Category: Site News

This website is very old. It’s been with me for many years. There are plenty of articles which are useful both for myself and the rest of the world. Bit by bit, word by word, link by link, image by image, this site was filled and filled over the years. Technologies changed. Some new techniques and concepts came up. Some old ones faded away. Spending as much time as I possible can (after everything else) on this site, sometimes I manage to introduce big changes – like a new bit of functionality or a totally different look. Not to confuse and scare everyone, I try to be open about the changes that were made. When something big is changed I post a description of what it was and why I felt the change was needed. These updates are published in this category.

Family tree updated

It’s been a long while since I lasted updated my family tree. Meanwhile, my mother has sent me a huge part (about 30 persons) of Lutso branch – complete with birth dates and pictures for some of them and my father has sent me pictures of his parents (my grandmother and grandfather). I’ve integrated all of these information, except for pictures of Lutso guys, since they are not annotated and I forgot who is who. I’ll identify them and add to the database. The pictures are cool and really old though. They were made in one studio in St.Petersburg, Russia. Silver plates, copied later on to paper, and than scanned to digital format – now that’s genealogy!

Blogs Of The Day

I came across Blogs Of The Day a couple of days ago. It is a nice resources for those who maintain WordPress blogs. It is a some sort of rating site. You can install a WordPress plugin, activate it, and your blog will automatically participate in the ratings. Both most visited blogs and most popular articles are displayed. The site is still in beta, but it is rock solid and grows constantly. At this time it features 140 blogs.

I have installed and activated the pluging about two days ago. None of my posts are on the Buzzlist, but my blog is in the Top 40 Sites (17th at the moment) and in the Top 20 Homes (10th at the moment). Don’t ask me for the difference between Sites and Homes though as I haven’t figured it out myself yet.

Two good things about Blogs Of The Day are:

  • Constantly updated links to interesting stuff to read in other blogs. There is a list of categories that can be used for finding specific subjects, if Top lists don’t appeal to you.
  • More traffic for all listed blogs. I’ve noticed an increase in visitors of my blog. Some of them have even subscribed to RSS feeds and participated via comments.

If you run WordPress – try it out.

Possible downtimes ahead

Here is a quote from an email notification I received from my provider regarding my Internet connection:

Please note that due to scheduled maintenance works on our international links, connectivity is subject to an outage during the following periods:

Friday, May 27th 2005, from 07:30 to 08:30 Cyprus time (GMT +0300).

Saturday, May 28th 2005, from 01:30 to 02:30 Cyprus time (GMT +0300).

Feed Map

I came across an excellent tool – FeedMap.net. It brings blogs (or RSS feeds) and maps together. One can add a site either with address fields or longitude/latitude location and FeedMap.net will generate a map to use on the site. It can also optionally show other bloggers in the region.

I just had some fun with the site, though it seems a bit buggy with often ‘Requst Timed Out’ errors. For some reason it also accepts only one coordinate for Cyprus – 35.1383828832779, 33.4352103269381 – which is a bit off for my case. It points to somewhere near Nicosia, Strovolos area.

I was also surpised to see that my blog was already submitted. I don’t know who did it, but to return the favour I added a few other blogs that I know the location of. Correcting the information is as easy as submitting the blog address with the new location information.

I’ve also included the BlogMap in my Blogroll page, so that I can easily find and use it.