All - Leonid Mamchenkov

Jim Carrey Official Website

Once in a while, I get this feeling that I have been involved with web development for more than ten years now. And then I see a masterpiece that humbles me, and brings me back to the ground. With supersonic speeds. And it even hurts sometimes to the point that I don’t want to touch a computer ever again. The official website of Jim Carrey had just that effect on me.

It is conceptually perfect and has outstanding execution. I don’t even know where to begin…

Firstly, it matches my perception of Jim Carrey’s image and character. I consider him to be a sad cloud of some sort. He is a genius in comedy, and has also a very strong dramatic side to him. This combination, I think, makes him into a very popular person who has nobody to talk to. Not necessarily so, but you get the idea. The website supports this perception of mine. It is comical, yet sad, and very very original.

Secondly, the combination of visual art and music is stunning. There is so much to look at. Unlike most other sites where you spend a fraction of a second to analyze the page in front of you and navigate to the point that you needed. Here you can stay on each page for minutes, looking at each and every little tiny detail. Awesome!

Thirdly, it is quite interesting technically. I am a strong supporter of the concept that good technology should be almost unnoticeable. It should do what it is supposed to do without attracting too much attention to itself. And this website has a few good examples. See, for example, how Twitter is implemented. Visualized as a bird on a tree, with Jim’s face, that speaks out word by word his latest tweets. How awesome is that? I bet you’ve seen a billion Twitter integrations to all sorts of websites till now, but you haven’t seen one like this. Or maybe you have. I haven’t. And Twitter integration is not the only example – there is the animation between different sections of the site, photo album, trailers of Jim Carrey’s movies, and more. Bits and pieces are spread across the whole thing, leaving you know choice but to explore.

I think if we had much less of marketing and public relations online, the web would look more like this. At the stage we are now, it seems only students and independent individuals can afford to have such websites (and I am not talking about money). The rest are expecting the website to be “professional” and so on and so forth. Which results in all those pieces of crap we have around. I’m just saying that sites don’t get much more professional than this one.

Bravo to Jim Carrey for “approving” it, and for all those people who participated in creating it. A masterpiece, an online piece of art. Nothing less.

How to Use Twitter for Marketing and PR

I’ve seen this website some time ago and then was looking for it and couldn’t find it. Now that I came across it again, I shall post it here for everyone to know.

HowToUseTwitterForMarketingAndPR.com

Enjoy, share, and make sure you forward it to your marketing and PR departments, so that nobody is missing out. Really.

Where did all the Linux netbooks go?

Adam Williamson asks the question after doing a bit of research across several major vendors and online shops.

where the hell did all the Linux netbooks go? In 2007 you couldn’t buy a netbook with Windows; in 2008 to 2009 you could still walk into a big box store just about anywhere and pick from a few with Linux; now, you can buy one from one store in England with an Android dual boot, one from a hidden page on Ubuntu’s site with an inferior configuration to its equally-priced Windows equivalent, and one from a very well hidden bit of HP’s site with a $132 premium over its identically-specified Windows equivalent.

I am not a big expert in this matter, but I tend to agree with some of his conclusions:

the cynical side of me can come up with a lot of explanations as to where all those pre-loads went, and all of them involve large amounts of money going out of Microsoft bank accounts

And I think that’s pretty reasonable. After the netbook market is different from the desktop one. In the desktop world, Linux has a number of ongoing problems, such as office applications, games, and so on and so forth. But most netbooks aren’t powerful enough to run those applications. Their primary use is of a simple Internet device – browsing the web, reading email, chatting, etc. And for this purpose, the operating system is pretty much irrelevant. Most of these tasks are done in the browser. And browser-wise Linux is rich – Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and more.

So, how come all these netbooks are now selling with Windows and not Linux. It can’t be just Microsoft Internet Explorer. After all, most end users don’t even know what the browser is. There must be another reason. And probably it’s not a technical reason. And as Adam says, it must be some of those reasons that involve large amounts of money going out of Microsoft bank accounts.

If you have any other ideas, please do share via comments.

Shell keyboard shortcuts

I came across a very useful post with the listing of many shell keyboard shortcuts. The article covers a mix of bash, csh, zsh, and Cisco shell keyboard shortcuts. The article is in Russian, but I think it will be helpful for more people, so I took the liberty to translate it. Continue reading for the translation.

Continue reading Shell keyboard shortcuts

AgentPress – WordPress theme for real estate websites

Some time ago I mentioned StayPress plugin for WordPress, for those people who need such functionality on their real estate web sites. Today I have something else to talk about – AgentPress theme for WordPress designed and implemented by awesome people at StudioPress (too much Press in this sentense, isn’t it?).

AgentPress is a commercial theme, but at a reasonable price of $99.95 USD. StudioPress themes are built on top of their own Genesis theme framework, which provides a nice separation of code into a parent and child themes. Child themes are small and manageable. Genesis, by the way, is included with your AgentPress theme purchase.

What I liked about AgentPress theme was that it doesn’t only provide the design for a real estates website, but also an administration interface to manage the properties. It uses standard WordPress posts for properties, with some additional fields. You can control which fields you want to have and in which order. There is a way to have both public and private fields, in case you don’t want to display everything. It’s also easy to expand the functionality using the WordPress categories and tags.

The front page of AgentPress theme is awesome. You have options to provide navigation either via pages or categories or both. There is a nice looking slider with selected properties. There are featured properties. And you can even have featured articles there as well. AgentPress theme supports multi-agent web sites, but I haven’t tried it, so I won’t say much about it. There is a simplistic property search, which is good enough if you have up to a hundred properties or so. The theme has a number of widget areas, so it is pretty easy to control what goes where.

I tried the theme before a much improved WordPress 3.0 came out. So I hope StudioPress will update this theme to utilize a number of the new features in WordPress, such as customizable menus and custom post types. If they do, it will be much easier to extend the theme to your liking, with, for example, advanced search. You can do things now as well, but some of them are no trivial.

Overall, if you are looking for a solution to a real estates website, I suggest you have a closer look at AgentPress theme. There are plenty of options in both Genesis framework and in the theme itself. It does the job and it takes seconds to setup. At least you can buy yourself some time to build a more customized solution.