Month: March 2005

“General” renamed into “Links”

A minor update to this blog’s stucture happened today. “General” category has been renamed into “Links”. I think this is more appropriate as I don’t normal post anything in “General” except for links to other websites. Also, “Links” is self-explanatory, while “General” is not.

Other than that, it is an average warm day here in Cyprus…

Dogs

Dog! Stand!Dog! Sit!Dogs are not something you see every day in Cyprus. A couple of decades ago, dogs brought some serious desease in Cyprus and many people were sick. Many dogs were killed than and some really strict laws were developed to control the migration (import), vaccination, and dog carantine. As a result, streets are full of cats…

Some people still do prefer dogs. Not all of them know how to properly care for one, but they still take them.

Someone came to my neighboors today and brought a dog. They tied it up in the coridor and left it there for few minutes. It started barking and making all sorts of noise. Olga noticed it first it told me. I came out and saw these beautiful eyes. I mean there were really something! White dog, light blue eyes and black border around the eyes – all made me go “Wow!”.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-03-26_POTD

Printing photographs from Digital Rebel

Today I gave few pictures from my Digital Rebel for printing to the studio. This is the first time I printed pictures from this camera, although I have it for more than a year now. I have to say that I was very impressed by the quality of the images. I expected much less. I ordered about 50 prints in standard size and also got a few enlargements free of charge. Both the standard size and enlargements came out really good.

I was satisfied already. But than I also thought that all the pictures that I gave for printing were postprocessed and compressed for the web and that none of them was ever inteded for printing. Now I am very interested in the enlargements. I wonder how big can I make them without obvious quality loss.

Thankfully, there are a couple of projects coming up where I will be able to check the enlargements’ quality…

Which web service to choose for blogging?

As I have already mentioned before, my mother is very interested in blogging. She is about to start blogging herself. I am helping her to find the proper tool and get used to the idea. I think it is important to remind here that she is not by any means an advanced computer user.

Features that she needs:

  • Web interface. As easy as possible.
  • Few security levels for posts. She needs to be able to write public articles (viewable by everyone), “friends”-only articles (viewable by a number of people selected by her), and private articles (viewable only by her).
  • Categories for posts. She needs to create several categories for her posts, similar to the way I have it.
  • Searching. Searching for posts that she wrote previously is an absolute must.
  • Comment control. She must be able to switch comments on and off and to limit comments to “friends”-only.
  • Image galleries. She wants to post images from her travelling and day-to-day life. Organization of images, annotations, and comments are all considered and advantage.
  • Favourite links on the main page. She wants to maintain a number of links to her favourite sites and other blogs (like mine) on the main page. In other words: blogroll.
  • Free. She is not yet totally convinced that she wants to blog, thus paying any money for this functionality is not an issue.

After talking to her for a couple of hours yesterday, I realized that she sees my blog as an ideal example. I would have, of course, installed a copy of Nucleus CMS for her on my server, but I am not so sure about the user friendlyness of it. I mean I can easily modify HTML and PHP code as needed for my blog. This is not an option with my mom.

So far I have inspected the following web services:

None of the above services fully satisfy the requirements. Out of all these, Blog.com has most of the features. It has an a very easy to use interface, themable blogs, multiple blogs per one account, categories for posts, image hosting and photo albums, comments control and much more. It even offers easy blogrolling, linking, syndication, and book lists. Surprisingly, the service is free. There are a few limitations though:

  • Disk space. Free account is limited to 10 MBytes. This is more than enough for any beginner who plans on writing text only. With photo albums and image hosting functionality it is pretty easy to run out of though.
  • Bandwidth. Free account is limited to 250 MBytes per month. Again, this is more than enough for a blogging newbie, but can be ran out of easily with lots of images or mild popularity.
  • Advertising. Free accounts will have a mandatory, but small Google Adsense advertising. I don’t see it as a big problem. This is much nicer than banner ad programs that websites used to have long time ago.
  • Minor functionality limitations. Few features are not available with the free account. Most noticably, access statistics are locked, so you won’t be able to see who comes to your blog, from where they come, and what do they want. Also, private blogs (limited to the owner or selected group of people) are also not available.

I personally see these limitations as minor ones. Most people use web services which don’t even offer half the features Blog.com does, so few cut offs are an OK in my book. In case there is a need for more disk space or bandwidth, or if those limited features are all you need, Blog.com offers a really nice pricing scheme.

Greece Independence Day

If you are wondering why all the offices in Cyprus are closed today, I’ll tell you. Today is the national holiday – Greece Independence Day. Cyprus has a very strong connection with Greece and celebrates many Greek holidays nation-wide.

There will be a military parade in Limassol on the Makariou III Ave. . I am not sure about the time, but my guess is somewhere around 11:00am. There will probably be something in Nicosia too.

Since I am working in the NOC during the first half of the day, I won’t be able to attend and photograph the parade. If you have any pictures or stories from the event, please post them or link to them via comments.