Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

What should I do?

Many people were asking me about Delicious recently. Some of these people are computer newbies, but others are highly trained IT professionals. I decided to write a small post about Delicious, that would explain briefly what it is and why would one want to use it. It seems that I’ve got my inspiration all right and after two hours that I haven’t noticed, I was looking at a rather large piece (about 10 KBytes, 1600+ lines) of text. And it still wasn’t finished.

While writing it, I also wanted to add few lines about flickr and Technorati. I haven’t done so yet, because I understand that it will blow the original article even more.

Now I am thinking about what should I do with all of that. I don’t want to pos the monster 10K thing as most people will get bored even scrolling through it. But I haven’t found a way to split it effectively yet. Probably I should add everything I want, reorganize and than split it into a series of articles. Maybe it will come out easier.

What should I do?

OpenID – free, open, and decentralized identity system

It has been some time since I was thinking that logging into all those blogs to leave a comment is lame. I guess this idea visits heads of many people out there. During the last couple of days I added few more blogs on my blogroll and started to think more about this problem.

My thinking was in the direction of some WordPress service. At least in the beginning. Something along the lines of Blogs Of The Day. Some services, say Blog Passport or something like that, that could be used by all those WordPress intallations to authenticate visitors. Basically, the even the same database table from WordPress could be used as a base. A person would login to at Blog Passport and than visit any WordPress installation and at any site that would support the scheme he would appear as logged in user.

But all I did was thinking. I didn’t even investigate if there are any existing solutions. The good thing is that I didn’t write any code. Because today I stumbled upon something that would be acceptable – OpenID. I first saw it at LiveJournal.com. It already supports it.

The idea of an OpenID is simple. It is even simplier that what I was thinking. It is a distributed system that authenticates against a URL. You can be logged in at any website that supports OpenID and than any other site that supports OpenID would work for you . The description of the process, the protocol, and the development status are all at the project’s website.

The good things about OpenID so far are:

  • free and open and intends to stay this way.
  • decentralized
  • supported by some big sites (LiveJournal.com)

WordPress plugin is in the works. I hope that this project will get some attention and that we will finally have one annoying problem solved. Cheers!

Geostamping

In an attempt to promote Cyprus on the Web, as well as draw some additional traffic to my blog, I’ve installed the Geo plugin for WordPress. All my entries from now will be properly stamped with geographic coordinates.

Since I don’t travel a lot, and even don’t have a GPS device yet, most of my entries will carry a generic Limassol coordinates (latitude: 34.67500, longitude: 33.03333). At times when I will be posting from places other than Limassol, I will adjust the coordinates accordingly.

Statistics refreshed

I’ve installed a couple of statistical plugins.

  • SearchHistory. It lets me see the history of searches that were done on this site. The results are available only to me via the Administrator interface, but I thought I’d let you know.
  • Counterize. This is yet another counter of visitors. Again, mostly this is for myself, but you can see a short summary, which I added to the Statistics page.

Now I know all about you…

Fonts saga continued

I mentioned recently that I’ve installed a whole lot of fonts on my office workstation. I was never actually concerned about fonts and was very satisfied with the default few that I had on box. But I surprised myself. The view of the world looked so different and it appeared so nice that I decided to do the same procedure at home. I am way too addicted to the good looks of the Internet to view it in Helvetica 24×7.

If you are like I was, never caring about installing fonts, then I suggest you try it. You’ll be amazed as to how different the real thing is.

P.S.: One of the side effects was also my blogging fever. After I installed all these fonts I started to browse the web more, and WordPress’ administration interface looked so good, that I couldn’t stay away.