Личният блог на Роберт Иванов - My site

Преместен

nospam@example.com (Robi) — Tue, 06 May 2008 23:32:00 -0400

Много работа, ангажименти и празници тези дни

Блога вече е на нов сървър. Ако имате проблеми, пишете тук като коментар или на имейла.
И галерията е преместена. Направих и леки промени в темплейта на галерията, надявам се че промените са към по-добро

Занапред ще се опитвам да пускам и по един фотоблог пост на седмица - снимка и кратък придружаващ я пост.

Местене

nospam@example.com (Robi) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:23:19 -0400

Тези дни ще местя сайта на друг сървър, така че ще има период на недостъпност.

DMOZ listed

nospam@example.com (Robi) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:36:27 -0400

За рождения ден на блога му направих подарък и го събмитнах в директорията за български лични блогове на ДМОЗ. Приет е

Три години блогване

nospam@example.com (Robi) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 02:00:00 -0400

Преди малко повече от три години този блог се появи на бял свят. Всъщност доколко света е бял, зависи от гледната точка. Или от лентата
Да приемем, че е бял - т.е. хубав и весел. Не че само бялото е весело.

Но пък през тези 3 години аз бях основно щастлив. Което няма нищо общо с блога, а може би и има.

Блога започна на английски, после реших че ще е хубаво да си има и българска версия на написаното. Едно време беше така - всеки пост си имаше английска и българска версия. После ме домързяваше и/или нямах време и пак се върнах към английския. След това реших да премина изцяло на български. Блога ми в началото беше опит за събиране на полезна (за мен) информация - PHP, web и фотографски теми, линкове и примери. По-късно, лека по-лека си стана личен блог. И естественото нещо беше да почна да си пиша на български.

Самия блог също претърпя няколко визуални промени. Сега се е установил на темата Competition от David Cummins. Но май е време да седна и да си направя собствена тема, с хубава начална страничка и всичко там както му е реда. Имаше и период с гугъл реклами на блога, експериментирах... В момента имам само линкове от TLA, които ми се струват по-добър вариант. Вероятно и тях ще ги разкарам, когато си направя собствена тема, но дотогава да си поиграя и с този вид реклама

По една или друга причина, най-личните неща си останаха скрити за посетителя, и истински щастливите и тъжни моменти ще останат в главата ми, ако не бъдат забравени. Защото забравяме. Понякога не трябва.

Писал съм за фотографските си покупки и за снимките които съм правил. За уеб програмиране, РНР, Firefox... Тук таме за понякоя прочетена книга или музика. За интересните неща, които съм намерил в нета. За разните семинари и конференции, повечето организирани от Бого (искрено завиждам за ентусиазма му да движи хиляди проекти), на една от които и аз бях лектор
Споменавах за част от личните ми проекти (които все още си чакат реализацията и даже към TODO списъка само добавям други проекти, които би било хубаво да направя )

С моето израстване, израства и блога ми. Или обратното, няма значение

Понякога пиша повече, понякога по-малко, но блогването стана част от мен

приятно четене,
Роби

Блога пораснал и е вече на три години

nospam@example.com (Robi) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 03:22:00 -0500

Някак си тихо и без да се обади, мина още една година на блога ми.

Точно преди 3 години написах първия пост. Сега искам само да му честитя третата годишнина, а един по-дълъг пост по темата ще дойде тези дни

Интересни ключови думи

nospam@example.com (Robi) — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 09:28:53 -0400

Ето някои интересни търсения с които хората са попадали на някой мой сайт:

what is robert in cyrillic? - скоро обяснявах в блога, че не съм Робърт, а Роберт, интересно че търсят подобно нещо
download hitchhiker's guide - някой явно е решил да попътува на стоп
i like my old nude photo - без коментар
gold farming - и аз искам - засаждаш един грам злато, на есента береш кило
печалба сайт - успех!
да измамим банка - Ц, ц, ц. Лошо!
раифаизен банк клонове - името на тази банка трябва да се българизира! винаги се чудя как се пише
плаща ли се за собствен сайт - охохооо, плаща се и още как. на следния ИБАН: хххх БИК: .... ххххх
z-rock bulgaria - Зи РОК РОКС! Има и много подобни търсения - радвам ме че хората разбират от музика
interesting personal blogs - благодаря на търсачката
my site - ноуп, ит из МАЙ САЙТ, лол
akademic+blog - в голяма грешка сте
beautiful links - още веднъж мерсаж на търсачката
good morning - добро утро и на теб (имам снимка с такова име - доста пъти крадната за бекграунди на сайтове от майспейс и подобни)
personal photographers for people in orlando florida - абе ако ми покрият пътните и джобните, снимането без пари
късметлия - радвам се за теб
nude cleaners - без коментар, отново

тези бяха някои по-интересни. има и доста за фотография, блогове, българия, цариброд, глен хюз, снимки ...

