How is the tag based advertising done at Coolinarika.com?

1. users are tagging recipes
2. advertiser reserves a desired set of tags
3. in this case, the company brand “Eva sardine” reserved the following tags: fish, shrimps, main course, sea food, sea, … eva (the name of the company brand)
4. if the recipe is tagged with some of those preselected tags, there is a relevant ad displayed.

Clever, huh? But the most interesting part is the following edge case.

Update: “Eva sardine” is actually a brand, not a company. Spotted and pointed to by lekke.

Got it directly from Malarkey’s referrer logs — Transcending CSS iPod shuffle. BTW, have you Spotted the diffrence?

Blackduke, portfolio of Tin Kadoić in its’ 12^th incarnation goes web standards. And now with a blog. Site is developed by Unpljugged.

Don’t miss the finest print and screen projects. The personal fav is Fresh Air (see picture below).

Did you know I bake cakes? No? Neither did I… However, despite your entirely justified skepticism – I’m proud to announce that at the time of this writing everyone who tasted my cherry cake is feeling perfectly normal. Hooray!!

Superfast, superurban, supercool…

Photos of this beast are taken by Mirko Beović at Geneva Auto Show. See the full report.

FOWA was excellent – I’ll summarize most of it – some interesting topics have to be discussed…

In the mean time here’s what I’ve found around the streets of London (that’s right – I’m a type addict). Excuse me for the low quality of the images, but the weather was far from perfect.

The latest incarnation of my pet project about Bull Terriers.

— photo by Mirko Beović

Take a look at more beauties of Croatia…

Impressed? I have 4 cards for 4 recepients. Drop me a line with your postal address and I’ll send you one. Unfortunately, we are out of cards, but all your addresses are in queue for the next round!

If you were 63 years old, would you be able to jump like that?
(Picture taken just a few moments after siring a cute black-brindle dam.)

Ana went yesterday for her monthly check up on Tikky. Here are some photos – strike a pose!

Do you remember the Dom scripting book by Jeremy Keith? Well, the guy is going to speak at the one day workshop about the AJAX at the Digital Sandbox, NYC.

Why I’m telling you this? Because, unfortunately, I had to refuse a special invitation from the organizers (sorry, guys)… (Ed: First, I missed the @media, now it seems I’m going to miss this one, too.)

Nevertheless, if you’re going, don’t forget to pick up your Survival Kit (or better said a ‘Surprise’ Kit) and, of course, say ‘hello’ to NY in my behalf.

I’ll be visiting the world’s largest dog show, the Kennel Club Crufts 2006 from 8-12 March.

The show is held at the Birmingham NEC, so if you’ll be anywhere near, drop me a line and we can drink a beer in a local pub and chat about web development and/or life in general… (speaking of which, feel free to recommend some food & drink places in Birmingham).

On the side note, the British embassy is lifting of visa restrictions on nationals of Croatia after 22 March 2006. And yes, I had to go through all this visa procedure, including paying the application fee (argh!), ‘cause the agreement is still not active. And no, it’s not funny.

Anyway, this will be my first trip to the UK. Unfortunately there will be no time for museums and such, but hell, missus promised someday we are going to visit for the sole tourism purposes.

This is the most complete list of pros and cons for vertical scrollers. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to discuss that on our next meeting with a client.

Reasons why news scrollers are bad:

• They are tacky, and reek of end 90ies web design
• They are annoying attention seekers
• They lure designers into thinking they can define the size of the screen, they don’t, the visitors do, each of them for themselves.
• They lure editors into adding far too much content to the page - hidden is not gone, think of the screen reader and text browser visitors.
• Considering “banner blindness", they might be useless
• They might cause memory leaks and slow browsing in some browsers on low spec machines
• They might confuse visitors with attention deficits or other disorders.

Reasons why news scrollers are good:

• Clients love them
• That other site has them (you know, that really cool, bleeding edge one, the… what? Bankrupt? Well, it was a cool site though!)

– source

Ran to it this morning, when I was searching for as painless as possible (standards-wise, at least) solution for an information slaughter.

What I like about the DomNews is that there’s a stop function. Every accesibility savvy developer is a star.

Now, if I could just find a way to explain how those Add to Favorites and Make this page my Homepage links shouldn’t go into main navigation area.

I received the following message this morning. It could be that there was similar list for the 2005. but nevertheless…

You know you are living in 2006. if:

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave
2. You haven’t been playing Solitaire with a real cards in years
3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3
4. You are sending an e-mail to a person sitting next desk to you
5. Your main reason for not staying in touch with your family and friends is that they don’t have e-mail addresses
6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries
7. Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen
8. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn’t have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go and get it.
10. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee
11. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. : )
12. You’re reading this and nodding and laughing
13. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this message
14. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list
15. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn’t a #9 on this list
16. Now you’re laughing at yourself : )

Wifey and I picked up our new Mitsubishi Colt last week. This time it’s a real car, not a toy. After some struggle with the contracting etc. (fact is – it all went relatively smooth, comparing to what I’ve heard from other buyer’s experiences), it was finally delivered… Okay down to a review: Continue reading ›

Recently, the wife and I felt a need to visit some real theaters, not movie theaters (which we visit on a regular basis).

