I’m gonna confess something to you, dear readers.

I try too hard not to be a pirate these days. Really.

And by pirate, I don’t really mean trying hard not to talk like lovely mr. Johnny Depp. I’m finding myself more and more trying to find legal ways to get access to music that I love.

One of my latest loves conveniences is Spotify. Really, it’s a music lover’s dream come true, such a great app and great potential. I’m more than willing to pay those 10 euros each month to have access to music I love – but I can’t. Why? My country copyright laws don’t permit it.

I’d also probably pay for movie and movie rentals through an interface like iTunes store. Same story. I can’t.

It does sound insane, doesn’t it? Willing to actually pay (even indirectly) companies to listen to music legally, just because it all gets so convenient and direct after all.

But companies and company policies, being the absolute pain in the ass they are, don’t let me.

How delightfully ironic, if I may say.

All my legal self can hope for is a similar to Spotify model for the iTunes Store, also available to Greece. Some kind of monthly fee with unlimited access to music. Now that, hell I’d pay! Especially for bands and people I love so much. Portishead. UNKLE. Archive. Placebo. Muse. Thievery Corporation.

Till then, sorry chéris, I’ll find other ways to get access to great music and buy illegal Spotify passes through e-bay, alright.

A great pic by juhansonin

Traveling to France was one of my childhood dreams.

I think every little girl that grows up with romantic visions of Paris in her head feels like that. Six years of awesome french lessons with Mme Angèlique didn’t help either – I always wanted to go to France and I wanted it bad.

This year, after a series of unfortunate events, my dream came true. Some random thoughts about Paris, in no particular order:

• French people are nothing like the sour, narrow-minded, impolite blurry vision I had formed in my head. At least, most of them. They’re seriously polite (I’ve lost count of mercis and bonjours) and willing to help you, even if you’re a (*gasp*) tourist. Funny fact: one of the guards at Eiffel Tower talked to us (quite fluently) in Greek, explaining prices and options. How cool is that?
• Paris is the most beautiful European capital I’ve been to, and one of the best-looking European capitals. Simple fact.
• I think I spent as much time over earth as under it. Paris métro is HUGE. And smelly. “Our” line, line 14 (St Lazare – Olympiades) was one of the cleanest and most civilized, though.
• Monmartre was kinda disappointing. So touristic and full of people. Exploring it under 35 degrees Celsius didn’t help, either.
• I’m afraid I didn’t really like French cuisine, eventhough I’ve not tasted much of it. Advice: when in doubt, never order andouillette. Trust me. Unless you like raw kokoretsi.
• …on a different note, Paris was a snacker heaven. Croissants, paninis, sandwiches, slices of pies… oh my!
• I *love* walking kilometres around the different neighbourhoods and exploring the city in ways no tourist guide would ever allow. That’s what I did in Rome and that’s what I’ll do in my next trip.
• Another fact: in some restaurants in Paris, Coke (or other sodas) cost way more than a glass of french wine.
• I must be the only tourist that lived in Paris for a week and didn’t visit the Louvre museum after all. I’m unique!

À bientôt, Paris!

I’ll be back to check the rest of you, for sure.

P.S. On a (somewhat) related note, what’s wrong with Italian people and english? Seriously. They’re so foreign-language-agnostic it becomes offensive at times. There was this pesky Italian tourist in Eiffel Tower elevator that kept correcting the French elevator girl when she was making announcements in italian. I felt like clubbing him in the head.

Warning! Silly post ahead.

You really think you can get anyway with just being a designer / developer in real life and be done with it?

Think again.

‘Cause you’re utterly wrong.

What today (a vacation day, mind you) had in store for me:

• Placed an online order for my dad and sis new PC because of course, I know better about this stuff.
• Created some fancy photo slideshows for Michael, as I’m the lucky one having a Mac which makes creating all kinds of cool stuff a breeze.
• Responded to my little cousin’s questions on why I can’t help him install cracked games on his brand-new PSP. Try explaining firmware downgrade to a kid and then come back here and tell me “pff”.
• Was patient while family was bugging me again to call Tellas support and ask for a technician to come and check our faulty line. Did not make it today, will probably call again tomorrow.
• Ordered online a slew of tickets for my trip to Paris (ouch, pocket).
• Sent about a gazillion e-mails concerning various pending stuff that must be completed before my vacation.
• Wrote a stupid post on having too much on your head on any given day.

All that in just a few hours. And my job title is (supposedly) Web Designer. What?

P.S. Some uncle will probably call me and ask my opinion on his new fancy ironing board sometime soon, I can feel it.

Me and best friend and geek accomplice Stelabouras decided to share our chaotic conversations with all of you, so we gave this duo podcast a try. It’s called Sugarenia & Stelabouras Make a Podcast but we’ll excuse you if you use SSMaP, really. It sounds cooler anyway.

It was fun to record and very quick (was having second thoughts about podcasting time but it’s not that bad after all, especially if Stelios is taking all the editing weight). It’s in greek, sorry international friends. It covers a wide range of geekery, from social media to apple fanboyism, MMOs and whatever goes. We’ll try and keep a weekly schedule, there’s no shortage of cool news around for sure, but it’s not strict.

One thing is certain: we liked the response and we’ll do it again.

Enjoy.

Nothing fancy, mind you. But this is for the people that’re curious about my whereabouts and why this blog is collecting dust lately.

