexed on google. 

An indexed site means the search engine spider has crawled the site and cached all pages on the site into its database.  That's not the case here.

Do you know of any website listing nigeria's top designers?

If you know of any then contact me on www.christopherkalu.com if

When you say top designers, are you referring to page layout, or web application programming?

I don't care much for graphics laden, and hence slow-loading sites, no matter how attractive they may be.  I don't care for sites designed in flash either.

I care more about what search engines care about.

A good website has the following xteristics:

1. Design your website for easy search engine indexing.
2. Have useful content.
3. Use simple navigation method, that is always available at the same spot on every page.
4. Focus your website on a particular goal.
5. Build a fast website! People are in a hurry, and don't want to wait for flash or heavy graphics to load.  If your site doesn't fully load in 20 seconds on a 56K connection, you have a problem. 

Your site www.christopherkalu.com for example is not search engine friendly at all.  Type the following into google, and you'd see that your website is not indexed.

site:www.christopherkalu.com

Now do the same with my site:

site:www.oasisoflove.com

Consider ebay, yahoo, google, etc.  Those sites are nothing to look at, but they're focused, mainly text-based for fast loading, and they sure are raking in the dollars.

So I ask again what you mean by top designer.  If you're referring to programming and SEO, then add me to the list of php programmers.

I've gone through the whole thread, and I'm wondering why the need for a separate equipment like a POS system.  A good ole computer can do what you want perfectly.  All in all, you can do it at much lower cost, considering the prices of computer equipment today.

Are you trying to develop a proprietary system that you could mass-produce and resell?

Otherwise, simply code in WML, and data from your web server can be routed to cellphones via the service provider's gateway. 

Maybe there's something I'm missing about your objective.

There is nothing wrong if a company go to the fedral government to take on a project that will eventually give every nigeria an identification card.

It's not so much a case of somebody/company being able to carry it out, as it is verifying the identity of the individual to whom the id is being issued.  How do you ascertain the identity of somebody in Nigeria, especially that of the older generation?  Unless it's closely monitored by the government, issuing id cards would be fraught with fraudulent id's being issued all over the place.

I don't understand why we still don't have a national database in Nigeria.  The UK has National Insurance, US has Social Security, even Mexico that is as corrupt as Nigeria has US-style id cards for its citizen.  Naija needs something similar. 

The only way for a person's identity to be unique is to tie the full name to a specific postal address + birthdate, then issue a unique id # to that person.

With open source database softwares out there, it can be accomplished with very little financial commitment.

Do people pay income taxes in Nigeria?  If so, how does the government track it without a national id? We're really backward.

yea...just write NO IDE REQUIRED and u have 2 put a security question and an answer and den u give da person you're sending da money 2 da answer AKA PASSWORD and datz how da person can get da money...

I was told you could do it that way, but it didn't work.  Even moneygram told me that would be fine.  But the bank in Nigeria refused to give out the money.

I had to cancel the transaction and send it to somebody else who had a photo ID.

Update: before you send money to somebody who has not photo ID, first make sure the bank will agree to give out the money.

Guys, get off the "it wasn't shot in Nigeria" deal. We've heard that a billion times now.
Come up with your own list of movies.

same thing goes for those P2P services.

besides IRC isn't that bad if you know your way around. just last week i downloaded two 700mb (1.4GB) files. it took about 5-6hrs - not too bad. you just have to know your way around.

Not really.

IRC is a lot more geeky than other programs. You have to constantly watch for openings and quickly type in those silly triggers.  And the wait time is way longer, since irc is used by a whole lot more people around the world.

Personaly it's not worth my time.  There are all kinds of stores in my city with killer bargains on CD/dvd's.

Here are some examples:

In the US, there are lawyers called Ambulance chasers.  As an accident victim, they advice you on ways to win big by claiming whiplash, even though the victim came out of the accident without a scratch.  What is the lawyer's motive here?  Well, he gets a cut (sometimes up to 60%).  Is that lying?

A guy commits murder.  Lawyer claims insanity.  Is that lying?

No all cases are this clear-cut.  However, if we consider the fact that a lawyer's primary concern is a win for his obviously guilty client, we can say lawyers are liars, or truth benders.

