Month: July 2008

My problem with community sites

How does it feel to post your artwork on deviantArt, your photos or thoughts on Tumblr, or just a blogpost on the sphere, when you know that no one is interested, you can write whatever you want, you could announce that you invented the cold fusion engine, and minimized it so that it fits into your pocket, no one would read you, simply because they don’t know you are there. There are so many people on these places, that you need more than one out of the following: huge luck (for some editor or a famous blogger to stumble upon your activity), extreme patience (to constantly post your works, however tiring that may be, and wait for the people to slowly realise who you are), lot of free time (to go around the sphere finding interesting people and starting to follow them or comment on their posts, hoping that they’ll come back to you to return the favour—note, this is the best way to do it, though it needs loads of devotion) or loads of friends or fans beforehand (if you’re a successful blogger or artist before joining a site where a couple of your readers is present, then you won’t have to wait a minute to receive a comment on whatever you did). Regarding the last few words of the parentheses: the most annoying thing is when you do your best and write or draw or photo really high quality stuff, any no one pays attention because some “popular person” just pooped in his hat. It’s just annoying. You can’t (shouldn’t) spend all your time before the screen just so that you’ll get a couple more visitors, and a bit of appreciation for your work.


new dot facebook dot com

To be honest, i’m not that huge fan of Facebook, but i’m registered ever since my american exchange partner invited me. I wasn’t using it much, so i’m not familiar with it’s deeper functioning, but i’ve read that there’s a new version available, at least the layout is new, and it’s available at new.facebook.com. I decided to check it out, but except for a couple of changes in the layout, i couldn’t see much change. There’s a new bar at the top and the bottom of the page, the bottom one being the more important, displaying how many of your friends are online, your notifications and a popup chat. The Wall got a lot bigger space on the profile page, and somehow all the applications that took up so much disappeared (may be they are not yet running on the “new Facebook”), just a couple is squeezed into the left sidebar. The home page didn’t really change, the left column disappeared and thus the page became a two-column design, which results in a somewhat better look. But the main design, the colours and basically everything else remained just the same. I’ve got the feeling that they’re either going to change a lot more in the future, or they’re afraid that their users won’t be able to get used to the new interface if it changed too much—which is a real danger, seeing the average performance of community site users. If anyone else has a different opinion, or was using Facebook more than i, feel free to write your opinions.


Halál

Gondolatfolyam, elolvasni csak saját felelősségre. Utoljára tavaly ősszel írtam valami ilyesmit, de akkor se publikáltam. Amit igen, az közelében se járt ennek. Csak saját felelősségre, de ha elolvasod, úgyse fogsz tudni hozzászólni.


Layout

I’m into layouts nowadays, it seems. I’ll write the promised two posts on the layout and/or version changes of those big sites, but now i’m just announcing that the possibly final layout of the next blog version is ready, more or less. Rather less, since i’ve only done a graphic design of it, haven’t tried to implement it into html as of yet, but it won’t be hard, because this one’s simple, but–at least in my opinion—looks great. While working on it, i realised that if i’ll have a tag system instead of or beside the categories, then the tags should echo the actual content of the post, which in many cases would mean that a tag should be present in more than one language. That’d be quite troublesome, but i think i’ll manage to figure out some resolution (such as multi-lingual tags, same id, different language, a simple double unique key in the database). One question: should the next blog remain in english (i mean the website itself, not the content) or should i rather do it in hungarian (or—don’t choose this, because that’d be loads of work—should i make a multi-lingual interface)? Is there anyone out there reading me, who doesn’t know hungarian?


deviantArt v6

Ettől hangos most a dA, és nem is ok nélkül. Az új verzió bizony legalább akkora változásokat hozott a kedvenc művészoldalamnál, mint a last.fm-nél. Először csak azt hittem, hogy valami apróbb dizájnátrajzolás történt, aztán jobban megnéztem, és minden megváltozott. A fent linkelt cikkben ők elmondják a leglényegesebbeket, így nekem csak azt kell leírnom, amit akarok, nem mindent.

Igazság szerint valószínűleg egy cseppet lemaradtam a hatos változat indításáról, mert amióta a hármas tűzrókával lesem a netet, azóta mindig a legutóbbi lapokkal nyitok, így a korábbi kezdőlapomat (a deviantArtot) szinte soha nem is látom már. Magamtól ugyanis ritkán járok arra. A színek ugyanazok maradtak, a szinte már márkajelnek számító matt-zöld árnyalat, amit ha máshol látunk, az kapásból dA koppintásnak számít. Viszont az ötösnél még sokkal sokkal több lett az ajaxos elem, így a hatos dA már egy vérbeli webkettes oldal, mindenféle királyságos drag’n’drop és hasonló jóval megáldva, amitől szinte már az az érzésem támad, hogy nem is egy weboldalt, hanem valami asztali alkalmazást nézek. Ott még mondjuk nem tartunk, hogy a főoldalon a legfrissebb képek maguktól frissüljenek, de ennek másodpercenként sok új képnél nem is lenne értelme, inkább csak zavaró lenne. Bár egy “Refresh newest” gombot el tudnék fogadni valamelyik sarokba, ami csendesen ajaxal lehívná az aktuális legfrissebbeket.


Esti napló

Nem vagyok én holmi emegyes vagy dunatévés műsor, csak egyszerűen nincs holmi értelmes téma amiről írhatnék (pontosabban van, csak túlságosan fáradt vagyok most ahhoz, hogy a Facebook vagy a deviantArt újrarajzolásáról írjak), plusz még fáradt is vagyok (ja hogy ez már volt?), így hát naplózok.

Reggel keltem, tizenegyig olvasgattam blogokat (írtam is, ha még nem tűnt volna föl), meg hírportálok címein is végigszaladtam, hátha van valami érdekes (de persze semmi extrém), aztán tizenegytől úgy egyig atyám egy színdarabját javítottam (helyesírás, tördelés, satöbbi), aztán ebédeltem, a júliusi GameStart olvasgattam (ez is ritkán esik meg), majd háromra leugrottam a “Sederbider-lakótelepre” az angoltanárnőmnek helyrepofozni a gépét (valami csúnya gonosz-ware-t kapott szegény), amivel eljátszadoztam úgy fél hatig, amikor elkocsikáztam édesanyámért, hazakocsikáztam, blogokat olvastam meg a nap közben felgyülemlett híreket, majd hatalmasat vacsoráztam, azóta meg itt punnyadok, blogokat olvasok, plörkölök, csetelek. Ezt a bejegyzést meg úgy írtam, hogy hátha nem tűnik föl senkinek, milyen zsibbadt vagyok.


Redesigns

I’m lagging behind the great ones… But i’m not interested (i think i’m becoming somewhat of a nihilist, seeing my attitude towards most matters)—or rather say i am, but no way would i hurry to catch up just so that i’d be “up to date”. Especially since the sites i’m talking about, the ones having had a redesign nowadays are really giants: deviantArt, last.fm and Facebook. In my opinion last.fm changed the most… Not only did they switch to a new layout, but also changed lots on the system itself. There’s a lot of debate going on whether or not the new layout is better than the previous one—it’s very different for sure. Those who used the old layout for a long time will need a bit of time to get used to this new one—and what’s strange, it seems that new users too, which i think indicates that something’s not really alright with this new design. Skip (this reminds me of “Mother’s” telegram in the Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4: “ADRIAN STOP COMING HOME STOP”, and the poor boy starts wondering why should he “stop coming home”). There is a new (?) feature called Library, which is a great idea in my opinion, instead of (but not replacing) all those relatively ugly charts with much more usable, good-looking mosaic. The event handling didn’t change much, only it’s not always that evident where and what should i click. (Summary.) Though the layout’s not the best choice ever made, i think the new version worth it. I at least like it and will go on using last.fm as long as it’s there and free. (Yeah, i haven’t written about dA and Facebook, those are coming in a later post.)


Előző életemben denevér voltam…

Ez is egy EFOTT-os történet… A kempingben ugyanis minden reggel nyolc-kilenc körül (tehát a legaktívabb és legmélyebb alvás idején) felhangzott Péterfy Bori örök érvényű (?) slágere, a Vámpír, egy vicces legény meg néhány hasonlóan vicces vokalista (ezt a szót a FireFox helyesírás-ellenőrzője alácakkozta, hogy nem ismeri, és felajánlotta helyette – többek között – a vodkalistát) leányka jóvoltából, csak úgy ébresztőnek. Onnantól kezdve, ha az uszodában, a fesztiválbuszon, kocsmákban vagy egyáltalán akárhol valaki elkezdte dúdolni, énekelni azt, hogy…

Előző életemben denevér voltam
Nappal aludtam, éjjel éltem én
Vakon repültem, de rád találtam
Megharaplak, mert a véred az enyém

Hova harapok most beléd titokban?
Meleg vér folyik lassan a nyakadra
Mert nincs ma más, csak vérszívás
Semmi csábítás, mert úgysem kell belőled más

Péterfy Bori & Love Band

Onnantól kezdve teljes együttérzésben volt része az illetőnek, mondhatnám, hogy a kempingezők közti összetartás szimbóluma lett a mindennap reggeli ébresztő. Egyébként volt Péterfy Bori koncert, ott voltam, és jelentem, jó volt. Bár lettem volna Amorfon is, amíg még lehetett! Anno a Nightwish-el voltam ugyanígy, amikor Tarját kidobták…


Blogs and ufos

I almost forgot, but an article about recent ufo appearances over Wales and Texas reminded me of something i’ve seen last friday. I was sunbathing at the swimming pool looking at the bright-white clouds when i noticed a small object moving among them. It was like an airplane, except it had no wings and had no contrail, which most planes have—this could be still explained with the huge wind up there and that the plane might have been turning so that i couldn’t see the wings (except it seemed to be moving straight). Then my reason called a second option: it seemed like a rocket, but then again without a contrail, and what would a rocket do above hungary? I thought of calling the air control centre or whatever, but dropped that idea, since i bet they wouldn’t tell me anything anyway. So most probably i’ve seen an ufo in the sky over Dunaújváros, around 1:05 pm on the 18th of july, 2008. If you don’t believe, provide any other explanation, i won’t be disillusioned.

I gave up reading over 300 blog entries gathered in the past three weeks, and decided to rather read them tomorrow… At least some of them. Today i dug through about just as much news posts, that’s the reason i haven’t reappeared commenting on blogs. Tomorrow. I’m dead sleepy anyway…


Burn, burn, burn

It was so fun to lay down and be browned dark by the sun in that week from 9-16 this month i spent with my family by the lake Balaton. It was good as usual, only the weather could’ve been better for a few days, when it was either just cloudy and windy (at least then we could go out to the beach and fly my kite, which in the strong wind was much fun) or in worse cases even rained, when we had no other chance than to sit in the hotel room reading or watching telly or just sleeping twice as much a day than usual. When the weather was good enough, after waking up around nine and eating breakfast, we went down to the beach to sunbathe, or to have fun in the water, playing or whatever (frisbee is fun in water). I usually had lunch around three after noon, after which i played chess with my little brother. At about six we ate dinner. After that there were a couple of choices. Either went down to the beach for an afternoon splash in the water, or had a walk in town, down the beach, or we went in town roller-skating. Monday i had to go to Budapest for my interview for the japanese scholarship (luckily the weather wasn’t that good that day, so i didn’t miss much), which i really enjoy: though i had to introduce myself in japanese (that didn’t go that well, i haven’t practised japanese for more than half a year now) i had a good talk with the interviewer—i learned that i got a top score of a little bit more than 50% on the written test. I think i could’ve received the official results by now via e-mail, but up till now i didn’t have time to check…