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There’s something you should see, or better yet, experience. This morning I came across a fascinating photography project The Light And Land by Bruce Percy that touched me, and touched me deeply.

My first acquaitance with his creative work was on the pages of his podcast which is essentially a smooth slideshow accompanied and narrated by Bruce himself. It was something that I haven’t seen for ages - thoughtful, well-planned, incredibly simple and up to the chase at the same time, that comes to you as a breeze, entertains and makes you tear off your daily routine. It makes you put your life into a different dimension and re-examinate the surrounding carefully, on your own pace.

For impatient, I’m giving the direct podcast link, but still… make sure to check the portfolio section. It’s whole new world that grabs your attention entirely. You will never see it with the same eyes again.

Promise.

I never told you guys, but my sweetheart has finally opened her first very own web-store - Caterok Bags. She is into practical and durable bags design and production, and now everyone can see and purchase them on the Net.

Here’s the front page:

Here’s the product page:

New items are added all the time. Kate spends days behind the drawing board designing simple, yet sparky things. Any feedback is greatly appreciated. If you feel that someone else can be interested, just let them know. Who knows, it could be right what they are looking for. Several times when people were looking for presents, they were excited to discover these cool looking pieces.

If nothing else, enjoy browsing through the collection!

The subject says it all. It’s fine to buy domains from them, but if you want to host your site or app, don’t do it. Everything that is more complex than a “Hello, world!” plain text page will be a trouble sooner or later. Even simple Wordpress with custom permalinks is almost impossible to configure. And if you are lucky, they will Upgrade your account to break it.

To make it worse, the moment it happens, you won’t be able to fix it because a simple change to disable their ugly File Not Found page is reported to take from 30 minutes to 24 hours, but really takes more than 3 days (it is still in progress, so I can’t give you the correct time). Maybe it’s because they are using Microsoft IIS? Probably.

Now check this cute “Page Not Found” message. What a style, don’t you find?

To reiterate, DON’T DO IT. Save your time and nerve cells.

Just noticed the release of the next Wordpress version — 2.6. Check out their release summary video to get an idea of what has improved and how. Good stuff.

I can’t help solving puzzles. Every now and then I buy a new box and we solve it together with Kate all days and night long until it’s finally done. I guess, now our family budget is saved.

Discovery channel has a number of interesting games, but this one is really a gem.

See more interesting games:

• River IQ

Also try:

If you are into SEO, you know how important keywords research phase is. I’m a very newbie in this area and always pay attention to what pro’s suggest. For a couple of weeks, I’ve been using Overture Keywords Inventory and Google External Keyword Tool for my research attempts. They are great tools and they are completely free.

As they say, there was a poll "Best Keywords Research Tools" recently and you can see the results below:

• Keyword Discovery (18%)
• Wordtracker (18%)
• WordZe (15%)
• Google Keyword Tool (14%)
• SEO Digger (12%)
• Overture Keyword Selector (6%)
• SEO Boook Keyword Tool (3%)
• KeywordSpy (3%)
• SpyFu (3%)
• Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool (3%)
• NicheBOT (2%)
• Hitwise Search Intelligence (2%)
• Google Suggest Scraper (1%)
• comScore qSearch (0%)
• AdGooRoo SEM Insight (0%)

(from: Winner Best Keyword Research Tool)

I don’t know what you think looking at the results, but to me it seems there’s a little bit of a conservative smell in the figures. I tried, I honestly tried to use Keyword Discovery several times both two years and a week ago. Guess what? They didn’t bother to update their interface. It still quite inconvenient, performs badly and employs approaches older than the world itself. I don’t know what they think, but it’s quite clear they get good money to let themselves not to bother with such minuscule and unimportant things as flexibility, ease of use and overall look.

Anyway, it’s their choice and their business. I just got the confirmation for myself that one shouldn’t follow the crowd blindly. For me, the WordZe was a discovery and it looks as a very good commercial product worth a try. I’ll give it a closer look later. For now…

Enjoy your Friday!

For a long time it was a huge pain in the neck to follow the blogs and threads I was ever commenting on. Most of the time I had to make a heart-bleeding decision whether it is going to be a fire-and-forget kind of comment or will I bookmark it somehow for the later returns. I realize everyone has similar problems, otherwise they wouldn’t ask us to add some kind of comments tracking to BlogBridge, so that I’m not alone in these sufferings.

It seems someone got to the point of being desperate, and finally decided to aid the community with an excellent comment threads tracker — cocomment.com. I discovered it by sheer accident noticing in my recent trackbacks section of the Wordpress administrative dashboard a reference from some new site. Quick check of the inbound link led to this amazing discovery. (BTW, it was you Markus, who “showed” me the way with your “IELTS: Done.” tracking.)

So how it is going to help? I believe they support some major blogging systems (Wordpress, Flickr, Blogger.com as I managed to notice from their guide) and use their comment tracking feeds and functions to get the list of recent updates. Then they process collected data and do notifications, organization and nice Web 2.0-ish display of threads in the inbox style. Nothing really complex, but they are the first (to my best knowledge) to turn it from a dream to a real thing. My kudos to you guys!

I personally, will give them a spin. It seems to be a good idea to finally organize my commenting world. It’s not too big, but still… One side-effect I noticed is that whatever conversation you take part in becomes visible to anyone in the world. I believe there’s something I can do to stay private as it’s definitely not in my plans to share a big chunk my personal life with “a community”. Let private stay private, I would say.

