Welcome to the new, redesigned Shiny Shell! Enjoy your visit.

About the website

ShinyShell (shinyshell.net) is the headquarters, testing grounds and continuous coding project of me, Electron. Having written many scripts and little components, designed sites and so forth, it occured to me that it would be an exceptionally good idea to start my own site which could be my headquarters, from where I could publish ideas and scripts, and also that it would be fun to build a site of my own which I could make from scratch and chisel to perfection. And thus Electron spoke: "Let there be a website like this", and the website came to be. Founded in September 2006, and originally called "Electron", only several individuals knew of it's existance. It was short lived, and disappeared from the Internet before Christmas (though it had about 3 pages). However, the site's "version 2.0" was by now being worked on in the secret directories of my personal development server. I coded a mass of features into what came to be the most advanced web site I had ever made up until then, in both design and server-side coding. It was worked on for almost a year, and then maybe a month before planned release, it just so happened I scrapped the project in favour of a complete rewrite in a different scripting language. That's where the current version - v3 comes in. Version three does not have the sheer amount of features the previous version had: with this version I hoped to just have a simpler, glossier layout and a greater focus on the content - presented within what is at least an aesthetically pleasing if not phantasmagorical design solution - with the traditional Electronian emphasis on the harmonious conjunction of clear blue and white (I eventually moved to other colours, for a little fun), only that time around the design lost some of the artic chill of v2 and gained more warmth and light thanks to the introduction of pale brown/grey, and more use of white.

Now I've weakened you with website history one out of a hundred visitors will find interesting, it's time to finish you off with website aims.

Shinyshell aims to be useful to it's visitors by providing various stuff that might be useful, or interesting to some people. This site does not promise to deliver a particular thing, or guarantee anything. Among the highlights, there are articles covering various web development and design topics, but also a variety of different subjects, such as lucid dreaming, art, music and films. Some articles will be intended as tutorials of a kind, whereas others may be reviews, pointers, rants, the author's own personal experiences with something or some such. It is also intended as a mini-community site based around a custom-written forum, and of course Electron's headquarters and sandbox. Also, any "products" I make will be published here. Shinyshell is still a fresh site, so you can expect it to deal with other things too in the future, such as free layouts and music I make.

Technical details... if anyone wants to know

This website was designed entirely using a text editor and Macromedia Flash (I use it for drawing). The markup is XHTML, and validates as 1.0 Strict, although it was originally written to be compatible with the XHTML 1.1 specification (later downgraded because of the annoying removal of entity codes like   from the specification - though a lot of the site might still validate as 1.1). The server-side is coded in Python running via FastCGI, using my own custom framework.

Code coloring on this website is achieved with the wonderful Pygments.

Exhaustive list of staff and contributors

In order of having been added to this list.

electron ^staff

Marin R.
Founder, administrator and designer/coder. Owns an expensive fountain pen.

Kthar ^contributor

Matej G.
Marketing manager. Is known for his ability to end a heated discussion with a single post.

Navarr ^staff

Navarr B.
Testing & appearing in ShinyShell comics. Loves tea, anime and structured semantic markup.

Kat ^contributor

Katie K.
Website host. Has kittens in her hair (disregard the provided picture).

Nick ^staff

Nick O.
Administrator, project consultant and likely a coder on the Lamplight project.

KasaiKitsune ^staff

Cynthia M.
Doesn't really work here. But she's on this list, so ph33r her.

About the webmaster

I am an nineteen year old guy, and a self-proclaimed web designer and developer who usually goes by the online alias of 'Electron'. I stepped into the internet scene in about 2004 - before that, I was into chemistry, art and some desktop programming. After seeing how fun it is to make websites, I joined some internet communities and learned of various technologies, such as JavaScript and PHP and started using them. I learned my HTML from an obscure volume titled "The U.K. internet starter kit, 1998 edition", a 400+ page book teaching absolute beginners about the internet. Even at the time of reading, it was outdated, but that's what imparted unto me basic HTML skills.

In the past I used Windows 98, XP, Solaris, OpenSolaris and Linux Suse, Ubuntu and in particular Fedora. I currently run Windows 7 because I have an academic licence, and because my laptop battery lasts longer with it than with Fedora 11. I really liked Fedora, although it's probably better suited for a desktop computer. In conversations, I insist that Windows Vista™ is an obscure type of window cleaning fluid.

I study information systems at the Faculty of Organisation and Informatics (a.k.a. FOI) in Varaždin, Croatia. My academic interests include systems theory, cybernetics, algorithms and data structures. In my spare time, I enjoy playing the piano (classical compositions, Evanescence, movie themes and my own work), drawing (not so much because I don't have the time), eating pears, watching Stargate and computer programming of course.

I'm apparently also well known in certain circles for my ability to accurately determine the pH value of natural spring water, to a decimal value, sometimes even discerning which minerals are more strongly present. I suppose this comes from my long years of water-drinking (just as someone becomes an expert at wine after drinking it a lot), and I never teach or explain this skill to anyone, except in very rare situations - this is simply because I've always wanted to have some skill that I say I never teach but actually sometimes I do (like Pai Mei and his Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique). I enjoy Japanese cinema, particularly films from the 1950-s.

I love animals. Among my very favourite are snakes, turtles, giraffes, lizards, penguins, hedgehogs and octopuses. The music I listen to is (loosely): industrial, classical, choral, gothic, black metal and rock. These are the most prevalent, though by all means not the only genres. I like a lot of music except for rap, hip-hop, Croatian "estrade" music, boring house & techno (defined as music that goes thump-thump-thump and fucking sucks), emo, whatever-core and punk.

My dream? I one day want to move to Lapland, the north of Finland. It's beautiful, it's often bitterly cold, and it's isolated. I'll save up some money, and move there to lead a simple life with the only extra items being a piano, some books and a large supply of English tea.

You may find my official portfolio here

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