Wordpress in Bulgarian.

There are many Bulgarian communities around the world. To my knowledge the largest one is right here in Chicago. I’m not counting Bulgaria, because that’s a whole country! Bulgarians make many contributions to many web sites, science, industries and technologies. We have also made significant invention contributions to computers and aviation, as well. Something to be proud off.

Meebo home page now featuring a background ad.

Meebo has finally started to monetize its home page. I like the design. Unlike many monetized backgrounds on popular web sites, their is more integrated, in style, with the content on the page. Good job.

At this time the add is for the Toyota Prius – 3rd generation.

Meebo does have some other products and services to complement its main function – integrating various instant messenger networks and protocols on the same web site. My favorite of their products is the Meebo notifier.

The Meebo notifier is a small app that sits in your system tray and it stays connected to the Meebo network, allowing you to exit your browser. The memory footprint is small, so it is not resource hog. In addition to providing notification when contacts come online and when new IMs are received, you will also be notified when any of the added accounts, like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, have new emails. A feature, which can be disabled if you don’t care much for emails. Lastly, the notifier is not an Adobe AIR app. Something, which to some extend, I find to be beneficial.

One thing I would like to see Meebo support is micro-blogging services, like Twitter, Identi.ca or Jaiku.

By the way, Meebo powers the chat room on this blog.

So, do you use Meebo? If you do, where do you use it? If you don’t, do leave me a comment regarding the reason.

Whois domain record: Meebo

I have also selected phpList as the mail list management solution. Once I have configured their new server, I will be installing and configuring phpList, which by the way has to integrate with their current site and have new users automatically added to the different newsletter campaigns at the time of them registering on the main web site. I found some scripts, which might do the trick, but there were some complaints from other users. Hopefully with Oxbury things will go smoothly.

Tonight I will be leasing the new server and then I will be working on installing and configuring the usual software required to operate a website smoothly.

Domain whois record: phpList, Oxbury Publishing

People use company logos in addition to their names, emails, alternate emails, phones, mobiles and fax numbers, as well as toll free customer support numbers. To those we corporate addresses, social network addresses, instant messenger addresses and you end up with a lot of information that gets tacked to every email of an email string. Why? It is a waits of bandwidth and space, and also time consuming to sort between the signatures and the actual email content.

Not to mention people who use double and triple signatures, because they are part of multiple organizations or want to show off their affiliations and other sorts of background. Also lets not forget that if you use a free email service, like Hotmail or Yahoo, they also append their own signatures, to promote their service and that they provide free email service. Or when someone emails from a business/corporate account, then there is a security message that comes with the email to inform every recipient that the information contain in the email “is confidential” and sharing it might violate something or another.

Image thanks to Transformatum.com

Overall there should be some standards to email signatures and what other information may be automatically appended to an email. I doubt that that will come to fruition, though. People and companies have been trying to standardize emails since the email system was invented decades ago, but as we can observe today – this has yet to happen. I would only hope and wish for that email signatures are only appended in an initial email. When there is an existing string of emails going back and forth then there is no need to append a signature. The involved parties clearly know who they are and what they can do. A signature should be appended only if the email string is forwarded to a new recipient.

Another thing that I am not a fan of, but it doesn’t bother me as much is when people forward emails and I can see that the email was forwarded 2, 3, 4 times and I can see tens of emails with each forward section. Not only does this take space, it consumes bandwidth, but most importantly it is a security problem. It creates an opportunity if one of the recipients is a spammer, or pissed at the sender to harvest the emails and use them to SPAM the rest of the recipients or cause damage to the senders reputation.

Are you also bothered by the above issues? Take the poll and let me know by leaving your comments below.

Anyways, they bought a commercial theme for the CMS I advised them would be best to go with. They, and I mean my brother and his partners, tasked me to modify the theme so the site looks and functions similar to the way their current one does. I don’t know why they picked the theme they did. By the time I get done with it, both the layout and the code will hardly be recognizable to the original. I did something similar for JutiaGroup.com, but I only made changes here and there, nothing major like I am doing with this project. But I am off topic! This was supposed to be a micro-post! here it is:

I hate developer who do not follow standards with CMS theme design. Each theme has parts to it, and when developers take shortcuts their products suck!!

