Sunday, October 26, 2014

Movie Review: Happy New Year - Doesn't Shahrukh have anything New?

Hello friends, don't expect this review to be high end reviewer filmy pandit review, this review is from general movie watcher (Mango person) with family. I watched this movie on Saturday 25th Oct, 2014 with my family and here is my view.


Right from the trailers I knew that movie will not be great, hence I did not prefer to watch this movie at expensive multiplex, I rather watched this movie at Drive-in Cinema at Ahmedabad.

I don't prefer to talk much about cast of the movie and background of each character as that will be found under so many films pandit reviews. Once movie starts its Shahrukh Khan, who wants to revenge his father's (Anupan Kher) death cheated by Jackie Shroff, who trapped him in wrong robbery case of Diamond and Shahrukh wants to take revenge by stealing 300 Cr diamonds from Jackie Shroff's safe.

This safe is said to be safest among world and can only be opened with finger print of Jackie's Son (Abhishek bachchan). And safe can only be reached through a duct which starts from a Hotel room which is booked by World Dance Championship, hence Shahrukh decides to take part in WDC so they get that room to reach the safe.

He brings together a gang (Boman Irani, Abhishekh Bachchan, Sonu Sood and new comer) and they all are looser on their own professions, and none of them knew dance, hence they take help of Dancer (Deepika Padukone) to learn dance. From here Actual Story starts. But the problem is, the preface of movie is tooooo long, it takes more than 1 hr to explain background of each member of the gang and actual movie starts when they start learning dance.

The part one of movie (before interval) could be shorten, its too stretched and really boring, movie picks up after Deepika's entry. Shahrukh Khan doesn't seem to have anything new now, he tries to survive with his old famous movie dialog repetitions and delivers almost nothing new. In fact in my opinion Abhishek did rather good.

Also characters of this movie are not understood properly, first they cheat deserving dance group to enter in WDC and in WDC they give up their own performance to help another dance group; which doesn't seem to suit their actual character described in the movie. But as expected by all viewers they are succeed to rob Diamonds from Jackie's safe but the journey of this mission is not breathtaking, it doesn't bring you at the edge of your seats and not exciting.

But movie sets are beautiful and performance of Shahrukh, Abhishek, Deepika are quite good and bearable. This movie can be seen once.

And here is how my Family Members felt about the movie.

My Daughter (10 years old) almost didn't watch movie, for her storyline was too complicated to understand and she was not able to understand what is going on.

My Son (14 years old) enjoyed second part of the movie but at Interval I had to explain him, what happened till interval, what's their plan and what they want to achieve and then he enjoyed little bit.

My Wife (34 years old) enjoyed the movie but same was my son, she almost wanted to go out of theater before interval and for me also movie was not so good before interval and final thought is,

Movie is all about robbing diamonds but during entire movie it feels like Movie is all about dance competition and we forget again and again that they are here to steal diamonds and director in entire movie had to repeat again and again that they are thieves and that weak point of movie. Can be seen once but don't spend too much movie, watch in silver ticket.

Saturday, October 4, 2014

Wordpress Plugins that Makes Day to Day Development Life Easy

Wordpress holds highest market share for Content Management System (Source: W3Techs.com), Wordpress has become first choice of website owners and developers for its Ease of Use. Earlier it was considered to be blogging system and Joomla, Drupal were considered for websites but now things have changed and Wordpress has became capable of making all different kind of websites, Just to check what it is capable to do, you can check out themes here.

Over the period of time Wordpress has developed a large community and developers have developed large number of plugins to make Designers life easy, Use the Plugin and concentrate more on Design end. Many a times Designers get to develop a static kind of website that contains Images, Portfolio, Onside Blog and nice contact form specially specially when it is a website for small businesses or a B2B information website.

Here I would like to mention about some great plugins that will make your life super easy if you are into small business website development:

All in One SEO:
How does SEO matter for Designers? you might ask but just install this plugin and rest is just copy / paste or typing job to handle SEO stuff like, Title, Description, Keywords, Page Follow, Entry on Menu. Plugin works beautifully and even as designer, if you added it, it will make SEOs life easy to optimize pages for SEO.

Custom Permalinks:
We do have permalinks option on Wordpress that is capable of making SEO Friendly URLs but still what if you want to add .php or .html extension at the end of URL to make it file name (specially when you are re developing old static site to Wordpress and you need to retain old URLs), this plugin makes URL management very easy, after installation you just need to type whatever URL you want on page or post edit screen with whatever extension or directory structure you need and rest will be handled by this plugin.



Remove P:
Wordpress wraps whatever you put into page or post with <P> tag, that in a way is beauty to make page adding easy but it is annoying when you are adding some HTML stuff to your page when page requires special treatment with additional HTML. In this case if you have installed this plugin, just enable "Remove Extra Paragraphs in this page" while editing page and it will remove all <P> tags added by Wordpress for that page and will save your HTML tags and your format.

Layer Slider:
One of the most beautiful slider plugin that comes free as well as paid version, but free version can also do much stuff, You can create beautiful sliders, create multiple layers on single slider and animate them to pass your message in a visual way.



Shortcodes Ultimate:
Whatever you are developing for and whoever you are developing for, Just add this plugin to the site and you wont need to add much after this, it has everything a designer can ask for, Slider, Light boxes, tables, Carousel, Tabs, Toggles, Tips, Video, Frames and anything you can recall as design element on a website, you can also add your own class while adding any element that will help you redesign that element the way you want to match your theme.



Breadcrumb NavXT:
Very easy to use and easy to place plugin, it simply follows style you created for your breadcrumb and display breadcrumbs on your pages or posts, You can customize separator, the way linked and unlinked items are to be displayed, You may not ask for much for breadcrumb that what this plugin offers.

WP Responsive Menu:
Do you want beautiful, professional looking menu for your website on mobile Device, then this is great, easy to use plugin, you can select the menu you created for your primary site and define break point when primary menu switches to Mobile menu and job is done. You can also customize menu icon, colors and styles for the menu on free version.



WP Total Cache:
Faster web is now primary requirements from everybody and this plugin serves it best, install the plugin and setup cache settings, Minify CSS, HTML and JQuerry, Cache database and pages and you will see improvement on your websites load time. (Soon There will be article on optimizing your Wordpress site where you will get more details on configuring this plugin)

WP Smush.it:
You forgot to optimize images before putting them on your website? No Problem!, Install WP Smush.it and then just go to Media and Smush all images, and you are all done, it will optimize images with no complains, smaller image file sizes keeping optimum quality. Must have plugin for optimization.

Manual Image Crop:
One of the best plugin that will help you to manually crop the images on your Wordpress theme. After installation, you will get Crop link next to all images on your media library, click on it and you are ready to go.



Jetpack:
Finally sharing a beautiful site is everybody's desire and Jetpack can do it all, it has everything that you need for sharing, A built in URL shortner, Social Network based commenting system, Inbuilt spell checker, Sharing options and a gallery system. Check it out.

Hope you loved the article, soon there will be Wordpress website optimization article, and video, check them out, Thank you for reading.