Спам

nospam@example.com (Robi) — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 09:13:20 -0400

За вебмаил ползвам гоогле аппс фор йоур домейн - голяма грешка... Преминах към тях уж защото хубаво филтрират спама и защото имат достатъчно място., а и няма да се занимавам със мейл сървъри, антиспамове, рДНС-и, СПФ-та, блек листи и подобни.

Да, ама не.

Вече от около един месец, всеки ден имам в инбокса по около 80-100-на спама. На този и на официалния ми гугъловски мейл. Някой ми е набарал мейлите и явно ги продава на форуми, защото 99% от спама който минава гугъл филтрите изглежда така: Уелкъм ту 'еди какви си' форумс, клик тука за да си активираш акаунта.
Има и български и сръбски и руски и френски и някакви йероглифи ... Стига вече!
Хайде, да допуснем че няма как да ги хване тях, но инбокса ми става неизползваем, особено след като ползвам поп3 и след една седмица влезна в вебмейла там е хаос. Тъндербърда, между другото се справя горе-долу и чисти доста добре.
Но, да приемем, че няма безплатна уеб поща без спам, па била тя и на Гугъл. Но, това което не мога да им простя е че в спам ми отиват някои истински и важни писма. Хората си пращат от легални сървъри, писал съм си с тях преди итн. Тъпотия ....

Скоро ще си се върна на собствен мейл сървър, пък Гугъл да си гледат работата ...

И, като казах собствен мейл сървър - имам един сайт, чийто мейли попадат във гугъл спам фолдера. Има рДНС-и, СПФ-та, не е спамил, не е блеклистнато ИП-то. Ако има някой админ който да иска да види хедъри или нещо да пише тук.

Тъй като съм в добро настроение, да завърша с добрата новина

Преди около 11 месеца активирах Акисмет плъгина на серендипити-то. Оттогава спама на блога намаля до 1-2 на седмица, което е доста поносимо Ако някой ми е писал, но коментара му не е одобрен, то или той е ползвал неприличен език или спам филтрите на блога са се излъгали и автоматично са го блокирали. Гледам си аз сега в базата. От тогава насам има 703 659 блокирани коментара! Това прави средно по около 2132,3 блокирани коментара на ден! Без коментар!

microstock-bg.com

nospam@example.com (Robi) — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 04:45:52 -0400

I have started microstock-bg.com - a place for bulgarian stock photographers. If you understand bulgarian, come and join us.

For my english speaking readers, I suggest: Microstock - great opportunity or just for fun article on photography-reviews.com.

заповядайте
http://www.microstock-bg.com/

Serendipity :: how to highlight owners comment

nospam@example.com (Robi) — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 23:35:31 -0400

As always, you can read more about blog engine I am using at: s9y.org. It is written in PHP, uses SMARTY, and works with MySQL and PostgreSQL, provides OOP-plugin API and is translated into 26 languages, with native encoding and utf8 support. s9y is written by Garvin Hicking and is licenced under BSD licence. I am very satisfied with it, even if there are times, when I say: Hm, I should develop my own blog. Yeah, right

What I like so much about it, is that it has really good coding conventions, nice file and logic structure. It also has SPARTACUS (Serendipity Plugin And Repository Tool Access Customization/Unification System). It is one plugin the rules them all SPARTACUS is something with which you can check which plugins are available, what they do, install them, uninstall the ones that you don't like. And all this from your administration panel, and without opening other sites or starting FTP client. IMHO this is the way all plugin systems should work. s9y has themes (different templates which you can use to change the look of your blog), about 120 plugins available and much more. There are templates which are table based and ones that hold on DIVs, plugins that use ajax, and ones that utilize only the proven concepts. It is up to you to choose what to use. It is very secure project - and its high security threads are very little and usually related to flaws in PHP, PEAR or other 3rd party software.

Of course, if you want to dig into its code and change something the way you want it to be - there are tutorials and documentations available. Even without them, it should be easy to do simple tasks. And, you can always take a look at some plugin and tweak it, so that it suits your need.