Little bit of background here – I am unhappy because I just discovered that the developers amongst few things that they had omitted to do, they had also set up the same file to be used as the front page and post page. These to display different elements when rendered. This won’t be a problem, though, I can set up a new page in no time.

The reason why I am saying that I underestimated the time it will take me to develop the site is because of all the things that pop up in my head that needs to be included in the web site as I work on it. Unlike other website project I have worked on, this is the first time I am developing a business and a websites with a variety of features and needs from the ground up. Granted I contemplated for a very long time if I should use a CMS or build my own interface, I decided to go with using one of the more popular CMS simply to get he project off the ground. Once the website and it is functional and servicing clients it can always be upgraded. It won’t be anything new. Over the years I have seen many websites which have switched from one CMS to another, or simply gone with developing a proprietary interface and vice versa. Every time I sit down to work on the site, as I am working on something at least half a dozen other things come to my mind that need to be included and once I place them on my to do list, half a dozen more pop up for each of them. For example tonight I am working on documenting  how customer’s will be referenced across multiple sites, especially ones that are not mine. As I figured out how I am going to do that and started to document it, the fact that I also need to collect and maintain customers’ personal billing information also came to my mind, and as I typed the previous I realized that that data needs to be encrypted.

It is definitely a learning experience. Even though my grand parents, my father and my Amanda’s father all owned or still operate their own businesses, being an entrepreneur was not something that interested me until 3 years ago. Thus I do not have much knowledge or experience with it. The who start up and get going process can be difficult especially when building everything solo with limited resources and the most valuable of them being time to work on business development.

So far the planing stage seems to be taking long time, but not as long as documenting how everything is going to work. The most important thing is to make progress. Some times it is a lot, other times it is as little as few words, or paragraphs.

As a co-founder of JutiaGroup.com I still handle technical and relevant aspects of the web site. Lately potential advertisers have been making contact, but they have been making contact the WRONG way. I have no idea what’s the logic behind it, but people are using the simple contact form to request information, which is already available on the clearly visible and indicated advertise page. I guess the thing that bugs me most is that to get to the contact form, which they use, a surfer has to find the contact page, which is hidden in a submenu. The information, which they request is available on the page which is to the right of the link on which they have to click to find the contact page.

Maybe they do go to the advertising page, but they just don’t navigate it. It’s called scrolling people, just scroll down the page. All the information people ask for is on that page, plus a very nice and extensive contact form, which was designed to save the time, which is now invested in going back and forth via email to determine something that one should have read and provided at first contact.

The only reason why I found out that there is a new version of the plugin is because I want to tweet (Micro post.) but I want my tweets (Micro posts.) archived. The only way to have the tweets archived is to use the twitter tool plugin, but it does daily digests. I find the post formats some what unappealing, and I really don’t feel like moding the source code to exclude the Twitter digest posts. This resulted in me avoiding Twitter and micro-blogging for most part. For some reason today, I decided to check for a possible update of the plugin, because I was hoping for a weekly digest option. Magically, not only there is a weekly digest option, but I can have both daily and weekly, And I can select the post times for both. If you remember some time ago I complained about how the Twitter-tool plugin would randomly generate the posts, thus missing tweets from the same evening.

I am very please with the added functionality and I can also get back to micro-blogging. Thanks Alex, even though you did not respond to my email!

Lately I have been kind of burned out on Twitter! I am not as excited or obsessed with it, although I do still look forward to connecting with friends and posting random things. I guess everything comes in waves. At least that’s how it is with me. I obsess with something for couple of days to couple of weeks and then I move on.

Anyhow, back to the looks of my blog. I want to have something plain, which will present the content in easy to the eyes fashion. I don’t want to have busy pages, either. I think I will start with trying out few different theme. Currently I am deicing between Mimbo Pro, The Studio and maybe Unbound. I will test their appeal and organization of the content, but I think, at the end, I just might just create my own theme from modifying the classic WordPress them. Just like I did many years ago, when I first started using WordPress. I would provide some examples, but the Archive.org does not have that many archived copies of my site. Besides, I think this was probably before the total data loss I suffered in July of 2004.

After I have settled on a theme or have created my own, I will reorganize the pages and the content their provide. Then maybe I will finally complete the About page. I am doing this, because I want to make my blog more useful. I want to start posting better articles and attract new and regular visitors. Eventually I would like to also have a forum community.

