Tag: blogging

Cyprus Scout beta announce

I have been thinking a lot about my blog and ways to improve it. I was talking with some of you guys. And some of you were talking to me. I’ve got a few ideas in the process and I am going to try one of the big ones now.

While the site started mainly for myself (and it still is), it becomes more and more difficult to ignore the rest of you. And when I think about the rest of you, I get really confused as to what brings you back every time to read my blog. Some of you come here for the personal stuff. Some of you seek technical help. Some of you respect my opinion on the movies. Some of you are parents. Some of you like photography. Some of you are looking for more information about Cyprus. Some of you just like the way I write. That last one is probably the smallest group though which doesn’t even include me. Anyway, all these looks like a lot of sides to a single site. So, I decided to try a little separation.

There is plenty of choice. What should I move away? There are plenty of photoblogs on the web. Yet another one will just get lost among them. Movie review blogs are numerous aswell. As are technical blogs. As are parenting. As are personal. But there is a definite lack of Cyprus blogs. So I decided to try it out.

Cyprus Scout is a blog about Cyprus. There won’t be any politics. There won’t be any real estates. There won’t be any crap that half a million spammers are trying to promote. There will events coverage. There will be discussions about culture, history, and traditions. There might even be some humor.

I am also planning to expand it beyond personal. At the moment I am the only writer, photographer, and editor in chief for that site. But I will get more people to contribute. I even already know a few who will. It’s just that they don’t. Yet.

Anyway, the site is currently in beta. It needs a lot of work. And it undergoes a lot. It can break or misbehave. But I wanted to let you all know that it is there and that you can start using it. Register, comment, suggest, submit drafts, correct. In a week or so when the dust will settle, I will make an announcement for the wider audience – Cyprus forums, other blogs, and a couple of portals. Until them – report bugs and help me out.

Bloglines feature a few updates

The other day I noticed a few updates, but not all of them. Bloglines announced all the recent changes in this news article and it turns out that I noticed only the small subset.

The biggest and most welcome change – keyboard navigation. Now, instead of scrolling feeds with a lot of items and switching between feeds while moving the mouse all over the screen, one can use keyboard shortcuts. ‘j‘ and ‘s‘ are my two favourites. By pressing ‘j‘ it is no possible to jump to the next item in the feed. No scrolling. No mouse. Simply go there. By pressing ‘s‘ it is trivial to go to the next feed with unread items. Again, no mouse involved. Just these two keyboard shortcuts speed up reading a lot. And I needed the whole two seconds to get used to them. Amazing!

Continue reading Bloglines feature a few updates

New Bloglines bits

I see some new Bloglines functionality that I haven’t read about in the news yet. Particularly, there are some new tabs available when adding new feeds (Click on the ‘Add’ link). There are two things that I don’t care about – ‘Astrology’ and ‘Lottery’ – and one that looks interesting – ‘Quick Pick Subscriptions’.

‘Astrology’ simply offers a number of horoscopes for any sign that you might be. ‘Lottery’ is more cryptic. I suspect that it has something to do with some lottery in USA as there is no description what so ever and the only thing you can choose is the state.

‘Quick Pick Subscriptions’ though is something that looks promising. It seems to be a variation of ‘Recommendations’. ‘Recommendations’ uses your current subscriptions to figure out what you might be interested in. While ‘Quick Pick Subscriptions’ features a categorized list of daily most popular feeds.

If you have been looking for new stuff to read – check these features out. You’ll probably fill up all your free time pretty quick.

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-10-10

New theme and new functionality

As you can see (unless, of course, you’re an RSS reader) I am working on a new theme for the site. The new theme is wider and utilizes screen space better. It also looks better and more consistent across different browsers.

But the new look is not the only thing that I am working on. There are some navigation changes and design simplifications (hopefuly). Long lists of categories and monthly archives are gone from the sidebar of the front page. They’ve been moved to the dedicated Archives page (more on it in a second), which is linked to from the top of all pages.

The top of the page also includes the link to the photo albums marked as Gallery. Many people were requesting this and I don’t know why I didn’t do it earlier.

I have also installed and configured Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin which allows to integrate tagging deep into the site. The integration process hasn’t finished yet, so I’ll have to update you on the functionality later on.

One bit that I will notice now though is the tag cloud that is available in the Archives page. The tag cloud represents most used tags and allows quick navigation to posts marked with those tags. The bigger the tag name more often it was used.

Anyway, as you can understand, the site undergoes some changes now and might not be very stable. If you encounter an empty page, broken link or an ugly message with debug dump, please don’t shoot me just yet. Everything will be back to normal very soon. Also note that none of the old functionality should be lost. If I forgot to enable something that you used before and thus can’t anymor, please drop me a line.