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.

Introducing photoblog

My ‘Picture of the day’ projects has evolved yet again. It has been bothering me for some time now that single images that I take for that project don’t look very good when displayed in the album manner. Albums are good for collections of pictures, not for singles. It has been bugging me for some time and finally I found a solution.

I have wrote a tiny Perl script that displays all ‘Picture of the day’ images in the standard photoblog way. You’ll see just a single image per page. You can than click on the image to see the next one. There is also some EXIF data displayed. In case you get lost, or don’t like this new feature, you can also browse through the photo albums as you used to. There is a link from the photoblog page to do just that.

“Oh, and how do I find this photoblog thingy?” you may ask. Well, I have changed the old “Photos” link to point to the photoblog by default. Yup, it’s the one at the top of the page. Right.

Let the feedback begin…

“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…

Rethinking ‘Picture of the day’

This has been on my mind for some time now, so I decided to finally do it. My ‘Picture of the day’ project is going well. In fact, it grew out of the original idea. These days I am blogging a lot and many pictures that I post to the ‘Picture of the day’ can be instead used to annotate my other posts. So, instead of creating two posts – one POTD submission and another a regular story without a picture – I will do one.

Here is how it will work. If I have a picture and the story, then I will write a single post with text and image. If I have just a picture, I will post just a picture in the relevant category. And only if I have a picture with some photographic value, I will create a post in the Photography category, with the picture and the description of the value, lighting conditions, and stuff like that. I might leave it as just a picture too, but I will try to avoid the laziness like that.

All these single pictures will still remain in the POTD directory in my photo albums.

Blogging anniversary

About one year ago I have installed Nucleus CMS and started blogging seriously. I haven’t missed a day. Every day during the last year I have posted at least one article. Sometimes I have posted as much as twelve!

I have learned a great deal about a number of topics. Mainly, of course, about blogging technology. I went from a total newbie level. I remember now how hard it was for me in the beginning to get ideas for postings. Than it became a routine. My writing got better. My vocabulary increased. Soon I had to introduce categories to maintain some order with the posts. Than I’ve learned about comments and comment SPAM. Than RSS feeds and blogrolling. That was really an eye openner. Than were trackbacks. Than a whole bunch of social software.

Daily blogging did wonders to the popularity of my website. I have jumped up in ranking tables of Google quiet a bit for a number of keywords. My posts were linked to from a number of high profile websites. My audience grew several times during this year. I am now getting about 1500 people daily. More than half of these are returning users.

My relationship with the Internet changed as well. It became closer to me. I became more open. I have learned myself better. I’ve got a better understanding of people on the Internet. I’ve discovered communities around topics that I have never thought existed.

Overall, blogging during the last year gave me much more than I ever thought it could have. I will surely continue the practice.

Climbing up the Google ranking table

Hitting first pageI’ve accidentally noticed today that I have climbed up yet another step in Google’s page ranking table. Searching just for “leonid” brings up the link to this blog on the first page of results!!! I’ve attached the screenshot for historical reasons too (that is when I’ll be the number one link).

Things like this boost my enthusiasm enormously. Expect even more blogging in the future.