We will have to see who this will go. I see this as “The Evolution of a personal blog”, the evolution of my blog. Looking through old posts and remembering old designs I can trace the changes in my way of thinking and writing. I am definitely more mature and interested to provided something useful and not just random ramblings. Well … for most part. It IS a journey after all. Correct?!

Progress and development is a must.

Jutiagroup – work on my brother’s site continues. Work should have been completed a while back, but for the moment it is down to only performing maintenance tasks. The site is dedicated to social events, politics, the stock market and money management. Authors are in need. So if you have a topic you would like to write articles on, even if it is not one of the main ones from above, visit the contact page and express your interest.

Bad SPAM, Bad – this one was spur of the moment. I started it yesterday after I came home and had to deal with the daily doze of SPAM. I wrote a “bit” more about it here – http://badspambad.com.

I needed some more functionality out of it so I took the liberty to modify the code a bit. Just to make it a tad more flexible.

I started by changing the function call for inside the template. I changed it from:

to

What this does is, before the function is called its existence will be verified. This will prevent your theme from braking and your pages loading halfway and then displaying errors when the function is called:

• if you disable the plugin (now you can turn on and off the plugin without the visitors getting page errors)
• the plugin file is moved, corrupted or deleted

In other words, if something happens to the plugin and you are unaware of the problem, your site will not brake. This of course is bad, but it will not have a negative effect on your site.

My next change was to make the number of posts being displayed flexible. With other plugins and the ability to call the function in any page or post you might want to display different number of posts at different places.

I started by deleting the variable

$max_posts

from the global declaration.

Then I placed that variable in the function declaration.

Old

function cypher_latestposts($before='', $after='')

New

function cypher_latestposts($max_posts, $before='', $after='')

Now when you call your function you can set the number of post to be displayed at the function call location. Like this:

In this example I want 10 posts. You can change this number to anything you want.

Here is an extra. Some of you might want to display your links in a list, others separated by a comma (no idea why), slashes, hyphens or as in the original just with a line breaker. So what you will do is change the function declaration like this:
From

function cypher_latestposts($max_posts, $before='', $after='')

to

function cypher_latestposts($max_posts, $before, $after)

When you call your function just insert what you want to separate the links with. Here are some examples:

','

'); ?>

After installing Coppermine last night and looking through its features and playign with its UI, I can say, I will continue using Gallery as a bridge between Tfnet’s visitors and my collection of images and photos. I still do not know how Gallery 2 would organize the albums, but for sure I did not like how Coppermine did it. I also did not like the user interface nor how multiple images were uploaded. Although I did like how I could add additional information to a newly added or already uploaded file. Not that i cannot do that with Gallery, but this one was a bit more rich on options.

One of the main differences I saw between Gallery and Coppermine is Gallery only works with images while a Coppermien album can contain any type of file in it. This makes Coppermien more of a files organizing and delivery system than a simple gallery collection of albums and pictures. I s’pose that would be a wonderful and extremely useful interface for a web site, which delivers a fair amount of various types of files to its visitors. In my case, though, I simply do not have use for it. Any files other than images, I have and want to share with you, TFnet visitors, I would organize in a fashion of my liking.

For now I am going to install the Gallery 2 beta version and keep it up to date with any new releases. I will update TFnet and the site map page with a link to the gallery ones I have it installed, configured and with some albums created. Keep checking back for the official news announcement of the opening of the TFnet Gallery! In it you will find not only photos of my family and I, but also my collections of avatars, sigs, funny pictures and drawings and many others.
]]> http://thetitan.titanfusion.net/archive/2005/04/08/gallery-on-tfnet-coming-soon/feed/ 0 http://thetitan.titanfusion.net/archive/2005/01/26/clanmpus-source-code-updated/ http://thetitan.titanfusion.net/archive/2005/01/26/clanmpus-source-code-updated/#comments Thu, 27 Jan 2005 01:08:55 +0000 Alexandar Tzanov http://titanfusion.net/wordpress/?p=87 Early, early this morning I finished up with the source code update of the clan Menkey Playhouse’s website. I was too tired to make a post about it when I was done and I was busy today, so here it is now.

I finished with the update of my site about the same time yesterday morning is I did with the updated of the clan MP site today. Read more about it here. Up to last night the site was structured just like mine was before, separate files for each page. Each one of which containing a template, which had to be updated every time one of the others was modified. Well, now only one file, an “if else” statement to maintain and some content files.

