Year: 2013

WordPress Themes : Flounder, with Colorful Post Formats

Via WPTavern I came across Flounder – a free WordPress theme with colorful post formats.  This looks rather awesome for use in personal blog, like mine.  Have a look.

flounder

The colors are customizeable and the theme is responsive, as any new theme should be.  Here is how it looks on different screens:

responsive-flounder

 

I’ve installed it and tried out with WordPress’ Live Preview functionality – it looks pretty good.  There are a few things that I’ll need to fix if I am to use it.  Namely, the archives list, which has an item for each month in history, and the menu with a few submenu items.  The archives would work for a younger blog, but mine span from October 2001, which makes the archives list way too long.  Maybe switching to years instead would be a better option.  And the main menu looks ugly when there are a lot of submenu items.  Gladly, WordPress menu editor makes it trivial to change.

There also seems a slight variation on post formats between Flounder and Favepersonal – the theme I’m currently using.  For example, the Video post format doesn’t display a video on the homepage.  But, once again, these are trivial to fix, albeit with an SQL query rather than with a graphical user interface.

Echo – lazy-loading HTML5 images with data-* attributes via JavaScript

Echo  is quite handy for web developers.  On those pages that feature a lot of images, things can get slow and the server might get too much of an abuse (with more traffic thrown at it).  One way to work around this is to only load those images that are in the visible part of the screen.  Here is a demo of how it works.  Just keep scrolling down and notice how by default you have a blank.gif image shown, with a standard loading indicator and a split second later you see the actual image which was supposed to be in there.

Simple, easy, elegant – and that’s how I like it.

Social Fixer – improved Facebook experience

Social Fixer – improved Facebook experience

Enhance Facebook And Remove Annoyances!

Social Fixer for Facebook plugs into your browser and improves the existing Facebook.com web site. You get to pick which features you want to use:

  • Filter your news feed by keyword, author, and more
  • Tabbed news feed organizes posts by games, apps, etc
  • Hide parts of the page you don’t want to see
  • Don’t show posts you’ve already read
  • Auto-switch to the Most Recent news feed
  • Add some style with custom themes
  • And much more! See the List of Features.

The largest flashmob wedding proposal … and more

Being happily married for over a decade already, I’m not too much into wedding proposals.  But the power flashmob is often mesmerising – crowds of people, sometimes as large as few thousands, gather together, self-organize, and execute projects of amazing size and complexity.  And all of that for no financial benefit – just for the love it, the idea, and, of course, tonnes of fun.

This, however, would never had been possible without the power of the Internet in general, and social networks in particular – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other sites provide a huge platform for organizing such acts.

By now, there are so many events, and people participating, that there is even a TV show – Mobbed – on mainstream network – Fox.  What these people do is organize flashmobs into professional productions, helping people announce their secrets to the world.  I haven’t seen much of the episodes yet, but this one is absolutely amazing – several thousand people help the guy to flashmob his girlfriend with a wedding proposal .. and even more.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT5-1PBCO5Y]

If you don’t want to spend 40 minutes watching all behind the scenes, setup, and the result, here is a shorter, 15 minute or so, version with just the result.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F9WZgTgB9E]

This is truly … ah, I wish I could find more words to describe it, but since I obviously can’t … TRULY EPIC.