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 1.0 Strict, although it was originally written in XHTML 1.1 + SVG and MathML (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 Electron's own custom framework.

Exhaustive list of staff and contributors  

kyykäärme staff
Marin Rukavina
Founder, administrator and designer/coder.
Kthar contributor
Matej Gržeta
Unknown function. Something to do with citing random songs.
Navarr contributor
Navarr T. Barnier
Web standards counselling, testing and de-idiotifying.
Kat contributor
Katie Kat
Manager of hosting, partial diferentiation and magnet supercooling. (she's super-cool and different)

About the webmaster  

I am an eighteen year old, often spiky-haired guy, and a n00b web designer and developer who goes by the online alias of 'kyykäärme' or 'Electron' when the prior is too difficult to pronounce. I stepped into the internet scene about 4 years ago - before that, I was into chemistry, art and some desktop programming. Ok, maybe some particle physics too. 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 and Linux SUSE and Ubuntu builds. I currently run XP again, but will be switching to either Sun's Solaris 10 (downloaded and burned all required image files) or Ubuntu/Debian sometime in the near future, and will only then be satisfied with my OS. In conversations, I insist that Windows Vista™ is a new type of window cleaning fluid.

I am a student of Information Systems on the University of Organisation and Information Technology (a.k.a. FOI) in Varaždin, Croatia. In my spare time, I enjoy playing the piano (classical compositions and Evanescence), drawing, reading books on geology, physics and chemistry, doing integrals, 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 train kendo, and enjoy Japanese cinema, particularly films from the 1950-s. I love all animals, but among my very favourite are snakes, turtles, giraffes, lizards, penguins, hedgehogs and octopuses. My musical tastes are mainly that of gothic and symphonic rock (some of them more mainstream, others less) - judged by quality, not popularity - as well as standard classic, hard and certain forms of alternative rock. If it sounds dark and eerie, especially if it contains piano, I usually love it. I also happen to have great reverence for goths and the goth subculture, though I do not dress in that manner (infrequently wear black clothes, but that's all).

My dream? If I won the lottery or otherwise won a considerable sum of money, I would set up 20 servers on his attic and start an enormous MMORPG of my own, and live out the remainder of my life writing web applications, playing the piano and perfecting my Hungarian.

You may find my official portfolio here