I will redesign the site right after I am done with the redesign of mine.

In direct result of the above I had to forget about using SQL database for now. I only need one for vast amount of text content, but at the moment I think I am doing just fine with integrate WordPress into other sections of the website, not just my blog. This is also how I end up opposite of what I had planed and using more includes than before. From all the previous web pages I was using, I got rid of the templates and only kept the actual content of them. So, now I have one index page with one template’s design to maintain, and a simple “if else” statement to update when necessary. It is much easier to make new pages, and keep site content up to snuff.

For now I am happy with the code of the site. The next step of the site update will be a facelift. I am going to work on some new graphics and experiment with some new colors. Once that is done, I might start recoding the site again. LoL, I know next time would be much easier.

After I am done with the recoding or maybe while I am doing it, I will also make a page for all the blogs hosted on Titan Fusion. So far there are only three, but lets hope this number will grow soon.

I am happy about this, makes it much easier. Now I can start working on something else. I have few projects already lined up for me to start working on.

Yes and I am still using include files, although I love mixing SQL and PHP, I still have not completely converted my site to query the pages code from a database. Something I am planning on doing in the coming months. LoL

But back to the script I was working on. It took all about 2 minutes to write it. But damn, it took me 25 minutes to figure out what my problem was. I would pass in values, but for some reason the script did not deliver. Even though I looked over my code bunch of times, I just could not figure out what the problem was. I Googled other scripts and looked over them, but still nothing. Then I again, I looked over my code and it hit me when I saw what I had done. It was a simple and silly mistake. Instead of comparing my variables to the values being passed in, I was comparing them to other variables in the script. Silly so silly!!!

All fixed now, woot. Now back to editing the WordPress files.

Earlier this morning I installed a style changer plug in. Now I can play around with the looks of the blog, and allow my visitors to pick the one they like the most. The style they choose should be the one they see every time they visit the blog as long as they do not clear the cookies on their computer. The plug in utilizes CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), with which right now I am having a lot of fun. Although at the moment I am having problem with setting different element to dynamically move on the page as the size of others change. I also want them to appear in certain order, which so far does not appear to be too hard to code. But I am going to work on that during the day. Right now it is 4:21 A.M., and I am ready for bed.

You can see the plug ins currently used as active on the blog here. I have placed a link to that page under the Information menu. The page is generated by another wonderful plug in. LoL I have a list of few more plug ins I want to use on my blog. I am also looking at a plug in which will cache certain section of the blog at a set time frame, so the pages load faster. Something it does need, because as I add more stuff to my blog it takes longer for the pages to generate/load.

I am pleased with the way things are coming out. I am experimenting with different looks and colors for the blog. I also have hand full of backgrounds I want to use as well. But, depending on how other parts of the blog come out looking, I might or might not use them.

In regards to my web site, there are few web pages I have to finish and it should be complete, for now. I will improve and add more to it in the future, when I actually have something to add to it. I just do not want to have supposedly existing sections on it, which lead to nowhere because those parts are non existent. I want to start mapping and programming, again. I think the easiest way to get into mapping would be by designing some maps for WarCraft III. I also want to design some apps for Linux. It seems like to get back in the swing of things I will have to start by reworking some of my old C++ programs both for Windows and Linux. It will help me with refreshing my memory and skills. If I get some time and actually start working on the preceding two, I am sure they would make a great addition to my web site. But for now, whatever free time I have I have to use it to work on the Jus2 web site.

Now back to finishing up my work on the couple of pages left to do.

Before I do that, I still have few other things to work on like members, battles and upcoming databases and forms.

I am getting better at it. Quote from the -(MP)- site news:

The web site is back. As many have had the chance to notice, he site have been redesigned and back. There are still some sections, like battle record and members, missing. But overall the site is 90% completed. Woo Hoo. News db and linking problems are resolved, something which will make Gilgamesh very happy.

Now that the news section is completed, next on my agenda is to create the battle record and members sections, followed by adding search feature to the site. When the above three are done, I will be working on improving some parts of the site and their usability. It will be mainly in the background, so you won’t be noticing too many changes on the outside other than facelifts here and there.

But, it’s all good, now I can start setting up thing for him. The forums should be up soon.

The web address is jus2investing.com, some make sure you visit soon to check out on progress.