One of things that is really important when we talk about open source projects is community. s9y has big and growing community of users and contributors. So, if you have some question or problem, go to s9y forums and check if the answer is already there (it usually is, just use search).

Few days ago, I decided to add one nice feature to my blog. I wanted my comment to stand out from comments of others. I googled a little, just to find out that the competition has plugin (actually, it is more a hack, than plugin) for the purpose. So, I checked with SPARTACUS if there is something similar in s9y. Hm, no. My next move are the forums. I asked there and in about 10 minutes I received an answer. s9y actually already has this builtin, no need for plugins. (hm, I should have first checked my s9y installation). So, what s9y does is this: names of the user with which I comment are: Robert Ivanov. So, when I create a comment, s9y adds class serendipity_comment_author_Robert-Ivanov to the comment div. All I had to do is to add such class in site CSS and I was ready to go. You can see the results in comments to this entry.

s9y installation is very easy, but if you don't want to bother with it, you can check the supersized free s9y hosting. What else can you ask for?

Happy blogging

New category: CC music

nospam@example.com (Robi) — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:07:39 -0400

I just added new category for my entries. It is called CC Music, and I will post here about music under Creative Commons license.
Unlike other posts on this blog, all posts in this category are licensed under
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Testing feedburner

nospam@example.com (Robi) — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:34:59 -0400

I decided to try feedburner service.

So, if you are experiencing any difficulties with my RSS feed - let me know. Thanks

200th post and some statistics

nospam@example.com (Robi) — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 23:29:39 -0400

This is the 200th post in my blog. I reached this number for a little more than 2 years.

Here are some statistics from s9y statistics plugin (not including this post):

Statistics

First entry: Friday, February 25. 2005 19:02
Last entry: Wednesday, March 21. 2007 22:03
Total entries: 199 entries
Categories: 5 categories
Distribution of entries
Received comments: 121 comment(s)
Most frequently commented entries
Most frequently commenting people
Subscribers: 19 subscriber(s)
Most frequently subscribed entries
Received trackbacks: 6 trackback(s)
Most frequently trackbacked entires
estimated comments per entry: 0.59 comments/entries
estimated trackbacks per entry: 0.03 trackbacks/entry
estimated entries per day: 0.26 entries/day
estimated entries per week: 1.85 entries/week
estimated entries per month: 8.18 entries/month
Total amount of characters: 188741 characters
Characters per entry: 948.45 chars/entry
The 5 longest entries

Top visited articles

Forex Trading - Information Guide: 7371 visits
Lukoil Akademic vs Bree 79:76 - photos: 4324 visits
Serendipity reloaded: 4291 visits
Digital Photo-Video Magazine - first issue: 4280 visits
Portrait of the visitor from the past: 3872 visits

Top karma-voted articles

Christmas Salsa Party - Sofia, Bulgaria: 166 votes
What Linux distribution do you suggest: 162 votes
Happy Holidays: 152 votes
Some cuba, latino photos: 151 votes
Microsoft Windows Vista voice recognition: 150 votes

To bulgarian readers

nospam@example.com (Robi) — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 22:12:41 -0500

To bulgarian readers:

Съжалявам, че напоследък пиша само на английски. Не остава време да пиша и на английски и на български

Почвам лека-полека да превеждам старите неща, надявам се скоро да наваксам.

Също така, махам Google рекламите за тези които разглеждат сайта на Български

Two years of blogging

nospam@example.com (Robi) — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 02:11:57 -0500

On February 25^th 2005, I wrote my first post in this blog. Two years layer I think that it definitelly was a good thing for me. This will be 192^nd post.

I am sometimes asked why I blog. Let me explain some aspects of the answer:

first, I like doing it
I speak about me, and I found similar people all over the world (I have few friends, who found me through this blog - they are from Canada, UK, China and Germany). Of course, allow me to also mention readers from Balkan countries. Thanks to all of you for being here.
I keep some links, thoughts and ideas in one place (and yes, not everything is published)
I exercise my english

truly yours,
Robert Ivanov

ReviewMe - interesting (and profitable?) service for bloggers

nospam@example.com (Robi) — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 08:24:36 -0500

This post is sponsored by ReviewMe.

Few days ago, I saw in my RSS agregator article about ReviewMe. The article stated that this is a new way of getting some revenue from your blog, and I decided to try it.

Read the rest of this article to find out more about this cool thing.

Here is how I see their service so far.

