Tag: web

My del.icio.us milestone

I have posted the 1,000th bookmark to my del.icio.us account today.

Here is my bookmarking evolution.

At first, I wasn’t using bookmarks at all. I didn’t have my own computer,so there was no point. And there were only a handful of sites that I was visiting, so, again, there was no point.

Later I go myself a computer and bookmarks started to multiply. They were all in one folder, and then they grew out of it, so I had to create some sort of hierarchy.

Then I got myself another computer and an office workstation. My bookmarking rate decreased since I didn’t have any means of synchronizing bookmarks between computers. I was adding bookmarks slower and not using them at all. My favourite sites were still in my memory and not computer’s.

The need for a good bookmark manager was growing though. I wrote a few scripts that synchronized my data between computers, but it was still a pain. Too often the needed machine was offline…

Then came Google. Somehow it stopped the whole bookmarking process. And I wasn’t the only one. Many many many people forgot about bookmarks altogether. Finding it again was so much faster and simplier with Google that everyone were doing just that.

With Google and the progress of the technology the Web grew fast. Lots of amazing stuff got published on the web. Finding something specific is still simple. But there are whole bunch of these things that you see once and then forget about them, until you need them long way down the road. By the time you need them, you don’t even remember what exactly they were – just some vague association. Googling for something vague doesn’t work very well. At least for me. So the need for something else was growing again. Google was good, but it wasn’t enough.

And so it came – Delicious. I was so glad to find! From the start my usage of it was pretty extensive. I was posting lots of stuff, tagging, re-tagging, importing and exporting, building statistics, and doing all sorts of crazy things. It was exactly what I needed.

And it still is.

Bad morning. Bad!

I just woke up and logged in. News time. I navigated to Bloglines, but it greeted me with “There is a problem with the database. Please try again later”. I thought – “yeah, well, that’s perfect time to read something that I’ve bookmarked a long time ago and never had a chance to come back to”. So I tried to load my Delicious bookmarks. Nope, no chance. I got only “del.icio.us is down for maintenance. we’ll be back in one hour.”…

Oh, my! What’s going on? Who’s next? Slashdot? Google? I rushed to check both of them, but they seem to be OK. Good. I’ll have something to read for the next hour.

Do you print?

While scrolling through Slashdot comments about KDE 3.5 release, I noticed a little bit of discussion about printing. The question was about how many people are actually printing anything these days.

That made me think a bit. I was one of the heaviest printer users back in college days. I had to do special arrangements with the sysadmin (read: slave labour) to get myself extra printing quota. I was printing probably 50 pages a day or so – everything I looked at on the web, was ending up as hard copy in a whole bunch of paper folders that I had.

There were reasons for me to print so much though. Search engines were pathetic, so finding the same thing again was close to impossible. Websites were coming and going all the time, so even if you could find the resource – there was absolutely no guarantee that it would have the content your were looking for archived anywhere. Mobile computing was a cool fantasy back than, especially inaccessible for students (pricewise). There were no services like Delicious that would allow to get your bookmarks easily from any computer connected to the web. Compact USB drives weren’t yet there, so moving files between computers wasn’t trivial. And so on and so forth.

Obviously, the best way to save information and move it around was to print it out.

During the last few years the technology progressed a lot. Especially mobile computing and networking. And web services. These take care of all my needs.

While I can still think of some computer users that would need the printing facility (accountants anyone?), I really cannot remember when was the last time I printed anything out. As a matter of fact, I gave away both of my printers (inkject and dot-matrix) that I had at home to someone else more than three years ago. For nothing. And two ot three last incarnations of my office workstation didn’t even have printing configured. So it must be about 4 or 5 years since my last printout.

What about you? Do you print anything at all? How often do you do that?

Improve your blog by fixing 10 things wrong

Useit.com has an excellent article titled “Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes“. It lists ten mistakes most oftenly made by bloggers. These are ten simple things that could really improve your blog. These are ten simple things that could even improve my blog.

If you are too lazy to read full article and all the reasoning behind these points, below is the summary for you. I will also mark my own progress with these.

Continue reading Improve your blog by fixing 10 things wrong

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.