Translatum.gr on ET1 (Hellenic National Television)

Spiros Doikas (translatum founder) invited to Psifiaki Ellada ("Digital Greece" a weekly TV programme about the Internet and technology by the channel ET1 of the Hellenic National Television) and interviewed by Nikos Vasilakos (as seen on ΕΤ1, 1st December 2008, 18.00-19.00).

How to embed your facebook profile on your web site

1. Go to your profile and scroll down to the bottom of the page.
2. Click on Create a profile badge
3. Follow the procedure to create badge by selecting the items you want included (i.e. picture, screen name, notes, etc)
4. Click Save
5. Copy the code that will appear and paste it on your web site. (You can see my code below).

What is a badge?

Badges are a customizable way to share your Facebook information on other web sites. Put your badge on a site and it will be automatically updated and visible to anyone (even non-Facebook users).

DTE 2008, μοντέλα, αυτοκίνητα και ντίσκο... ε τι άλλο;

Καθυστερημένα λοιπόν, μερικά σχόλια και φωτογραφίες από τη DTE 2008.

Κατ' αρχάς, για πολλοστή φορά μένω άναυδος από την έλλειψη δωρεάν ασύρματου ίντερνετ για τους επισκέπτες και τους εκθέτες (οι εκθέτες έπρεπε να πληρώσουν επιπλέον 150 ευρώ για να έχουν πρόσβαση στο Διαδίκτυο!). Είναι συγκλονιστικό να πηγαίνει κανείς σε μία από τις σημαντικότερες εκδηλώσεις πληροφορικής στην Ελλάδα και να μην υπάρχει δωρεάν ασύρματη δικτύωση! Είναι σαν να λέμε, πάμε σε γιορτή μπύρας, αλλά παιδιά, μπύρα δεν έχουμε, καλά, έχουμε μερικά βαρέλια, αλλά όχι για όλους.

Η φασαρία στον χώρο ήταν τόσο μεγάλη, που υπήρχαν στιγμές που νόμιζα ότι επρόκειτο για έκθεση εξοπλισμού για ντισκοτέκ (δεν αστειεύομαι καθόλου, αν κοιτάξετε τις φωτογραφίες θα δείτε περίπτερα με DJ set). Στον κάτω όροφο βέβαια, γινόταν έκθεση εξοπλισμού ήχου (δεν πήγα, με κάλυψε ο όροφος της πληροφορικής). Επίσης, μια καλογυαλισμένη, μαύρη (παράνομα παρκαρισμένη) Maserati, υπενθύμιζε με σαφή και αποστομωτικό τρόπο ότι βρισκόμαστε, αν μη τι άλλο, σε έκθεση πληροφορικής.

Categories for your blogger posts (labels)

You want to categorize your posts and have a list of categories on your blogger blog? Dead easy.

1. Log in to your account.
2. Go to Layout -> Page Elements
3. Click Add a Gadget
4. Add Labels
5. Edit your old posts, and add labels at the bottom.
6. The list of labels (you can rename them to categories) will appear on your blog automatically.

Changing the case of blogger article tags (labels)

You have added your tags nicely but one day you discover a horrifying discrepancy: you meant to have all your tags start with a capital letter, but a couple of them start with lowercase. So what do you do?

You go to each post, edit it, and change the lowercase letter to capital. Does it work?
No.

The solution? Simple.

1. Simply delete the offensive tags from the posts concerned.
2. Once you have deleted all the offensive tags from all posts concerned, edit again those posts, and add the tag with a capital letter.

Check out my labels, they are all lowercase, right? Well, they were not always...

Coppermine bridge with Joomla and frontpage module

Added coppermine and mehdi bridge for art-teachers.com and completed the digitizing and posting of issues 2 + 3 of the magazine (issues 1-3 are sold out and hence hitherto unavailable).

Used following modules:
Mehdi joomla coppermine bridge
mod_ExtCoppermine - shows pictures from Coppermine

Adding social bookmarking to blogger posts

There is a nice free service called Addthis

If you want to include the button below each post in blogger (as it appears on this site), select Template -> Edit HTML, then copy-and-paste the code below into the template, right after the following tag.

<div class="post-footer">

Note: be sure to check the 'Expand Widget Templates' checkbox first. When you are done, click 'Save Template'.

If you can't find the tag, copy the template code into a text editor (e.g. Notepad, etc), and search for the 'post-footer' string. You might also want to save a copy of the original template before changing it.

