Russia in color, 100 years ago

Big Picture has yet another amazing collection of photographs.  This time it consists of color pictures of Russia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and a few other areas a whole century ago.  Some of these images are beautiful.  Like this picture of Nikolaevskii Cathedral from southwest in Mozhaisk in 1911.

When I see things like this, it often makes me think about the church and how it abuses and explores the poor people.  It’s not only now, it must have always been like this.

Or here is another picture. Pinkhus Karlinskii, eighty-four years old with sixty-six years of service.  Photo taken in 1909.

Just think about it! It’s not a painting, but a photograph, and a colored one at that, of someone who was born around 1825!  Almost two centuries ago.  Wow!

Sideshow – Cyprus web design company

For years I’ve been complaining about the web design situation in Cyprus.  Most web design companies here suck.  And most of the websites that they do suck even more.  Once in a while, though, I’d mention this or that website that was standing out.  Finally, I can mention a web design company that stands out and that makes websites that stand out too – Sideshow.

Yes, like every other company, they have their problems (front page of their website doesn’t validate clean) and they don’t do everything the way I would have done it (they are using Vimeo for videos, not YouTube), but I am still impressed with their work.  They use Drupal CMS extensively.  They truly know what social media is about, with Facebook and Twitter integrations and team tweets, their own blog, RSS feeds, and more.  Their design work is fresh and modern.  And their portfolio is shining.  Remember, when I was praising the new Cyprus Mail website? That’s the company who did it.  They even print their business cards with Moo, what more can I say?

I’m so glad I found them.  I have people left and right asking me where to go for a new website, and until now I have been very reluctant to refer them to any of the webdesign companies I know.  But now I have a proper reference.  And even though I haven’t worked with them personally, I think I am in the position to judge their work.  And as I said, I am impressed.  Respect!

P.S.: no, this is not a paid ad.  I truly am glad and impressed.

P.P.S.: if you are a web designer or web developer in Cyprus, they are hiring.  If there is one web company to work for in Cyprus, that’s this one.

Ad CTR ratio by browser

Download Squad attempts to analyze a recent report about advertising click-through rate (CTR) ratio based on different browsers.  Apparently, more than 40 million impressions were used as the data for this report, and Opera and MSIE users came on top – they click the most ads.  Firefox and Chrome users are further down the list, and Safari users are at the bottom.

I think this chart makes a lot of sense.  While there are ad-blocking solutions for both Opera and MSIE, neither one of this browsers has a healthy plugin ecosystem.  In other words, even if there are ways to filter ads in these browsers, most users don’t know how to do it or simply don’t care enough.  Both Firefox and Chrome browsers are blossoming with addons and extensions which filter all ads, known ads, annoying ads, flash ads, ads on specific websites, ads of specific sizes, and so on and so forth.  In fact, I don’t know any Firefox or Chrome user who doesn’t have some sort of ad-filtering extension installed.

That leaves us with Safari.  Why Safari users are clicking the least ads?  I don’t know.  I’m thinking that might be a statistical inaccuracy or something along those lines.  Or maybe they all are just broke from buying all those Apple products and have no interest in ads no more.  Who knows?