Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

If you have a lot of attention for details, you probably noticed a few things moving around and changing on this blog in the last few days. You weren’t dreaming - I indeed moved changed a few things. Here is a round-up for those of you who enjoy these sort of things:

• List of categories moved up. Since I am interested in and blog about many different things, I don’t blame you if you would like to skip some of them and read only things that you care about. I moved the list of categories higher up in the sidebar, so that you could jump directly to the topic of your choice.
• Full posts in categories, tags, and archives. This should also make reading posts about specific things easier. You won’t need to jump to the full post page all that often now. Less clicks and all.
• Category header images. Some categories (see Photography, Movies, and Technology for examples) will greet you with different header images (once again, thanks to Igor Gorbulinsky for his talent and time). This feature should help you out a bit while navigating the site - instant indicator of where you are.
• Highlight of category name, tag, and search query. When you navigate to posts of a specific tag or category, you should see the term at the top of the page. Sometimes the term is highlighted, like, for example, in case of search query. Also, sometimes, you have a link to RSS feed which provides easier access to similar posts.
• Improved RSS feed auto-discovery. Depending on where you are on the site, your browser will suggest a different set of RSS feeds to subscribe to. I’m trying to make these things as intuitive as possible.
• Improved browser compatibility and standard compliance. A few small glitches here and there were fixed. All RSS feeds are valid now, except for those rare cases when content of specific posts causes problems. CSS is now valid and many warnings are fixed. HTML is now almost valid. There are a few issues which which are caused by WordPress bugs, but fixes for these seem to be available in the upcoming version of WordPress. In any case, it seems all theme and plugin specific issues were fixed.
• Upgraded WordPress to version 2.3.3 .  This is the latest version with all the security fixes and such.

As you can see from the list above, all of these changes are rather cosmetic and can be classified as web site polish. None of them should cause any issues to you or your browser, and much of the misbehaving functionality should be fixed now.

If you have any ideas on suggestions on further improvements, or if you notice any misbehavior at all, please let me know.

I have to admit that I am not a power user of Google Maps.  Sure, I visit the site often to search for a parking space or a better route around Limassol downtown.  But I never actually explored the power of the application and all of its useful features.

Today I accidentally realized that I could actually place marks on the maps and share them with other people. This is more than valuable while providing someone with driving instructions or just to make sure several people talk about the same place.

In case you don’t know how to do this, here is a quick guide for you.

1. Visit Google Maps while being logged in with your Google account. If you already have an account with Gmail or any other Google service, you can use that one with Google Maps.
2. Click on the “My Maps” tab under the search bar on the left of the map image.
3. Click on the “Create new map” link.
4. Navigate the map image and zoom to find the location of your choice. Drag and drop the marker (icon with blue something right next to the icon with the hand at the top of the map image) on the location, or draw a shape around it (another icon up there).
5. Fill in the title and description of the map on the left.
6. Mark the map “Public” in the privacy settings on the left, under the description.
7. Click on the “Done” button to save the map.
8. Click on the “Link to this page” on the right side, above the map image. You’ll get the URL that you can copy and paste into email, instant messenger, or blog.

If you did everything right, you’ll have something like this - my map with a few Limassol locations.