I’m proud to annouce that I’m more or less done with the long promised fine-tuning of this blog The changes are rather under the hood and will hopefully provide a better reading experience I basically used the whole day in order to change and ugrade the blog. One of the most visible changes is the new layout in the categories section. I have to say that I knew right from the day I installed this theme that I wanted the categories section to look different but it took me quite a while to figure out, which screws I had to turn… Now it looks the way I intended it right from the beginning Morevoer, each category has now its own RSS-feed! In case you wonder why that is big news: For example, if you don’t understand german, simply use the “English” category feed and you’ll only get my posts in english Or if you like to know what I’m doing here in India but really don’t want to hear about german politics – there’s now a feed for you I think that’s great and hope you’ll use it. Little side effects are the new RSS and Twitter buttons in the right sidebar as well as the Tag Cloud. I wasn’t aware of the fact that clicking on a tag would result in a broken layout… Now that’s fixed Moreover I changed the way I’ll handle photos from now on as I explained in this post These are only a few of the changes but I hope you’ll like them. I’m always happy about a comment on what to improve or change, so feel free to tell me what you think

Enjoy your day,

Strothi

since I started this blog I tried several different methods to use photos. First I stored them locally on my server and used the MyGallery plugin to implement them into this blog. But the process of uploading, editing and using the pics was rather uncomfortable When I got MobileMe I thought to use the service not only for mail but as well for pictures, but that wasn’t the solution. While the presentation of the pics is really awesome as well as the integration with Aperture, my photo program of choice, the implementation of MobileMe into this blog sucks! Thus, pictures are there but rarely seen. No tagging is possible, no description can be given and even worse, the pics can not be used in a post on this blog.

So I ended up doing some research over the last couple of days in order to find a fast, reliable picture service that can be integrated into this blog as well as into my workflow, thus has an Aperture plugin. I ended up comparing the well known Flickr with SmugMug and finally went for the later. (A good comparisons on both services can be found here ) It just feels right and my experiences with it are so far really great. I’m absolutely stunned by the performance of the uploading process (from India with slow connection, it’s WAY faster then the MobileMe upload took back home in Berlin)… It costs a few bucks but I’m willing to pay for quality and thus this is no big deal. Especially if you move over from Flickr (or say so), you get 50% rebate on the first year To conclude, I’m quite happy with smugmug and hope that everything works out the way I hope for. The old MyGallery pics will remain here as well as the pics on MobileMe, but from now on I’ll only use SmugMug

Take care, Strothi

welcome on my blog. I’m actually about to change a lot within the next couple of days so you might see a lot of new things around here. While I will post in English what I consider personal or of interest for international readers, especially bearing in mind the upcoming election in Germany I will post local and national stuff in German. My focus will be on environmental- or internet-related issues as well as on local stuff and thus I will try to inform you a bit about the things I’m daily reading and or dealing with. I hope you’ll enjoy the new layout and approach.

Take care, Strothi