I heard you yawn … how exciting can building websites be?!?!? If you’re running your own website then the theme you use and the way you publish your content are critical – and being a “Jack Of All Trades” also means I’m a “Master Of None”. No website builder = no website.

A website builder is critical to someone like me – I need a fast way to assemble my website so that it works right but looks good too! Then when the gazillions of people arrive at my site I’m ready ….

Enter Stage Left: Themify Builder

I already use a Themify theme for my website. Adding Themify Builder speeds up my management of the site as any pages or posts become fast and easy to produce.

You can use any builder on your site but Themify Builder stands head and shoulders above the rest. I’d love it to be free and it kinda is – if you have a Themify theme it’s included. Otherwise it’s $39 which seems a little too much to me. Another way to get it is as part of their Master Club bundle which is expensive at $139 but gives you so many other goodies too it is definitely tempting.

Themify Builder is a powerful page Builder plugin that lets you design elegant, custom layouts for your pages. To simplify that process Themify Builder lets you build your custom designs with either the front or back end – the front-end function lets you see a full preview of how your modules slot together on a live version of your site.

Themify Builder comes loaded with modules that give options and useful capabilities for your site – maps, galleries, call-to-action buttons, and sliders etc. You can uninstall plugins that are surplus-to-requirement because of these modules. There’s more than 60 stylish animations you can apply to individual modules as well.

Themify do tempt you to spend more money on over 40 add ons – some of them are a good bet and some don’t suit what I do. For instance there’s:

• Image Pro lets you add filters, overlays and animations to images.
• Pricing Table
• Bar Chart … is for Bar Charts (surprised?)
• Content Restriction lets you add membership functionality to your website
• I love the WooCommerce addition to display WooCommerce products anywhere on your website
• Progress Bars give animated bars which are great on sales pages
• Timelines for a timeline-styled layout
• A/B Images let you place before/after images side by side, with a dynamic slider for easy comparison.

The individual extensions are $10 each (ouch!), so it’s better to score the complete collection for $39. Better still the $139 Master Club license grants you all the extensions anyway.

Installation went without a hitch for me and the integration with my theme is great. As I said earlier I use a Themify WordPress theme already and as all Themify themes include the basic Themify Builder functionality I’m sorted. If you use someone else’s theme you can run the Themify Builder standalone with a non-Themify theme but the economics are not as attractive.

Give yourself a break and use Themify Builder to make your website look and work great – easily.

Disneyland?!?!? Love It! Maybe not the sugar rush from candyfloss but definitely the Small World characters.

For almost 60 years Disneyland has used animatronic figures — the dynamic robots that bring our beloved Disney characters to life. But Disney’s newly launched (literally) Stuntronics are a whole new ball game.

Initially they were built out of a small research project called Stickman. Disney Imagineering’s Stuntronics are fully autonomous, self-correcting aerial performers designed to fly across Disney parks, striking heroic poses and following perfect trajectories to stick the landing every time. The stuff that would make most stunt men and woman jealous! They’re geared with on-board accelerometers and gyroscopic arrays that mean these robotic ‘stuntpeople’ can be flung into the air like trapeze artists, controlling rotation and center of mass with amazing precision. And all without worrying about the union demanding extra pay for risky work.

As Virtual Reality and immersive digital technologies are increasingly bringing us into the on-screen action,\ the addition of lifelike autonomous robots are bringing the action to you IRL (in real life). Whether it’s Elastagirl or Iron Man, Disney’s lifelike Stuntronics robots will electrify real-world entertainment as they perform near-superhuman stunts throughout the theme parks and usher in an era of safe interactive spaces.

This extraordinary step towards human-like bipedal walking robots presents a massive breakthrough in robotic dynamism and precise maneuvering.

I guess it doesn’t stop me from snacking on the candyfloss tho …

As Seen On ‘The Voice’ EMC
EMC went on a global search for a song that inspired people to rise above life’s obstacles and they selected me and my song ‘I Believe In You’ as 1 of 5 worldwide finalists. They flew me “all expenses paid” from New Zealand to Boston to perform before a live studio audience and … ‘The Voice’ EMC Judges were stunned! ‘I Believe In You’ was a hit and was streamed to an audience of 15,000 people worldwide … watch it NOW!

Do you love to travel but hate those cattle-class seats and jet lag dramas? If we can sample food and try on clothing before a purchase, why not test-drive a city before committing to a flight?

Kayak VR, a virtual reality platform, lets you explore a city and learn about its most treasured landmarks from the comfort of your living room. Accessible through Google’s Daydream headset, Kayak VR is currently piloting two cities — Venice and Kathmandu — providing travel tips and trends, audio tours on landmarks, exploration of local hotels, and a sense of the real scale (and crowdedness) of a given destination. Perhaps one of Kayak VR’s more remarkable features is the app’s stereophonic sound option, adapting its audio tour to your visual focus within a given scene.
This ‘pre-exploration’ of a city, serves both tourists who are sitting on the fence about where to go and eager planners who are building out a trip agenda. THinking forward tools like Kayak VR will democratize and delocalize global tourism – an industry that contributed nearly $8.3 trillion USD to the global economy in 2017. Offering visually coherent and educationally rich data on your surroundings, the platform may one day allow anyone a private tour of the Sistine Chapel or a view from Mt. Kilimanjaro – without the jet lag or the long flights and hotel prices.

While nothing beats circling Venice in a gondola or reaching the peak of a hike, Kayak VR’s informational tours and visual immersion could one day offer unprecedented exposure to billions without a passport or the ready capital for a flight.

You can read more here at Kayak’s article “Try before you travel — Kayak launches virtual reality exploration tool“.

Would you travel like this?