Important: Addthis might recommend to add the script automatically as a widget. Do not do it as it will not work.

How do I identify the source of my spam emails?

How to identify the source of your spam emails. Below you can see your IP and where you are now. If you paste someone else's IP, it will show on the map where they are. So nobody can say they are in Timbuktu, when in fact, they are in Athens.

Some tutorials follow.

Log in anywhere with a single user name and password - OpenID!

What is OpenID?

OpenID is a decentralized single sign-on system. Using OpenID-enabled sites, web users do not need to remember traditional authentication tokens such as username and password. Instead, they only need to be previously registered on a website with an OpenID "identity provider" (IdP). Since OpenID is decentralized, any website can employ OpenID software as a way for users to sign in; OpenID solves the problem without relying on any centralized website to confirm digital identity.

How do I get an OpenID?

Surprise! You may already have one. If you use any of the following services, you already have your own OpenID:

AOL
openid.aol.com/screenname
LiveDoor
profile.livedoor.com/username
LiveJournal
username.livejournal.com
Orange (France Telecom)
http://openid.orange.fr/
SmugMug
username.smugmug.com
Technorati
technorati.com/people/technorati/username
Vox
member.vox.com
WordPress.com
username.wordpress.com

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID
http://openid.net/
http://wiki.openid.net/OpenIDServers

SMF showing Greek accented capitals in default theme

The following bit of css code creates a problem with Greek in SMF's default them. Capitals in Greek should not be accented and the default theme turns to uppercase the menu text which on the language file it is entered with lowercase. If the accents in the language file are removed, then the other themes which do not capitalize, will appear without accents and with lowercase, which is, again, wrong.

So, what is the solution? Simple, you open the style.css file of the default theme, and you delete all instances of:

text-transform: uppercase;

/* definitions for the main tab, active means the tab reflects which page is displayed */

.maintab_first, .maintab_back, .maintab_last, .maintab_active_first, .maintab_active_back, .maintab_active_last

{

   background-position: left bottom;
   color: white;
   text-transform: uppercase;
   vertical-align: top;

}

Blogger: How to limit the number of posts per page

1. Log into your blog and in dashboard, click on settings.
2. Click on formatting and on the first setting is show option which is the place where you can limit by posts or days.
3. Be sure to scroll down the end of page and hit save settings before you view your blog page.

Remove the blogger bar (navbar)

You can hide the Blogger NavBar by following these instructions:

• Log in to blogger
• Select Layout on your Dashboard.
• Go to the Template tab.
• Click Edit HTML.
• Under the Edit Template section you will see you blog's HTML.
• Paste this CSS definition in the top of the template code:

<b:skin><![CDATA[/*
-----------------------------------------------
Blogger Template Style
Name:     Rounders
Designer: Douglas Bowman
URL:      www.stopdesign.com
Date:     27 Feb 2004
Updated by: Blogger Team
----------------------------------------------- */

#navbar-iframe {
  display: none !important;
}

/* Variable definitions
 ====================
  <Variable name="mainBgColor" description="Main Background Color"
            type="color" default="#fff" value="#ffffff">
  <Variable name="mainTextColor" description="Text Color" type="color"
            default="#333" value="#333333">
  ...

Remove the code to show it again.

Your page has one encoding but your form does not like it?

Forms are funny creatures. They inherit their encoding from the encoding declared in our web page.

Sometimes however, we are not happy with our web page's inherent encoding as the results that come up when our form is posted fail short of our expectations.

Let's take a specific scenario. You have a web page with UTF-8 encoding and a search form directing to a web site with Windows-1253 encoding. What happens when you post the query αγάπη in Greek?

You get something like this:
αγάπη

You send love, and you get gibberish. Now, this is not fair, is it?

But apparently, there is a solution to that. You can add a little parameter to the form, instructing it to send the query in a different encoding. So for example my form was like this:

<form action="http://www.blab.com" method="get" target="_blank">

and after it was like this:

<form action="http://www.blah.com" method="get" enctype="multipart/form-data" accept-charset="Windows-1253" target="_blank">

In other words, you have to add the character set of your desire (matching the destination page encoding) by adding this little bit of code

enctype="multipart/form-data" accept-charset="Windows-1253"


Lets see the two forms (search for the word αγάπη):

The one without the unicode instruction:

The one with the unicode instruction: