Yearly Archives: 2006

Events

Happy New Year!

It’s evening now, and another winter night has set in. This one’s special though. We’re getting ready for a New Year’s celebration that will soon begin. I’ve been keeping my time on a leash these past few days, trying to wrap up loose ends so I can start the new year with a clean slate. Wow, what a year! So many things happened, most good, some bad (but they turned into good anyway) that I can hardly begin to recall them all.

We sat down yesterday and counted our blessings. There were over 30 big and wonderful things that happened to us in 2006, and that’s not even counting the ones we couldn’t remember. We’re grateful here, and we look forward to 2007 as we plan for bigger and better things. We hope your 2006 was as wonderful as ours, and that 2007 will turn out to be an even better year for you.

As you each celebrate New Year’s Eve in your own way, let me tell you how it’s done in Romania: we have a most wonderful time with friends, and toward midnight, we call up every single blessed relative and friend and wish them a Happy New Year. The lines are so busy we can hardly get through, but it’s loads of fun!

It’s a pity people here in the States don’t have as much fun as Romanians. Our neighborhood is pretty quiet during times like these… There’s one thing I know. I plan on making lots of noise at midnight, and if I wake up a few sleepy neighbors, so be it! 😀 I’ll leave you with a few photos from these past few days. See you next year!

Someone’s happy to see you

We’ve got all kinds

It’s all downhill from here

I came prepared

Gone shopping

Meanwhile, at the General Store…

Let me tell you about Rudolph

Here we come a-caroling!

Three lights

Star of wonder

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Reviews

The best WordPress plugins

On Christmas day, I gave thanks for the four top technology solutions that impacted my life in 2006. First on my list was WordPress, which is as far as I’m concerned the best personal publishing platform. The beauty of WordPress is that it’s almost infinitely extensible through plugins. If there’s a feature that’s not standard in WordPress, chances are someone’s written a plugin that fills that need. Here are the plugins I found most useful during this past year, listed in alphabetical order:

  • Akismet: hands down, the best anti-spam plugin there is. I wish Akismet made junk email filters as well. When coupled with manual approval of new comments, virtually nothing gets by it. It filters out 99.9% of the spam comments, and leaves a few in the moderation queue for me to check. Since I started ComeAcross in April of 2006, it’s filtered out almost 17,000 spam comments. None of those reached the blog. Only meaningful comments written by real people made it to the live site — and that’s a beautiful thing.
  • FeedBurner Feed Replacement: it allows me to present the FeedBurner feed for ComeAcross as the standard feed that gets shown to browsers and feed readers when they visit my site. That means people don’t subscribe to the real site feed, which might change, but to the FeedBurner feed, which stays the same and is enriched with all sorts of goodies.
  • Filosofo Home-Page Control: lets me set a particular page as the home page, and also to separate the blog to a subdirectory, even if it’s at the root level. At first, you don’t get the point, until you realize you can use WordPress to run a regular site by creating pages, then add a blog to a subdirectory later and specify that subdirectory through this plugin. In other words, you run the site pages at http://www.example.com and the blog at http://www.example.com/blog. Really, really nice.
  • Google Sitemaps: I get my lion’s share of traffic from Google, and I’m truly grateful for that. My content gets ranked toward the top in Google search results on many topics. It goes to show that quality content will make it to the top no matter if it’s produced by one person or many people. So anything that will tell the good folks at Google when I publish or change my content is at the top of my list. Imagine my joy when I found that someone put together a beauty of a plugin for WordPress that creates a Google Sitemap of all my site content and pings Google whenever I add or change that content! I was ecstatic, and I still am!
  • inlineRSS: this little plugin allows inline display of RSS feeds from virtually any source. I actually used it to display my del.icio.us bookmarks for a while, but it works with YouTube feeds as well. It won’t display photos or videos (although if you’re brave, you can tweak the XSLT file for those purposes), but if you’re just looking for a simple list of links to your latest and greatest feed items, it’ll do the trick just fine.
  • No Ping Wait: boy, oh boy did I need this plugin after I started using WordPress seriously! Because I set up WordPress to ping several services when I published a new post, the publishing process became unmanageably slow. Any hiccups in reaching a service would cause a delay when saving a post, and possibly bring everything to a stop. Well, that was no way to run a site! With this plugin, pinging is delegated to a separate process and whether it fails or not, it doesn’t affect the publishing of content. After a quick and painless install, my site ran smoothly once more, and I was grateful for it!
  • WordPress Database Backup: talk about a lifesaver! Yes, this plugin, along with Akismet, ships packaged in with WordPress, but even if it didn’t, I’d download it and install it in a heartbeat! It backs up the site database (where all of the posts, pages and comments are stored), compresses it, and either puts it in a backup directory on the server, lets you download it to your computer, or emails it to you! How cool is that! That means you and I can do periodic backups of the site, and restore from them in case anything should happen. I absolutely love it!
  • WP-Contact Form: this plugin lets you easily add a contact form to your WordPress site. Just create a contact page, paste the snippet of code that calls up the contact form code, and you’re set: you get instant functionality that your site visitors will love!
  • WPVideo: I’ve saved the best for last! This is, hands down, no contest, the easiest video plugin for WordPress! It should be packaged together with WordPress and shipped out as a standard config, that’s how easy it is to use! After it’s installed, you just tag any YouTube, Google Video or MetaCafe video link with a simple snippet, and that’s all you need do! The video automatically displays, and you can configure the display of additional data such as video title, duration, and even a download link. I’ve seen some video plugins for WordPress require you to paste special codes from the video URLs, or to use arcane tags and make ridiculous changes to core WordPress template files, but not WPVideo! No, this is the easiest video plugin for WordPress, I guarantee it!

