Petronas used to produce very heart warming advert for Chinese New Year especially the advert created by Yasmin Admad. There is no exceptional for this year. The new advert named Young Hearts. The advert is simply simple and enchanting. It is about a short story of an old couples being young heart. It reminds us no matter how old we may be, we will be celebrating the Chinese New Year the same way we are doing now and in the past.
Genesis Framework – Premium WordPress Theme
It’s time to change my blog site’s design. I need a better theme for my sites. I’m using WordPress blogging platform and I always look for a good WordPress theme that is easy to use, easy to manage, simple and look nice. But it always turn up I design my own theme from scratch or customize an existing one.
This time I have chooses a premium WordPress theme – Genesis Framework with Minimum Pro child theme. Genesis Framework is developed by a company called StudioPress and Genesis Framework is not a theme by itself. It provides a framework on top of WordPress to add more functionality to WordPress. A child theme, in this case I’m using Minimum Pro, is required to work on top of the framework to provide the real WordPress theme.
The reason for choosing this framework is that it is so easy to configure and use. You don’t need to modify code to get what you want out of the theme. And secondly, many pro bloggers (e.g. problogger.net) are using Genesis Framework child theme for their websites. And thirdly, you only need to buy the license once, you can use on all your websites, with unlimited support. I’m still playing around with the theme and will use it on all my blogging websites. I will review more on this framework when I get more hands on. My initial feeling is: impressive, easy to use, very comprehensive of tutorial and definitely worth of the money.
These are the features offered by Genesis Framework:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Responsive HTML5 designs
- Unlimited everything: support, updates, websites.
- Security
- Instant update
- Customizable and fast
- Widgets and layout options
- A list of reliable developer if you like further customize the theme
Yasmin Ahmad in Google’s Doodle
Yasmin Ahmad (7 January 1958 – 25 July 2009), was a director and writer for films that had touched many people’s heart. Google also honours Yasmin Ahmad with special doodle, netizens pay tribute on late movie-maker’s birthday.
Yasmin Ahmad’s Filmography: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1379108/
New SSD Cloud Hosting @DigitalOcean
I have recently moved all my websites to another VPS hosting. The previous dedicated server was too expensive to me to continue as I didn’t earn much from the websites’ income. The previous hosting was USD$119 per month and the one at DigitalOcean is only USD$10 per month.
I’m having good experience with DigitalOcean hosting. To deploy a VPS (they call it droplet) is blazing fast and very easy. Within a minute, with a few clicks, your VPS with the Linux distribution you have chosen is ready to use.
DigitalOcean hosting plans are very affordable. For as low as USD$5, you can get a 1 core CPU, 512 RAM, 20GB SSD disk space and 1TB transfer. You mange your droplet on the cloud. You can create and destroy VPS using their very user-friendly cloud hosting interface at anytime you want.
Since DigitalOcean uses SSD in all the hosting plan, deploy a Linux image on the disk is as fast as to deploy them in the RAM. You can experiment with you Linux setup you want with very low cost and destroy & recreate if you not satisfy with current setup.
Every droplet you have created is a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with a dedicated IP address. You will have the root access to everything and the server is unmanaged. You are the administrator of the VPS. Anyway, if you encounter a problem and cannot be resolved by yourself, you can always get support from DigitalOcean by creating a ticket or get help from the community.
Setting up a VPS for multi domains is fun and can be challenging. Since the VPS is unmanaged, I need to setup almost every thing from nothing. But I have successfully setup the web & email server using Virtualmin (at zero cost!) and migrated most of my websites. I will share my setup steps when I have time and the problem I was facing during the setup and how I solve it.
So far I’m very satisfy with DigitalOcean for the pricing, server speed, user-friendly droplet management interface and the service uptime.
If you are interested to get one, you can always register a free account, open a ticket and ask for promotional code. You may be able to get a promotion code that let you start to play with the VPS for free :)
TM Unifi
I registered Unifi last week through an agent but don’t eligible for the one month free promotion. According to the customer service, apply through agent is not eligible for the promotion and you must apply online. Is that mean Unifi encourage people not to apply from the agent? Then what for they need the agents, I though the agents are the one who bring them $$$.
I also called their customer service line many times to make appointment for installation and get the new phone number but kept engaging. Really don’t know what they are doing. They have upgrade their broadband technologies, they should also upgrade their customer service mah! Haiz… wait wait wait