Anyway, good piece of news!

Update: I found privacy settings where they let (but not recommend) me hide my conversations from the world.

Recently Pito Salas of BlogBridge started a great new series of educational posts on Squidoo. These are intended to bridge the gap between geeky techies chirping with their awful terms, like ‘blogs’, ‘feeds’, ‘rss’ or even scarier stuff, like ‘aggregator’, and simple working bees surfing around.

Check his “The difference between a web site and a blog” to learn how different blogs and regular sites are, what they have in common and why it is important not to confuse them one for another. It’s all very simple, but there’s no doubt, you will be proud of yourself when finished reading as these little details are what makes people stand out.

The second article “What are the best news blogs?” is focused mainly on acquiring new blogs for your reading pleasure. It answers important questions: “where to look for blogs”, and “whose opinion matters” when looking for new sources.

Have fun, and don’t forget to bookmark these or Digg if you feel they helped you. Here are the Digg links for your quick reference:

• The difference between a web site and a blog
• What are the best news blogs?

Yesterday I was fixing a pipe in the kitchen, today it was the bathroom door. These days I’m feeling like a true house-husband. Taking the wooden door heavy as hell off the hinges appeared to be not a do-it-alone kind of task even though I managed to succeed. Just let the professionals do their job the next time you need to fix something like that, or at least find a good helper if you still plan on doing it yourself. I was half dead when I finished as it took several rounds to make everything look just right. Phew…

This week I was working on my memory. I mean that part of the body you use to hold the address of this blog. Well, my amazement can’t be put in words. The site I discovered is very concise and has tons of practical advices and methods. They are dedicated to the single topic — memory training — and extremely easy to grasp. What distinguishes this resource from many others is that it cuts to the chase. No fluff, just stuff. Please meet Build Your Memory dot Com.

I spent no more than 20 minutes to observe the first results and, frankly speaking, I was close to shock. It virtually knocked me out when I saw how good my memory works when well-operated. The first bright illustration was my ability to remember 20 unrelated words (and I’m still able to recollect them easily) in the correct order. Can you do that right now? I bet you can’t.

There are heaps of valuable advices on working with memory. Just to name some, they teach you how to remember big numbers (like a hundred digits long or more), organize your dreams and recall them at will. If nothing else, you will have some good time exploring your limits and there’s no doubt you’ll find something excitingly useful.

In my case, the life has already started to change for the better. Today, when I worked with a text for my next English classes, I was able to remember and still able to recall more than 35 new words and phrases after the single pass without any visible effort. It used to take more than a day to learn them before and at most only the half of them made their way to active vocabulary. It’s a remarkable progress to me.

As a side effect of this miraculous improvement I’m no longer afraid of learning new. There’s no feeling that the head is about to explode, if you know what I mean, and there’s no need to preserve precious space for really important special occasions. It’s a great pleasure to know that there’s room for everything I need.

Another small step to perfection. I love it!

Whole yesterday night the electricity was acting up, like a naughty child, and in the end went off. We woke up that morning only to find the lights, computers and radio completely dead. An unusual feeling… especially if all your life depends and is mainly spinning around the Internet that comes over the wires with electrons on the run. We spent a wonderful day reading, solving Japanese puzzles and preparing to our English classes that had started earlier this week. Now I’m back online and ready for action.

This time I share some of my recently discovered hidden places on the Net. These are all dedicated to photography, creative, never widely advertised and all holding immense value. Please join me for this quick tour.

Let me start with some extremely stylish thing. Here’s Cole Rise and the collection of mostly monochrome works driving you away into the mystic world of air. The spirit of flight is dominating in his works living in a cozy space of imaginary world. Take your time to discover the truth of birds and the power of winds, explore the volumes and break the law of gravitation with the wizard of this amazing gallery.

Moving slowly from unreal to Earth views, here comes Kenneth Parker with a colorful and extremely powerful collection of “windows” from all over the planet. It’s hard to put in words how high in quality these images are, and how breathtaking the views in them: pristine colors, professional cropping leaving vast space for imagination and the plot off the beaten track — all make the time collapse guiding you through the eternity of life. With lost settlements, the strength of nature, whims of flora and much more Kenneth Parker welcomes his visitors.

Eric Myer is an artist of a different kind. He spreads his wings with the urban culture. His definition of art is invariably based on humans, their surrounding and communication. The way he chooses to deliver the message through the boundaries of a static pulls the deepest strings of a soul. Never before have I seen such a sincere and lively reflection of human feelings as it is set in paper of his works. The color and action go hand in hand making you feel invigorating power of a radiant smile.

Quite opposite side of the human nature is shown in works of James Nachtwey; the dark side, with its unhealthy trend towards self-destruction and inflicting pain. In his own words, he witnessed a lot, and this experience is clearly mirrored. The position is doubtless and leaves no room for hesitation. There are no wonders of the world, there’s no joy, no fun in his work, just the deepest sorrow and the chilly breeze of an utter despair. Turn the pages of the dark side to see, to believe, to remember.

Hope you enjoyed this little journey in the stunning world of creative photography. Color and form is not the everything, you still need a feeling, a sense and a strong hand to make it real.

Until the next time!