I received some comments on the look and feel of the website and the fact that it looks very similar to my website http://www.dharwadkar.com. This is because it is hosted on the same webserver and same CMF and that I don't have time to create a different skin for the website. This is the plone default look and feel. We have the option of creating a different skin (website design), something I am not very skilled at. So I am waiting for suggestions from the other guys on that. If anyone has any inputs on how the website should look like, feel free to comment on this or send me an email.

I will shortly be adding a Alumni tab / section to the website and will create areas for years. Be sure to go in and add yourself in the appropriate year.

Thanks to Sameer, I got the SB logo. Only thing is that the logo is for SB Science college (a minor detail). If someone can get hold of the SBES logo, that would be great.

I have created a logo (a very lame effort from a non-creative guy, but its a start) and have made that as the logo of the website. There is also one variation in grey if that is preferrable for guys, then I will replace this with that logo. Let me know the opinion.

Again as I said, this is a very raw effort from me. I am sure there are some very creative people out there who can do a lot of justice to this effort. Please rally those guys and we can have a professional looking website for ourselves.

As mentioned in the earlier post on SB logo, we had foreseen some issues with copyright and IP while using the SB name and logo without permission from the institution. Although our endeavour is not competitive in nature to SBES, rather it will augment the school and institution, we thought it was best that we notify the school authorities and get their written consent for this. We don't want to land any of our friends in trouble for their enthusiasm for copyright issues. Who knows, we may even get help from the school in terms of information, content and a guide.

Ambarish has volunteered to draft the letter for this purpose and Aniruddha Jinturkar has very graciously volunteered to take it to Hon. Shri Bapusaheb Kaldate for his signature and to discuss the issue with him while he is visiting India. I would request people from Aurangabad to accompany him on his visit to Shri. Kaldate to ensure quorum.

I am expecting the first draft of the letter from Ambarish sometime today and I will post it's content on the website for public review and feedback for two to three days before freezing on the content.

Thanks to Amruta Medhekar, one of our team members, Sushant Danekar was able to meet up with Mr. Arun Medhekar, GS of SBES and talked about our initiative and project. It seems that Mr. Medhekar was quite pleased with our initiative and was willing to help us in our endeavour. He has again called Sushant a couple days later to discuss in greater detail.

When asked for the permission, he has asked for a formal letter to be presented to the institution upon which he will grant the permission. Thankfully we had anticipated that and are currently working on that. Now the ball is in our court with us waiting for Ambarish to pull out the first draft of the letter for our review. Once we get the IP issues out of the way, I feel we will gather more speed toward the manifestation of our objectives.

After a long time I have some update and some good news about our project. Vaibhav and Sushant met with Mr. Medhekar and he has officially granted permission to use SB's name, logo and any other material that will be required. A formal letter will be presented to him in a day or two for his signature so that we have a record of this event should we need it in future.

He also applauded our initiative in building up this website and was very happy that we ex-students have some tremendous enthusiasm and energy in carrying this out. He also promised all possible help in terms of documentation, records and information that will be needed to make this a success.

Having said that, I am a bit disappointed in the team. Nobody has shown the necessary diligence to follow-up and act to keep this website dynamic and vibrant. Sushant has been feeding me with a lot of information from back there so I was aware of what was happening, otherwise I would have been totally in dark.

I was also dormant for so long as I did not have any update whatsoever and I didn't want to post just for the sake of posting it.

One special mention I want to make at this time and that is of Anirudha Jinturkar. He has been a silent and a zealous worker canvassing the website to so many people through his network of friends on Orkut. I am sure the number of hits that you guys see here are largely due to his contribution.

It is very heartening to see the recent spate of activity at the website. A lot of people have signed up and I suppose they are ready to go. Progress also has been good at some other fronts as well where we got permission and some very encouraging response from the office bearers of the institution.

I just hope we can translate the enthusiasm into action as we will have a lot of work to do in transalating the text into English as most of the material will be in Marathi. I am sure if all of us can pitch in, we can make this happen and very fast.

After a long hiatus, I was happy to see some activity. One of our fellow alumnus, Kiran Pande, tried registering but was faced with an error. Apparently, Kiran had kept the check box "Send password in email" checked and tried to register.

I request all to please note that we don't have any SMTP server setup and emails cannot be sent from our server. I strongly encourage Kiran to try registering again with the box unchecked and the registration will definitely be successful. I have verified this by creating a test user and attempting to register myself.

I again see a comment which says that there is an error in registering to our website. I thought in my previous entry here, I very specifically mentioned that do not check the box next to "Send my password to my email address". Another request to all the people who want to join in the movement. Please do NOT check the box next to "Send my password to my email address".

On second thoughts, I think I will make that check box dissappear. This way it will ensure that new people wanting to join in will not be able to check the box and run into unnecessary issues.