Living in Romania pretty much sucks because till a  movie gets to theaters you can download it from the web in blu-ray. Anyway, i had the chance to watch Surrogates, which i was very very eager to watch since july and i have to tell you that it fulfilled my expectations!

The movie is basically about the huge evolution humanity goes through during a very short period(17 yrs) in the future, and everyone uses & controls surrogates(robots) looking as them. The surrogates are made by VSI(visual self) and basically anyone can look how ever they want to look, so a sexy hot chick surrogate could be controlled by a fatman sitting in his chair at home. Everyone got so addicted to using surrogates, that almost the whole USA uses it, except small groups of humans(dreds) who oppose the technology.

Bruce Willis plays agent Tom Greer, who works at the feds(FBI). He and his partner, agent Peters start investigating a murder, in which two surrogates were terminated killing the hosts also. During a chase Greer wanders in the land of the dreds and by this way his surrogate is destroyed. From this point he continues the investigation “in the flesh”. He finds out that the kid that was killed in the murder was the surrogates inventor’s(Canter) son who is out for revenge.

Canter creates and uploads a virus that will destroy all surrogates including the hosts stating that they died when they started using surrogates. Greer gets to him, but before he could stop him Canter suicides. Greer logs in to a surrogate and thanks to the supervisor from VSI manages to create a buffer that will protect the hosts. He has the chance to stop the virus, but he doesnt.

The movie ends with all surrogates crashing and humans coming out from their homes.

I skipped lots of interesting parts, so i wouldn’t fully spoil the movie

expect articles in a whole new form!

This image is a special dedication to my colleague, mbogdan. This is your dream isn’t it? A nice comfty chair+ a huge desk with lots of lamps, and most significantly 7 monitors where you can code in peace and quiet listening to some rammstein, ;o

I heard this song quite a few times on the radio while @ work, or going to college or to work. The lyrics are really really catchy, but the music video is simply brilliant! I watched it like 10 times and listened to it like 50 times(today).

An other thing i like about T.I. that he doesn’t rap about crap. For example: 50 cent raps about bitchez, cocaine, guns, violence, while T.I. raps about learning from your mistakes and not doing the things you see on tv and in movies. This song is about the morale of life. (the video was made just before T.I. went to jail for 1 year and 1 day)

Along with the selection i will post a screencap of the website and i will comment upon the overall concept, the elements, and what makes the design unique and outstanding. This way you will get to see my design preferences.

After 12 months i will make a public poll, and you, the audience will vote the design you like the most. The winner will get a prize(a badge to put on website + some solid cold cash).

As you can notice it got a whole new look, but i kept the overall brown color, and added some very very nifty features. More than 9 cool addons were created specially for this new theme and to make my life a lot easier. Don’t believe me? Check the new features:

1. Author management. Admins can choose which author’s name and description appears on the front page(bottom right corner) and the author can set his own picture, name and description.
2. Dynamic image resizing. That the small thumbs you see are automatically grabbed from the images inserted in the post and for every size a new thumb is generated.(uber sexy stuff).
3. Ad management platform. This platform contains top header ad, box ad, sidebar ads. I can choose to set an image or use code(adsense for example as an ad.
4. Sexy featured category display. You already saw this didn’t you? It’s a small custom javascript written by my colleague, mbogdan.
5. Latest releases display. The part under the menu shows the latest theme and plugin releases. A thumb of each post is displayed and if you hover it title appears “pushing” the intro title up.
6. Category order. Admins can set which categories appear on main page and in what order. They can also exclude categories from appearing on main page.
7. YouTube video display. I just have to enter the YouTube URL and the video will be replaced with the video i desire.
8. Flickr stream management tool which allows me to display my flickr stream.
9. Super cool admin panel made for the theme (<3 mbogdan).

There are other smaller addons, but there’s nothing special about them worth to point them out.