The homepage has simple design and very clear information about what this is about. There were two options: for advertisers and bloggers. Since I am at the second group, I clicked the second link. Actually, I just opened the site in IE and saw that there are some differences with renderings in site CSS depending on which browser you are using. They should fix that.

Next screen is a simple description in four steps of how it works. So far, so good. I like minimalistic texts and I like those two sentences:

You will be paid $20.00 to $200.00 for each completed review that you post on your site.
Sign up as a blogger at ReviewMe and you will immediately have the opportunity to earn cash by reviewing ReviewMe itself!

Nice! This means that in the worst case, I will earn 20$ just for signing up and writing review about them. And, yes, the registration is free.

The registration went normal. The only problem I saw there is that they are paying via Paypal or check. I would prefer MoneyBookers, they are accepted in whole world and are good solution for those of us not living in those 35 countries which can receive money from Paypal. I know some of my friends are receiving checks from microstock sites, and it was a real pain to wait for the check to come (and not been loosed), and wait another 45 days for it to be cached. Most of them are now using MoneyBookers, and they say that it is a bless. Other suggestion is to use 2CO, since they send money worldwide.

After registering, and logging in - you can add your blog. You can add up to 6 blogs. The menu title says Submit a Blog, but the page itself contains: You may only have up to 6 active sites. I suppose that you might add site which is not a blog, but the home page also wanted bloggers, so - I am not sure. Also, keep in mind that RSS feed is required, too. If your site has bloglike structure and has some rank on technorati, maybe you can give it a shot. Luckily for me, I own a blog (actually two), so it was no problem for me.

After you submit your blog, it is automatically checked for its rank at Alexa, Technorati and estimated number of RSS readers. I am not sure how the last one is determined, but I got lowest rank at it, and because of that - my whole site has been ranked with one star (out of 5). It is interesting (no, it is bad), that I could not check my rankings on their site from my interface. I had to find my site from the list of all blogs and then I could see its stats - no link to this page from my admin. This is page that I usually call 'view your profile' and it often is missing, even if I find it very useful.

I hoped to achieve at least two stars, so I was kind of disappointed. I also hoped that they will count Google PageRank, too. Level one means that one review is 40$ for advertiser, 50% of which will go to ReviewMe. Hm, it looks like a great piece of the cake, but I don't mind as long as this thing is giving me products to review. And, the blogged is rechecked for new rankings every month, so it might be only better. Never mind, going further ... I tried to add my second blog called photography-reviews, but the system said that it was not popular enough, so I should try few months later. For the first time on their site, I saw that there is a limit which blog should fulfill. I must agree that photography reviews is not very popular (still), and I was also happy to see that they are not receiving ALL blogs, since this would be equal to suicide. Advertisers would run away, and their database will be full with useless blogs. So, this is a good thing.

I read the FAQs and some other texts on the site. And, after that, there was not much more what I should do. I should wait for the advertiser to choose my blog and request a review of his product/site/whatever (oh, yes, this is the idea of ReviewMe). After some clicking on site interface, I finally noticed that their image-banner-like promotion saying: $25 000 giveaway had alt text attached to it. The text was:

When you are accepted as a blogger by ReviewMe, your first review offer will come from ReviewMe itself. We will keep ordering reviews from new bloggers until we have payed out $25 000!

I have to admit, that they did great job there - I am certain that word about this money giving site is spreading all over the world of blogs. And, after all, that is how I found them. I clicked on the banner-like thing (I usually don't click on banners - I just don't see them. In this case, this was a bad thing) and received the review request. Whew, luckily for me, they have not payed out the whole sum and it looks like my first review came earlier than I expected. Cool. I have 48 hours to write this review (which is almost done).

Some final thoughts:

I would like Moneybookers, or at least 2CO.
It looks that the only criteria for the review is the minimum of 200 words. I think that there should be more things to look for. Like originality of the review, its approach, in-depth analysis ...
Affiliate program would be nice
Also, once you register, there is nothing you can do to get clients. It would be nice if we could also search for publishers. At the moment they are the active members, they can search or browse by using tags. I expect to see number of registered bloggers rapidly growing, so it might be problem for smaller sites. Or not, depending on advertiser' budget.

# It will be interesting for me to see Successful stories from some publishers. I have some product or two which might need reviews. My idea was to use AdWords for traffic, but this is also interesting. Of course, both can be used, but it will be interesting to see where this will go.

I can say that it looks like potentially good service. If the advertisers buy it - it will be great one.