Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

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.

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.

Convert WordPress tag to existing category

By now most people have figured out what is the difference between categories and tags, and which ones to use where.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the problems are over.  Once in a while there is a need to convert from one to another.

WordPress provides the tool to convert from categories to tags.  But I needed something for the reverse process.  In fact, I had a slightly more complicated situation – I already had both a tag and category with exactly the same name, and a whole lot of posts which were tagged, or categorized, or both.  Messy!  I was looking for a quick way to add all posts tagged with specific tag to the category with the same name.  Once that is done, I could easily delete the tag.  After a few Google searches, nothing straight-forward came up, so I decided to not waste anymore time and wrote my own little script.

Below are the pros and cons of my approach.

Pros:

  • Standalone script, not a WordPress plugin.  It is not utilizing any of the WordPress configuration or functionality, but raw PHP and direct connection to the database.  You can do a dump of your database, restore it on a totally different machine and play with this script until you are sure you are getting the expected results.  No worries about screwing up the live database.
  • Requires both the tag and the category to be present.  It will not proceed unless it will find both.
  • Safe.  While there is no undo for the effects of the script, it still works pretty safe.  Nothing is ever deleted or updated in the database.  Only the new records are added – for posts to appear under the selected category.  Nothing else!

Cons:

  • Standalone script, not a WordPress plugin.  It is not utilizing any of the WordPress configuration or functionality.  You will have to specify your database credentials by editing the script.  You will also might need to change SQL queries to reflect your WordPress tables prefix.
  • Runs from the command line.  If you don’t have access to or don’t know how to use the command line – tough luck!
  • Code quality.  I wrote this as a very quick and dirty solution to my problem.  It is not intended to be executed frequently.  Neither it is not intended to be executed by someone other than myself.  Yeah, I know, this will probably change, but I don’t care at this stage.

Now, you’ve been warned, so I won’t be holding you off from the source code any longer.

Continue reading Convert WordPress tag to existing category

Example of webdesign misunderstanding

When building websites, a conflict often arises between what the owner of the website thinks is required on the site and what the visitors to such a website are looking for.  More often than not, the owner of the website has no idea of what is useful and what is not.  More often than not, the designer of the website doesn’t think about what is important and what is not.  The result – a website that even though is packed with information, is useless. An agony for everyone – owner, visitor, and designer.   This xkcd comic illustrates the situation nicely.