I did the design about a month ago on a friday night when inspiration hit me on the head. I gave the design to mbogdan the next day and since than till last-last sunday he’s been working a little and stalling it. But eh, we finally got it done.

As you can see in the bottom part we will create a poll plugin(which btw will be released for free), and there are still some minor changes we have to do.

The sexiest part of the whole design is the comment page. I really like how it turned out, and as you can notice i moved the comment post box above all comments and sepparated comment from trackbacks(mixed up they were annoying). To see the comments page at glance check out the Custom widgets v1.0 release post (it has lots of comments).

As usual, if you have any suggestions or feedback please post them and they WILL be considered.

I will get back to the regular-basis blogging soon, but before i do i still have otehr work to finish + exams.

What does it do?

The main purpose of this plugin is to help you monetize your blog, in a smart way i mean. Ad Integration is an all-in-one ad managing platform which lets you create, manage and assign ads to your posts and sidebar as widgets (new feature).

Just as at Custom Widgets 2.0 the management and options panels were tuned up to fit the Wordpress 2.7 design, and along with the tune-up we removed useless elements which used up the space. By this way everything got more organized and cleaner.

Assign Ads as sidebar widgets

Did i mention that you can now add your ads as sidebar widgets? I think i did, but eh here’s a quick in-depth look:

After setting the ad location as Sidebar Widget the plugin will automatically create a widget which you will be able to add to your widgetized sidebar from the good old widgets page. And there you have it, you can manage the ads from your sidebar also

How do i use it?

After you’ve installed and activated the plugin a stand alone meu item will appear right below the main menu. This provides quick access to the Custom Widgets management section.

Main Management panel

There are 3 main segments in the management panel: The ads display box, The Options box and the Donation box.

The Ads display box will show all the Ads you’ve setup. Those ads which are written in light grey aren’t public, and those which are written in black are live and running.

The Options box is meant to give you more flexibility and it allows you to define a custom css for the ads and even add html code to appear before or after the ad. The max ad count per page defines  the maximum number of  ads that should appear in the same time on a page.(category pages, tag pages, etc).

Adding a new Ad

Things can’t get simpler than this! Adding a new ad takes just seconds(after a bit of practice of course) and you will easily realize that Ad Integration is a very powerful ad management plugin and it will save you a lot of time and earn you a lot of money(hopefully).

To distingush one ad from an other give a title to your ad(will be visible only to you via the management panel) and insert the html code. The exciting new feature in this release is thge much requested show in sidebar option which if delected will create a widget that will addable to your sidebar from the widget managemenet section.

If you choose to inser the ad into posts you can choose it’s location and it’s alignment. The final step of the new ad setup is the publish function where you can select to publish the ad or not.

Editing An Ad

You can easily edit an ad by clicking the Edit button in the right part of your ad management panel. This will take you to a page where you can edit your ad: rename it,change the code and it contains all the settings which were present on the Add new ad page + EXTRAS.

The extras consist in two handy features:

1) You can choose wether to load the ad automatically or manually. Loading the ad manually means that you will have to inser the generated code() into your post for the ad to show up.
2) By default after adding a new ad it will be automatically activated. You can deactivate it by selecting the No tickbox and saving the changes.

Download Ad Integration 2.0

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Click here to start TS Ad Integration v2.0 download

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Installation

***To upgrade from Ad Integration 1.0 to v2.0 simply overwrite the old files with the new ones.

1) Download the .zip file to your computer and log into your wordpress admin panel.

2) In your admin panel head over to the plugins section and select the Add new segment. Browse to the custom widgets.zip file and click the Install button. Wordpress will unzip the plugin and install it for you after which press the Activate Plugin button.

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We work our asses off to release new plugins and themes for free. Working for free isn’t very motivating as you might know. If you wish to make a small contribution(you will be redirected to a paypal secure page) feel free to use the widget below.Once the donation meter fills up we will release a new theme and a new exciting plugin!