Last night we went to Teatar Exit to see a comedy performance the Plaža (the Beach). It’s the drama about social intolerance.

The play is directed by Sunny Suninsky and performed by Linda Begonja, Sven Medvešek, Damir Klemenić, Mirta Zečević/Daria Knez (all very well known actors here in Croatia). The scene is very basic, and the whole performance depends on the actors’ abilities to transform between a few sets of characters – the play is a kind of a style rehearse, the genre which is often very demanding.

The humor is contemporary and the situations are real, and one can actually feel very familiar with the relationships performed. Vocal performance doesn’t dominate, so if one can’t actually understand all of the jokes, there’s always a support in adequate facial and body expressions. Really great acting.

If you’re my fellow citizen or just visiting Zagreb as a tourist, it’s absolutely worth seeing it! Plus, the moral of a story is great:

“If it’s unique and beautiful that we are all so different, why are we trying to make the universal world?”

A week ago the missus and I went to the movie to watch a Michael Bay film The Island with Evan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson.

Apart from us both being fans of the minimal interior design in the small city on the beginning of the story, we especially adored the Black Wasp (photos: 1, 2) flying motorbike-like vehicle driven by the bad guys.

Screenshot is taken from the official web site .

Those nasty black interceptors reminded me again on the excellent design by Tim Cameron, whose motorbikes are still rotating on my screen at home.

Speaking of which, we’re currently waiting for our new car, the New Colt (5 door family variant). Some more pictures, once we get it, will be posted.

Alen went solo, and he’s giving away XHTML+CSS template if you win a little contest. See more at the Pixelpusher blog.

If you search Amazon for Keith Jeremy’s upcoming book, by entering the DOM scripting, you might end up with very interesting results. The first book is, naturally, DOM scripting. The second one is DHTML Utopia Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & DOM by Stuart Langridge, which is also very well worth considering. But the third one is a pearl – the Ajax Training Sessions by Jorrit Smink.

Probably, the most of you find this situation funny – *laughs* Yeah, the Amazon connects the book for the soccer coaches with JavaScript and DOM book, just because the two have the term ‘Ajax’ in common. And I tell you what – you’re right, it is funny. But it’s also a pleasant surprise if you are a sports trainer, like I am. Searching for one thing and finding something totally opposite, yet relevant to my other interests, I find strange, veeery strange…

A book baton, another from the series of this years’ run-around-the-blogosphere marathons, has been passed to me by my fellow blogger Cody Lindley. I found this one interesting, because I swallowed quite a few books lately, some of them web design/development related. Continue reading ›

This year’s aeromeeting was better than the last year’s. Great opening with group flight from Austrian guest group of four old Saabs followed by the two attractive acrobatic demonstrations by Slovenian guest pilots. Those were great—looking at them doing all those difficult turns, makes you start wondering how the heck they know where they are when they finish some complicated loop. Continue reading ›

I’ve been passed a musical baton by Anatoly. Not sure should I say ‘thanks!’ or ‘crap!’, but now I’m on it, even if it means yet another hour stolen from my sleeping time : ). Continue reading ›

“ There’s no such thing as free table”

A practical joke from my office mates : )). In case someone has any copyright issues, the original is stolen and adopted by Che, so he’s the one to blame.

Is it just me, or Jim Carrey at this picture looks exactly as certain D…? Nah! I’m probably just imagining things…

About twenty minutes ago, a delivery from FedEx came to our office. The guys started smiling… What?! Is there something I should know about?! They actually ordered me a beautiful TyGrPoApHy hoodie. Wow!! A few moments later and after I almost broke my fingers trying to open the ‘pillow’, I’m proud model of the Veer wearable. Thanks, guys! (Oh, yes, it was my birthday last Saturday)

Like the first time, the first four guys who drop me their addresses via contact form, will receive a beautiful Croatian postcard.

Update

Postcards have been sent to guys who left their addresses.

Every year in the spring, I’m looking forward to weekends at the country-side at my parents’. Everything is blooming and flowers are all over the backyard—plenty of nice camera targets… Here’s what I came across:

We finally trashed the old car and bought a new one. There were a few accidents lately with the old Renault. Nothing serious, but once something is broken, it’s just keeps happening and there’s no turning back. We bought it last winter and this really paid off, but last month when steering wheel started behaving strange in rightmost position, i started thinking about new car. Continue reading ›

I have a very funny dog!

