How simple is that!

In this post I will discuss about the three mobile applications the are available on IRCTC, the railways’ official website . IRCTC has partnered with three applications and links to all of them are available on IRCTC website in the “Mobile Zone” section at the bottom of the page. Click on any one of the following links to know more about that application:

1. ngpay
2. atom
3. PayMate

In order to book tickets using these applications, all you need to do is SMS your mobile number to a number provided by the providers or enter your mobile number on their website. They will send you an SMS with the link to the application. You will then need to download, install and configure the application on your mobile phone by  providing a username, password and some other information.

All these are basically M-commerce applications that provide various other facilities like Flight Booking, Hotel Booking, Movie Ticket Booking, Bus Ticket Booking, Bill Payments etc. For booking train tickets, you need to browse to IRCTC and start your search. It’s fairly simple. The payment can be made by Credit Cards, Net Banking, Debit Cards, Cash Cards etc.

On successful booking, an e-Ticket will be sent to you by  the application on the email address provided at the time of transaction. This ticket can be cancelled through ngpay itself.

A maximum of six berths/seats can be booked at a time, for a specified journey between any two stations served by the train, subject to distance restrictions in force. An individual user can book a maximum of ten tickets (PNR) in a calendar month. Booking can be done against General (GN), Ladies (LD) and Tatkal (CK) quota berths/seats.

ngpay:

SMS ngpay to 56767 OR enter your mobile number on this page to get a link to the installation application on your mobile phone.

ngpay on IRCTC and ngpay  Official Website.

Click on the below snapshot to know about the steps to book tickets using ngpay:

atom:

SMS atom to 54959 OR enter your mobile number on this page to get a link to the installation application on your mobile phone.

atom on IRCTC and atom’s Official Website.

Click on the below snapshot to know how to install and use atom:

PayMate:

Enter your mobile number on this page to get a link to the installation application on your mobile phone.

PayMate on IRCTC and PayMate’s Official Website.

Click on the below snapshot to know about the steps to install and book tickets using paymate:

Hope this article helps in planning your journey more comfortably!

In order to get an an Online Railway Reservation (e-ticket), all one needs is the following:

• Internet enabled computer
• Identity proof (needs to be declared while booking and shown while travelling)
• Mode of payment (Credit card, debit card, net payment through account etc)
• Printer to print the e-ticket
• Age/Senior citizen proof (incase you took a ticket in Senior Citizen quota)

People who do not have access to internet can also make use of these websites by getting their tickets booked through local Internet Cafes, Agents etc that use online booking to reserve tickets for these passengers.

Here’s a list of some of the websites that offer online rail reservations. I’ve also tried to highlight some of the distinguishing features of each website.

Click on a logo for more information on that website

makemytrip

By far this website offers the best user experience. It is simple to use and provides you multiple options on the basic search page. You can get a fair enough idea of the availability status on the result page itself and don’t have to click on each train and view it’s status separately. However, there’s a catch here, the default search results that are displayed to the user are not the latest status’, but cached data i.e. data captured sometime back. To get the latest status, you will have to fetch the updated status for your particular choice. I would still say, that this is good approach, as in most cases, travellers prefer to check various trains and then pick up the ones’ that suit them. Here, you get an idea of status (time, availability, rates) of all the trains and can simply refresh status for the one’s that suit you.

Some of the distinguishing features of makemytrip as compared to it’s competitors:
- choice between oneway and return trip
- While searching if you select “flexible dates”, the search results will be displayed for 4 days.
- While searching if you select “flexible class”, the search results will be displayed for different classes, e.g. Sleeper, AC 3 Tier, AC 2 Tier etc
- After getting the search results, you can refine the data by selecting your preferred time of departure/arrival
-You can also save passenger details and avoid having to fill in these details every time you book rail tickets.

Make My Trip - Click on the picture to view a snapshot of the result page

IRCTC

This is the first online reservation portal that made life easy for internet buffs, followed by the aam janta. It started in the year 2002. The website is owned and managed by the Indian Government. The website is little slow as compared to some of it’s competitors. Once you make a search and select the train and Class of travel, it displays availability of future dates as well. It also provides rail tour packages and a whole lot of information on Indian Railways.

IRCTC Result page - Click on the picture to view a readable snapshot of the result page

cleartrip

Although not very impressive to look at. The website is crip and clean and much faster than most of it’s competitors. Does give you an option to change dates and travel class on the search result page. But the like most other sites, you need to fetch the status of each train individually.
One interesting feature of this website is that you can email the search result.

Cleartrip - Click on the picture to view a readable snapshot of the result page

yatra

They also provide you the option to alter Travel Date (Previous/Next) and Travel Class. Overall not a very impressive website as it is very slow. But does provide the service and is another option.

Yatra - Click on the picture to view a readable snapshot of the result page

ezeego

Although you need to get individual status of each train, ezeego offers couple of interesting features that non of the other sites does:
- View route
- Email Result for a specific train
The website has a lot of bugs, I tried to book a tickets 3 times, but failed! It is also relatively slow.

Some of the websites that I found really useful:

First Cry : They call themselves “Asia’s Largest Online Baby and Kid’s Store”. Well, they certainly are largest in my house! They have a vast range of products and offer different discounts from time to time. The biggest saver being discounts on Diapers, keeping in mind the consumption in every household with infants/toddlers. Avoids me the pain in carrying the bulky packages too. By far, this website offers maximum discount on diapers as compared to any other player, be it an online store, pharmacy, retail chains like Big Bazaar, Easyday etc. First Cry also offers vouchers through various deal sites e.g. Snapdeal and Khojguru. They offer a large variety of toys for all ages from many big brands. The downside with toys here is that there aren’t too many options for lower budget. Not a great variety in clothes either.
They have a great 24/7 customer support that I’ve used many times, free shipping (orders more than Rs 200) and an option for cash on delivery (orders more than Rs 2000). Incase you are not satisfied with the product, they have a return policy too.
All in all, a decent shopping experience, saves a lot of time too.

