I like #stumbleupon. But, I find that I hit that ‘Stumble’ button a little too often. When I do come across interesting sites that make me want to stick around, they usually have to do with learning about some random fascinating thing. So what if someone just compiled a bunch of interesting ‘learn-about-stuff’ type websites into one easy to access website? Well, by golly, that’s exactly what we did this week!

WhatShouldILearnAbout.com is a resource for random learnings. It has one big button that generates a random link from a database containing hundreds of links to cool things. But don’t take our word for it, let none other that Mr. Leonardo da Vinci convince you:

“Learning never exhausts the mind.” -Leonardo Da Vinci

So, there you have it. If learning stuff from our new website is good enough for one the most brilliant Artist-Engineer-Philosophers of all time, then it’s good enough for you and your family too! Now, go learn something..

Dear mother:

I hate cleaning, so I have decided to hire a company called Prestoshine to come clean my house instead.

Sincerly,

life is too short to clean up after myself.

This week, we feature a website that we created for a local cleaning company called Prestoshine. I know it’s not as funky sounding as the few other websites we’ve made so far on this project, but at least it’s not funky smelling! (I totally just add that joke to coatpuncher.com) Besides, we need to pay for this project somehow.

So, if you live in Calgary, Alberta and need a break from housework, checkout prestoshine.com.

Have you ever wanted to make it look like your computer has crashed without having to actually make it crash? Then, check out this week’s fun little website: WindowsBlueScreenofDeath.com.

We’ve all seen the infamously dreaded ‘Windows Blue Screen of Death’ at some point. And it always seems to appear when you are doing something important on your computer, like writing a long document which you haven’t saved yet, or playing solitaire. WindowsBlueScreenOfDeath.com allows you to simulate the effect of the blue screen in a web browser without losing hundreds of hours of work on your masters thesis. Great to fool your friends with! (Hey, isn’t April fools day only a few weeks away? I am predicting the site will be popular that day..)

We hope you enjoy this week’s offering as much as we have enjoyed making it. If you like it, follow us on Facebook or Twitter and/or leave a comment. Have fun!

If you read the title of this week’s entry and thought “What the heck is tilt-shift photography?”, you would have had the same reaction I did when we first decided to take-on this week’s challenge: build a website dedicated to tilt-shift photography, and furnish it with ample unique content.. in a week. Wow, was this one ever a challenge! Check it out at www.tiltshiftfoto.com.

Not only did we have to come up with a complete website from scratch, but we had to learn how to take photos (or find them in our personal photo collections) and manipulate them in photoshop to create the desired effect. In case you are unaware (as I was), tilt-shift photography is the art of manipulating a photograph of a standard scene to make it look as though it’s a miniaturized scene. This involves using photo-editing software, like photoshop, to add blur, contrast, and saturation effects which ‘fake’ the altered focus effects of close-up camera shots, hence making the objects of a picture appear miniture.

Enjoy. And as always, please leave your comments so that we know that real people are checking this stuff out!

How many times have you told someone a joke that was so terrible, you wished you could take it back and never repeat another? Well this week, we bring you coatpuncher.com; a site dedicated to providing the world with worst jokes ever heard. Seriously, these should never be repeated in public.

The idea for this week’s site came from an evening when we were having a few drinks with friends. One of our friends had said a joke that was so bad, none of us laughed. In fact, we all felt a bit awkward. To break the awkward silence that ensued, our bad-joke-friend decided to throw a playful punch. Because of his inebriated state, the punch landed on a jacket sleeve, rather than the shoulder to which it was intended to land. At that moment, someone piped-up and said “don’t be a coat puncher”. Ever since that time, this particular group of friends has associated the name ‘coat puncher’ with someone who tells a very bad joke.

So, the next time you have the urge to say a bad joke, tell it to us instead. We will immortalize your awful comical taste in the anonymity of the internet for all time (or until we stop paying the hosting fee). And if you hear a bad joke from someone else, call them a coat puncher and tell them that there is help over at coatpuncher.com.

This week’s website is the second in our experiment. We wanted to take you through a showcase of some of the neatest web pages from where we’ve drawn some inspiration, education, or just thought were quite nifty for various reasons. It’s the ‘nifty-ness’ of these pages that drew us to register the domain niftywebpages.com for this week’s feature.

We began by revisiting a list of web pages that we had been compiling for the past few months, breaking them into several categories based on 20 fairly subjective features (clean, colours, texture etc). We used these features to build a menu system for niftywebpages.com, but quickly realized that there were far too many categories to make this work in time. Remember, we only had one week to build niftywebpages.com. After some discussion and debate, we were able to narrow the website to 6 categories: ultra clean, colours, texture, sleek, unconventional, & columns.

Now that we had our categories selected, it was time to get into the fun stuff: design! Given the slightly antiquated nature of the word ‘nifty’, its use being far more common in American culture of the mid-20th century, we decided to build niftywebpages‘ logo and theme around the concept and colours of marketing material from this time era. The vision was to have a logo with one of those 1950′s-looking business-man caricatures giving the thumbs-up to the word nifty, all set on a background of age-faded yellow wallpaper. We achieved this with the help of photoshop and a google image search.

The next design elements we wanted were as follows:

1. A dynamic (auto-updating) screenshot of the each featured web page
2. A short description of each page
3. A way for users to leave comments, linked specifically to each entry
4. A way to display each web page entry (and add new ones) without having to hand-code every one.
5. A way to display the websites newest-to-oldest on the home page
6. The possibility for a search feature in the future as the listings grow

We knew that the inclusion of these elements would require a heavy use of dymanic, server-side scripting. In fact, we would need a full database to list each website, categorical listing, html link, comments, etc. In the past, this type of website has taken us between 60 and 100 hours to put together.

Given our short time-frame, we decided to build niftywebpages.com on a customized wordpress template. WordPress allowed us to bring-in every design element we wanted, while spending less than 20 hours on the actual development stage of the project, and less than 5 hours to populate the database with the first bunch of websites.

In the end, niftywebpages.com was a fun build. It wasn’t the most challenging build, but it definitely was not one for the beginning website designer.

The idea of creating one website every week for a year is daunting. Most web developers need at least 2 weeks of full-time design and development to create even the simplest pages. Our goal will be to do it in a week on a part-time basis. This will not be possible without maintaining a focus and diligence throughout the entire process, and keeping a minimalist perspective in our design techniques.

The first few weeks and web pages are going to be the most difficult, since experimentation will be key in developing the different styles needed to achieve our goals with the least amount difficulty, while yielding the greatest visual variance between each website. Once we have worked with a few different design techniques and developed a steady work-schedule routine, the following weeks will become progressively easier. I am looking forward to the challenge and overcoming the learning curve.