Well, there you have it, folks! If you use WordPress and you don’t already use these plugins, by all means, give them a try, they’ll make your life a whole lot easier! As for me, by way of this post, I’m sending a big, hearty Thank You and Happy New Year to the developers who worked on these plugins. May you wonderful people have a blessed year ahead! I can’t thank you enough for your work! Oh, and if I haven’t mentioned other WordPress plugins that are doing wonders for people, I apologize. Here’s a list of all of the WP plugins. Take your pick!

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Thoughts

Romania, my country

Just got sent a PowerPoint show entitled Romania is my country. While I’m not enthralled with the music, the photos are fantastic, and that’s why I’m sharing it. Enjoy it, there are some beautiful places in there, including Medias, my home town. (Thanks, Nick!)

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Places

Impressions from Walt Disney World – Part 3

This post is a continuation of my series on Walt Disney World.

Lights, Motors, Action! is one of the shows at Disney MGM Studios. It runs only a few times a day, and it involves tightly coreographed action and stunt sequences with cars and motorcycles. The setup is that they’re filming scenes for an upcoming action movie. The truth is, they’re just trying to involve the audience a little more. I have mixed feelings about making everything seem like the movies, but I can certainly agree with this: the show and the stunts are great!

The set is built to resemble a small, Southern French town.

Marketplace

There’s an introduction, where the audience is told what to expect, then the stunts begin, with little breaks to allow the crew to set up the various scenes.

Hero and villain

Divide and conquer

Mid-air

Wheelie

Catch my drift

Jet-set

On fire

Finale

I understand the stunt drivers go through a set of tires in three days, and since the show began, they’ve worn down the pavement on the set by several inches, and it will need to be repaved. There’s also a surprise: you’ll get to see Herbie during the show!

Herbie

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Reviews

Giving thanks for innovative technology

This year, there were a handful of technology/software products that truly changed my life, and I wanted to take a little time to thank their makers publicly.

WordPressThe first, and most important, is WordPress. Without it, this site wouldn’t exist, because I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to combine the content from my various other sites into a single, easy to use collection. The WordPress motto — “a state of the art semantic personal publishing platform” — couldn’t be truer, and I’m here to attest to that. It was easy to combine content from my previous Blogger blog and two of my personal sites into what I now call ComeAcross, and it is easy, every day, to publish more content that may benefit others. That’s really the purpose of ComeAcross — sharing what I think is useful information with others — and WordPress made it possible.

Updated 1/1/08: I’ve since merged ComeAcross into Raoul Pop, which is the site you’re on right now.

GmailGmail has been another wonderful product. Although I started using it in 2005, it was this year that I really started to appreciate its features, ease of use, open standards and fantastic spam filter. The account size is more than generous, the ads are not intrusive, I love being able to label my messages, and the search feature is right on. On top of that, I can retrieve copies of my messages through the POP protocol (that’s Pop, as in my last name :-)), and make them searchable on my iMac through Spotlight.

LoudblogFinally, I’m grateful for Loudblog. It’s an open-source podcasting platform that’s fast, easy to install, and easy to use. I use it to publish my three podcasts: ComeAcross and Dignoscentia (in English and Romanian). I have to apologize because I haven’t had time to publish any podcasts recently, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate how easy Loudblog made the publishing of podcasts for me.

So there you have it, three products that have made it incredibly easier for me to publish content and communicate this year. I’m truly thankful for them, and who knows, maybe they’ll help you as well!

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