Year: 2007

Question for the English speaking crowd

What is the English word for the piece of carton, wood or plastic which is placed on the table under the cup? Usually, it is used in place of a saucer for large tea or coffee mugs. I’ve spent the last few minutes searching for it, but none of the online dictionaries helped. I also went through quite a lot of tableware, glassware, dishware, and other-ware, but hit a dead end in every direction.

If you know what I am talking about, please leave a comment. Thank you.

Update: the word is “coaster“, or “cup coaster“. Thanks, ma.

The 3 Rules of Self-Marketing

If you are interested in self-marketing, Web Worker Daily has an excellent post with links to more.  Here are some quotes to give you the feeling:

Knowing how to market yourself will do more for your earnings and reputation than becoming better at what to do. Don’t believe it? Think about the people in your industry who make more money and are more famous than you. Do you think they really know more than you? Did they just happen to get lucky? Or were they savvy about how to promote themselves?

Start now. Why? Because this stuff takes time. Building blog circulation, getting people to notice you, cultivating your social network, working your way on to the speaker list at conferences good marketing can take years to pay off.

You’ll notice that I didn’t say these were 3 easy rules. Simple, yes, but not easy.

Web worker’s Halloween

Web Worker Daily is as good as ever.  Here are a couple of quotes from their mandatory Halloween post:

 There seems to be a pretty good correlation between those of us who work on the web and those of us who accumulate things that beep, buzz, light up, transmit, and receive.

and

Take a walk through your house at dusk and look at all the digital time and temperature and channel displays, all the pretty LED lights, all the remote controls listening for your commands, all the wall chargers humming away, all the instant-on appliances: those are all standby power users. Depending on who you believe, they’re responsible for somewhere between 3% and 20% of your electricity bill (and a corresponding percentage of your contribution to global warming, strip-mining, and other energy consumption-related ills).

They are always on the subject, always nicely written, and often with seasonal feeling to it.  There are few online resources that I read more often…

Three things to like about WikiMapia

Here are three things that I like about WikiMapia :

  1.  It’s brings together the excellence of Google Maps and the social power of Wiki.  The results are better than anywhere else.  Even Cyprus, which usually gets little attention on the web, is covered pretty good.
  2. It’s easy to add landmarks and notes.  That’s something I really missed so far on Google Maps, where I can just see maps and search for geographical locations.  With WikiMapia, I can find something, mark it down with the notes, and then send the link to somebody else.  I won’t need to provide the instructions like “find two major roads crossing at the bottom of this map and then follow the one that goes up until second turn on the right. You’ll see a sort of triangular white building.  That’s our office” any more.  Just a link.
  3. WikiMapia pages score pretty good in  Google search results (I hope it doesn’t sound like invitation to spammers).  To find map to our offices now all I need to do is search for brief company name – “mmvirtual“.  The map link is the second result after our own web site.

WordPress for Dummies

Matt links to the announcement about “WordPress for Dummies” book coming out.  It’s been a while since I read any “for Dummies” books myself – they are usually written for beginners, a stage which I don’t stay at for long enough to buy and read a book.  But I feel like “WordPress for Dummies” book could use some publicity.  There are a lot of people without technical background using WordPress and trying to figure things out.  I think that a book like that could save them a lot of time and effort, as well as show a few things they might not have thought about.

It’s not the only book about WordPress out there, but it’s not in the crowd by any means.  Here are the Amazon search results for “wordpress”.