First Cry

BabyOye : Started by young parents to make life simpler for other parents! BabyOye provides many options in toys. The best part is that they have a mix of both international and Indian brands. This makes purchasing easier as they also offer items that do not pinch a hole in the pocket.

BabyOye also offers discounts in various sections. To keep it simple, they also have a return policy incase you don’t like what you get.

BabyOye

Hush Babies : This website offers a wide range of products. Their best feature being the nice clothing options. They offer discounted apparel on Indian brands like Lilliput and some imported stuff as well. No discount on diapers. Not as many options in Toys as the other players.

Hush Babies

Let Baby Play : Seems like a relatively new website, might have started in June 2011. Nice range of toys. I appreciate the Home Safety Section that not many such websites offer. They give discounts on many big brands like Mee Mee, Chicco, etc. Diapers are also on discount, but they have very less options. Most of the categories do not offer too many products. There are no clothes in clothing section. But I’ll give it a benefit of doubt as it’s new and aims to grow.

Let Baby Play

In today’s busy world time is something that no one has. I surely wish that this segment grows and helps young and expecting parents in getting all the options under one roof. This way we can reserve our time and energy for the little ones. Getting discounts on branded (on non-branded) products would add icing to the cake

A lot of websites are being created/converting to BuddyPress. Some of them can be viewed here.

Before installing BuddyPress, make sure that you have a working WordPress.

Steps for Installing BuddyPress:

1. In WordPress wp-admin, go to Plugins->Add New, search for BuddyPress. In the resultset, you will find it, Install Now and Activate it.

2. Update the permalinks structure. By default WordPress assigns web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them. BuddyPress requires this to be set to anything other than the default option. Go to Settings->Permalinks and select an option, say Day and name, and Save.

Permalink Settings

3. Now you need to install a theme that is compatible with BuddyPress. Chances are that the theme that you were using till now would not support BuddyPress. Go to Appearence->Themes and you will see the following message on top of the page:

Message for BuddyPress Theme

Click on “activate a BuddyPress compatible theme” and a new “Buddy Press Default” theme will be appear in Available Themes on the same screen. Activate this theme.

BuddyPress Default Theme

You can also install the BuddyPress Template Pack to make your existing theme compatible with BuddyPress.

4. Go to your blog and you have a new social networking site! It has your blog under the Home tab and other tabs like Activity, Friends, Groups etc. But wait a second, when you click on any other tabs, say Activity, you might get a “Webpage Not Found” error!!!

Webpage Not Found

If you do, this is because Apache can not load the rewrite_module. Open httpd.conf (If you are using WAMP, you can go to Windows Quick launch->WAMP->Apache->httpd.conf) and append the following line at the end:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

Save the file and restart the server. Check Activity tab, you should be able to view the page.

5. You are ready to roll! Ask your friends to register and have a community of your own!

6. Here’s how the basic installation with default theme looks like (you can add a lot of character and color with more plugins and themes):

Buddy Press Default Theme

7. You can also configure BuddyPress settings on left panel next to Dashboard on wp-admin.

Note: Do make sure that the following have been done:

a) On Settings->General->Membership, the Anyone can register checkbox is checked. This is required since in a social networking site, you would want users to be able to Register themselves. If this is not checked, your friends will not be able to create an account on your website.

b) WordPress has been configured properly to send emails. When people Register, they will be sent an activation email from your website using this facility.

Tips on Deactivating/Deleting BuddyPress:

1. Before you delete BuddyPress, make sure that you delete all the BuddyPress plugins.

2. Deactivate and Delete BuddyPress.

3. You might not be able to view anything on your blog. This is usually because the BuddyPress theme that you were using has also been deleted. Although WordPress does switch you back to the default WordPress theme, but it isn’t installed properly. To correct this, install a fresh theme. You can switch back to the default theme now if you want.

Before starting, you need to download the following:

1. Installer of Latest WampServer. This will install all the dependencies (Apache, MySQL, PHP) that WordPress needs to run on your machine.
2. A copy of Latest WordPress.

Installation Steps:

1. Install WampServer.  You can keep all the default settings and press Next/OK.

2. Once installed, start the WampServer from the QuickLaunch bar. Click on the WampServer’s icon and select Start All Services.

Start Wamp Server

3. In the browser, open http://localhost

4. Scroll down and go to phpmyadmin

5. Create a new database, say, wordpresstest with the default settings. To keep things simple, we will use the mySQL user root for now.

Create Database

6. Unzip the already downloaded WordPress, you will see a folder wordpress in here. Copy this folder inside the www folder that the Wamp installation had created. The default location is usually C:\wamp\www. This is the root web server directory.

7. Now we need to configure WordPress. In the browser, go to http://localhost/wordpress.  Continue on this page, you will be asked for details to setup. Database Name would be the name with which you had created the DB earlier i.e. wordpresstest. UserName is the database user, let’s use the default user root. Password for root is <blank>. Leave Database Host and Table Prefix as they are.

Configure WordPress - Step 1

8. Continue to the next page. Enter the Site Title, this will be the title of your website, let’s call it My First Blog. Username is the name of the user who would be writing/managing the blog, say, admin. Put Password for this user.

Configure WordPress - Step 2

9. Go ahead and Run the install. Voila, you are done!

10. In the browser, go to http://localhost/wordpress and what do you see? You have just created your own website on which you have full control!!!

My First Blog

11. Go to WordPress Dashboard to write and manage your blog.

Dashboard