There is something called attorney client privilege.  Why is this privilege even needed?  Is the lawyer hiding something?  A lie perhaps?  Well, it's needed to prevent investigators from uncovering the truth from lawyers.

What they mean is that you can download files illegally over IRC.  You know, I'the go for the Itunes option any day!

Oh, I see.

You must have the patience of a saint to get files via irc, since you have to stay on queue sometimes for long hours before download begins.  Never mind the fact that you're exposing yourself to serious viruses from guys looking to make your system into an emailing zombie.

What has IRC got to do with bypassing firewalls? Maybe you know something I don't.

there is one way. IRC.

That statement makes no sense to me.

It's mental instability with some.  I saw a documentary about suicidal tendencies on tv the other day.  It often occurs among kids from privileged families who got teased a lot growing up.  Some of them never get over that stigma put on them by friends.

Their parents are often too busy working to notice any problems.  Until it happens.

I don't want to speculate on what you use those programs to download, but The RIAA frowns upon file sharing clients.  There were a rash of heavy fines on people, that were highly publicised to scare everybody off.  Now they're going after isp's to track the use of such clients and turn in the users.

I think you should accept the fact that they're illegal softwares and let go.

P2P tools like Morpheus, Kazaa, BearShare, LimeWire, shareaza, winmx, etc are used mostly for illegal activities.  Although they can be useful in swapping open source software too.  For example, a lot of people use bit torrent to get their copy of Linux.  Therefore, while your isp is trying to protect the bad, you're also unable to put the programs to good use.

I never compared nigeria to russia!!

You did here when you said:

Most nigerian (student )will go anyway as long as its outside nigeria!!! 

You dnt need to be in a country to know something about it.i havent mentioned anything that is totally wrong

Really?  How come Americans don't know how people live in Africa?  They think we all live in jungles.

when i say ghetto i mean poor!!

Russia is poor, but not ghetto poor.

Russia has its problems, but I commend them for a lot of things.

Russia is poor, but not the I can't eat 3 square meals a day poor.

I think your use of the word ghetto suggests the people are downtrodden and living in abject poverty.  But that's not the case.

друг rubl, скажи мне о себе

я находился в Хaркове когда я был студентом

Your isp is your gateway to the Internet. So if they're blocking certain ports for some services, there's little you can do. But like Seun said, if you share what it is you're trying to do, somebody may be able to suggest a workaround. For example, if port 80 is blocked, you can always use other ports to run your local web server.

I think we're making too much of the speed gain. That is not the reason that google is fast.

You gain a bit of speed with ajax for the simple reason that the whole web page doesn't have to be rendered all over again for each request. However, ajax presents little speed advantage (email file attachment) when it comes to uploading, since that is limited by your Internet connection speed.

All in all, ajax is a good thing, but we mustn't make it into what it's not.

Ajax has little to do with google's speed. It's a misconception that ajax somehow enhances a website's speed. I don't see how.

First of all, when you download a page for the first time, the images, hte included javascript and css files, etc get cached in the browser. So the next time you request the same page, those items won't be download again. The only thing downloaded would be raw text data. Which is exactly what ajax also downloads. Maybe a bit of time is gained because the whole page doesn't have to be laid out.

Although since ajax works in the background, you are able to continue doing other things meanwhile. That's why google's gmail file attachment appears faster. In reality, the upload speed of your attachment is determined not by google, but by the speed of your Internet connection.

I see nigerian designs at times and just laugh...using rainbows colors all over a website. they spoil job for others.

Why does it have to be a "Nigerian" design, rather than just the individual who built the site? Should we hold every Nigerian ransome for one person's actions?

You have no clue what Nigerians are doing around the world.  And not every Nigerian is actively marketing his skills, as many simply work full-time for other design companies.

Web design today is very easy.  Most designers simply grab several ready-made templates, extract ideas from each template, and combine those ideas into one.  How hard is that to do?

Before you design your next website, make sure you've learned Photoshop.  Then go to google and search for "web templates".  Start with the free templates.

I'm not a designer, but a programmer.  However, when the occasion calls for it, I deliver.  Check out these sites that I cobbled together:

http://7hillsfamilypractice.com/
http://requesttraq.com/
http://hiphoenix.com/