While the most of my neighbors tried to reach through to their cars, Bobbs had fun running over the field. Here’s a sequence of ‘the crazy run’… Continue reading ›

I have 7 (seven) beautiful postcards of Croatian national parks and i will send each to seven people who will contact me and send me his/hers address. I will announce when i’ll have no postcards.

Not so recent Jon Hicks’ “Geekend2” post made me thinking about what are people i virtualy meet over the Internet like in real life. I mean, we are reading each other’s thoughts and thinkings, and we are being influenced by other people writings in many ways. And depending on that—in fact pretty superficial social interaction—we are creating a certain image of that person in our minds. Continue reading ›

Here is another solution how to get some time when your kid needs your attention, but you have some other work waiting. I’ve name it “Virtual flower with a smell”.

Luka is not drawing recognizable objects yet, but he has an affinity for visual arts—at least he likes reading comics. Almost every day we spend about thirty minutes behind my drawing table, playing with those thick wooden color sticks especialy made for kids’ safety. Usually someone must be near him, otherwise he looses interest. Continue reading ›

Phew! Two hours of enjoyment this evening! I’m sucker for Spidey.

Before i watched the first movie i suppose i set too high expectations and i was quite disappointed at that time. I mean i love all those super-heroes, but this great idea to put a comic story to a movie fell all down with previous episode. So, today i went with nothing but an empty space in my mind and went to a movie teather just to stay… well… informed.

Fortunately — and it’s also very rare — this second sequel is by my personal oppinion much better then first in many aspects. The action scenes were great, especialy the camera — boy, am i like those wierd perspectives! There was also a fine dose of humour. Regarding the bad guy (Doctor Four Four), one could find his artificialy intelligent robotic arms very simmilar to those of the Matrix’s squidges (is that the correct word?). Matrix is a good movie, s0 it’s not a minus for Spiderman scenarists (or whoever came to this idea) for being inspired by it.

On the negative side, those endless (boring, self-repeating undecisive) romantic scenes slightly broke movie’s flow. But i guess we all had to completely understand that Peter Parker cannot make up his mind about his purpose in this world, blah, blah… If i was a female, probably i would like it.

My recommendations.

Been bussy for some time collecting selected articles on Netiquette. “my best friend” threw some very interesting definitions of Netiquette. Very cute and actual is definition at RIO Glossary:

” network etiquette; an informal group of rules and ways of behaving on the Internet. Example: sending spam, unwanted E-mail, is bad netiquette. “

Any article would help (your or other people’s) – don’t be shy to share.

Been yesterday at this year’s Aeromeeting in Zagreb (Croatia). Almost 2 hours of waiting to see one of just a few MiG-21 left in Croatian army. Untill last few minutes there was just some ordinary overflighting of smaller airplains and gliders of different kinds, a few skydivers, nothing very exciting realy. It was so uninteresting that Luka played with some wild growing flowers around the spot we settled on. However, last 10 minutes or so the situation changed as our army crafts came.

First, our most popular training plane – Pilatus done some attractive elements and when he went off and we all spectators felt sorry for it, from behind us came MiG-21 in low flight, making our ears want to explode. Luka was pretty confused by this strong sound and i must say he didn’t appreciated it, so for next 10 or so forssages low above the ground i covered his ears. But i enjoyed, ha-ha!

MiG-21 related links:

• Rudolf Perešin
• MiG-21 Lancer
• MS Flight Symulator 2004 MiG-21 bis Add-on
• FOR SALE - you can buy anything these days over the internet, don’t you?

There’s often a time when something comes to my mind and i’d like to open my code editor and ‘dive into mark’, but also at this very same time Luka (the son) gets extremely hungry and therefore anxious and kind of cranky…

Well, i’m proud i found a way to make designer’s kid quiet for a few moments: prepare 1 whole egg, 1-2 dcl of baker’s flour, half teaspoon or less of salt, some chocolate (preferably Nutella), 2-3 dcl of milk and 2 dcl of water. Mix all ingredients, ’till you get a creamy fluid.

Use this to bake a few pancakes. When you’re done, put melted chocolate or Nutella on each pancake, roll them and call your precious to this delicious meal.

Additionaly, warm some milk, add a teaspoon or two of honey, and pour everything in his/her favorite cup… Perfect! Now go, go, go! You have exactly ten minutes to do some work!

While checking some old bookmarks (had them over 300), I’ve found a diagram, “The Distance to the Nearest Star”. Wondering is there some guy watching how far is our Sun from his solar system.

A few days ago there was a movie, Star Trek: First Contact on TV… Is there someone cruising near us lately, waiting ’till we discover warp drive?