RSS of Cyberborean Chronicles now is http://blog.cyberborean.org/feed.

Changes

Main taxonomy of the content (tags) is preserved, but the structure of categories is completely redesigned. In 1.0 version, categories were used to identify topics and thus duplicated the tags in many cases. In fact, there were two independent systems of topics classification.

In new version, topics are identified only by tags (java, linux, coding etc) while “categories” are used to classify  posts by their type, format or purpose (Announcements, Essays, Howtos etc). Thus, there are two  clearly distincted taxonomies: topics and types.

Reading a post, you may notice “See also” menu in the sidebar. It contains the posts similar to the current one – those you might want to read if you are interested in that topic. This magic is a courtesy of Similar Posts WordPress plugin.

Photos

I also launched a standalone photo gallery and moved all pics from my Flickr account to there. Now the gallery is another part of Cyberborean Chronicles: http://photos.cyberborean.org. The pics are organized with their own system of tags.

I’m not going to post gallery updates in the blog (former Photos category) anymore, except for the shots I have to tell something special about. You can see gallery updates (the latest pics) at the widget on the right sidebar. You also can subscribe to the updates feed: http://photos.cyberborean.org/main.php?g2_view=rss.SimpleRender.

Gears

WordPress just rocks as usual and gears everything on this site with a help of the following plugins (alphabetically):

• ActiveLink lets quickly insert links to Wikipedia definitions.
• Add to Any: Share/Save/Bookmark Button: you can see this button on every post page to add the post to your favorite bookmarking services.
• Akismet keeps spammers away from my blog.
• Contact Form 7 powers the form to contact me on the Feedback page.
• Similar Posts does all magic to generate “See also” menus.
• Simple Tags helps me to tag the content and generates the tag cloud (see on the left)
• SyntaxHighlighter Plus converts code snippets into eye candies.
• WPG2 integrates the photogallery with the blog

The photogallery is powered by Gallery2 software. To photos from Flickr are imported with Gallery2Flickr plugin (hacked to fix the dates of the imported pics).

Please note that everything is still a beta, so any feedback is welcome. Thanks!

A day in the blog’s life.

It’s not a 04-01-joke, it’s like the Slashdot effect looks. Someone mentioned my old article (“Anicent tags museum“) in a comment to the Slashdot post and it resulted in a traffic that Chronicles usually have during a whole month.

• My profile

Feel free to follow me or invite me to follow you.

You also can view my twittering at the sidebar on this blog.

Twittering from a console:

[sourcecode language='python']
$ curl -u twittername:password -s -F status=”Your text here”
http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml http://twitter.com/account/end_session
[/sourcecode]

One can write a nifty handy shell script also.

[sourcecode language='java']
/**
* HelloWorld
*/
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(“Hello world!”);
}
}
[/sourcecode]

See also this and this examples of Java code, this example of Python and this XML. Actually 12 programming/markup languages are supported by the syntax highlighter.

What’s good

• It’s an eye-candy
• Language-dependent syntax highlighting, of course
• Horizontal scrolling of the code block, if it’s needed. Now I don’t have to bother how the lines are long
• You can copy my code into your clipboard by a single click

What’s bad

There was a bug when HTML-reserved characters (“<“, “>“, “&“) were displayed as HTML entities (“<” etc). It has been fixed just today. I also noticed that the single backslash chars (“\”) are not displayed and must be escaped with another backslash (“\\”) – hi, PHP geeks!

[upd] The problem with backslash has also been fixed. Thanks to Joseph Scott from WordPress for fast responding and fixing it![/upd]

Sadly enough, code posting is incompatible with WYSIWYG, if you bother about indentation of your code. TinyMCE visual editor will eat all your leading spaces and tabs.

Numbers.

77 posts (yeah, I’m a quite lazy blogger) in 32 categories (but I like order and structures!) visited 2,879 times. WordPress.com has no ability of installing Google Analytics or such, but I did some basic monitoring with free StatCounter to see from where are the visitors and which browser/os they use.

The top countries in a list are US, UK, Germany and Russia. 47% of visitors browse with Firefox (of various versions), 31% use MSIE, and 11% was identified as unknown “Mozilla 5.0″. Other browsers (Konq, Safari and Opera) are below 5%. So, Fox rocks and beats MS browser down, at least on my site (even if 11% of “mozilla” were MSIE’s actually).

Systems. 52% of visitors are on Windows, 35% on Linux and 5% use MacOSX. There are 8% of “unknown” OS (have no idea what is it).

What people read

Statistics on specific posts is a good way to know what people looking for when visiting other’s blogs. Unsurprisingly, motivation in whole is mostly the same as my own, when I’m surfing the blogosphere.

People want to solve their own problems. There are a lot of people who came to me via the search requests like “how to bla-bla-bla”. So, my “practical” articles like, e.g. this, this and this enjoy the stable popularity. My software reviews are also among them.

People are interesting for personal opinions. This is why the blogs are the great things – there are real alive people behind them, who are not restricted by corporate, political etc. rules and can freely explain their own thoughts and opinions. Even if a blogger is wrong and subjective, there are a lot of people who will read his opinion on a subject just because this is a living voice in an ocean of a carefully filtrated, neutral and politically correct official information.

I think this is why my old post on my position in Kowari row is number 1 in the top hot hits list. And it is still popular, though almost an year is passed after that incident.

For open source software users the developers blogs are the additional support channels. My Memoranda posts have a stable and considerable audience and I suppose they are the users who want to see how the project is going on from developers point of view.

I plan to launch a Memoranda community blog in the new year, so I and everyone would have a specialized place to write about the software and discuss it.

Conclusions

I’ve got mixed feelings on my year of blogging. I still believe that Chronicles is a right thing and I am neither disappointed nor bored of it. On the other hand, I regret that I missed so many chances to write because of my business or laziness.

So, what is in my blogging agenda in 2007? First is to keep promoting open source software as much as possible. Second is to be on the bleeding edge of new exciting things in our fantastic times. Third is to be a bit more active blogger than I was in 2006. And fourth, fifth and so on is to keep having fun and let my readers to have fun too.

Thank you all, my dear readers.

Merry Christmas!

• Technorati now tracks over 37.3 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• English, while being the language of the majority of early bloggers, has fallen to less than a third of all blog posts in April 2006.
• Japanese and Chinese language blogging has grown significantly.
• Technorati now tracks more than 100 Million author-created tags and categories on blog posts.

45% of new bloggers give up during first 3 months after they started! Fortunately, the “Chronicles” is five months old, so it passed that critical point.

I was surprised to discover that English is not a primary language of the blogosphere and that its Japanese and Chinese parts are nearly so large as the English one.

I knew MSIE is a buggy browser but I thought it is not so bad if so many people can live with it. But now I convinced it is really very bad.

I’ll skip the case when it smashes the whole page with preformatted text block (“A SOL Example”). I agree, the block is too wide for the text column in the template. Nevertheless, it is not a problem for Firefox.

But why it switches the fonts few times into the same paragraph? Just have a look:

What the hell? Maybe there is a funny markup that WordPress engine inserts there and it makes IE crazy? No – I looked at source HTML and there are no any markup between those chunks of text. This is solely a MSIE 6.0 rendering bug.

Dear Microsoft corp.! I’ve heard you are about to release the 7.0 version of your web-browser. You give away the browser for free and have no profit from it, so why you spend so much of money to its development? I’d like to give you a free advice – go and grab the Gecko sourcecode. You would save a lot of your money and make your browser much better.

Dear IE users! There is a picture:

Look at it for 10 minutes everyday and your karma will be substantially improved.

Happy browsing!