So, without further ado, what’s keeping me busy:

• Day work. Demanding project on the loose. Much thought going on over features, design, functionality. Meetings, HTML / CSS, a dash of Javascript and PHP. Rinse and repeat.
• PC Magazine. Five pages of the best greek tech magazine out there are pure Sugar, look out for them. Not to forget that monthly greek blogger interview – how cool is that?
• CSS3.gr. Apart from writing articles and blog posts whenever I can, we’re in for some cool updates so keep posted.
• Interact Curriculum localisation. I blame John for proposing me as a Team Leader for the greek localisation team of the Interact curriculum, but it’s a job I enjoy nevertheless. Greek friends, wanna help? Drop me a line at zaxarenia at gmail dot com.
• FancyCage. I’m working on the HTML and Stelios has almost finished with the core functionality. Updates coming soon.
• Blog theme update. I’m so tired of talking about this, but I’m getting somewhere. I’m quite sure about it.
• Tiny personal & family micro-projects.

When not working on any of these, I shut down the iMac and head to the nearest beach because hey, I’m lucky to live in one of the most beautiful islands around.
Plus I read a ton of books simultaneously, both fiction and work-related ones. Katie claims this cannot be, but I make it happen somehow.

So there, it wasn’t that bad, was it?

How do you enjoy your summer, people? Do share in the comments.

I won’t go too much into that. I’m definitely pro-ban. I just want to say this:

It’s sad (not to mention pathetic) to see all grown-up people acting like my 9-month old niece when I take one of her toys from her. I’ve seen drug addicts with better attitudes than some of the smokers out there (and I mean it).

If you’re in a closed place and you smoke between non smokers, you suck. If you moan and whine about the smoking ban in everyone around, you suck and you don’t have anything exciting to do with your life. If you decide to follow the ban but light a cigarette in an enclosed place as soon as you see another one do this, you suck and you have absolutely no personality.

Will this ban have any kind of luck in Greece? Probably not, because we’re one of the most dont-fucking-care-about-others nations in the whole wide world.

But some people have got to learn to play by some rules, someday.

I will ask you, dear readers, to point your browser to an article page in Reporter.gr (say, this one), take a deep breath and count how many animated banners and paraphernalia you can find littered across the page.

I count:

• One 468x60 banner on top, accompanied by two 120x60 small banners on its right. That makes three.
• One big, 728x90 banner just above the content.
• Three 120x300 banners in its right sidebar. Not to mention the Google Ads just below them. But Google ads visual clutter is irrelevant compared to this lengthy animated behemoth.
• The obligatory 300x250 inline banner in the article text.
• Another 120x300 banner on its left sidebar, accompanied by a small 120x60 just below it.

So that makes:

3 + 1 + 3 + 1 + 2 = 10

That’s ten, my dear readers. Friggin’ ten animated banners on the same content page. Not to mention 3 revolving “New!” .gifs right there on the menu and the animated logo. Jesus web designer Christ on the advertising cross.

It’s a wonder my 2.5 years old Macbook hasn’t exploded yet with this page open in Firefox. Clearly, this is in-content advertising gone terribly wrong.

An example to steer the hell away from.

• Tastespotting.com has the most nailed-it-down interface I’ve ever seen for a food site, of course, heavily aided by its great content. I dare you to check out those photos and not drool, once.
• Not exactly news, but zen living blog powerhouse zenhabits.net posted an excellent post recently, citing 55 ways to get an energy boost. Absolutely worth reading.
• Really cool insight on how to start your own web design workshops by maratz.com. Will prove really interesting for the future (hint, hint).
• This article from sixrevisions.com really nails how difficult is to design for the worst client of all, yourself. Really helped me tying some loose ends here and there.
• I dare you to head over to Pretty Loaded and not get mesmerized by the slew of cool looking preloaders. Yum.
• I love reading case studies. An excellent case study I’ve read recently was that of Wiltshire Farm Foods by Headscape. Very inspiring.

I think I gave you enough links tonight to keep you busy for a while. Now excuse me, will have to drag my sunburnt self back to bed and try to ease my pain.

Over my (few) years of web design experience, I’ve become anal pretty worked up with what my code looks like. It must be an old trauma from my university years, where well-written code well, let’s say, wasn’t exactly the norm (.c include files – yes, I’ve seen that with my very own eyes). As a result, be it HTML or CSS or PHP or Javascript, I can now proudly say: I write girl code.

(Don’t look at this site source code – it’s not mine. It’s an adapted template – yep, don’t ask when my new template will launch).

One thing that’s pretty important while authoring CSS for relatively large projects is the way you structure it. We’ve already discussed single-line or multi-line in this blog, plus the way you define sections and so-called variables in your CSS are already known topics. But I’ve decided to beat that dead horse a bit more.

Multi-line doesn’t cut it and single-line sucks

There’s a way to structure CSS that I want to experiment with.

I think that multi-line CSS is very readable but a total waste of whitespace and bandwidth. I also think that single-line CSS can become exceptionally tedious, especially with properties like border-radius, that require at least three lines to work relatively consistently across all modern browsers. Working in multi-line CSS and converting it to single-line just before publishing sounds a bit like an overkill to me, all those back and forths!

So what do we get when we mix the best elements of both methods?

The compact multi-line CSS structure! Tada!

*crickets chirping in background*

Well yeah, lemme show you how it’s (supposed to be) done.

How it’s done

In compact multi-line CSS, you keep the multi-line-ity of it all, but you group “relevant” properties. You know which they are: margin goes hand in hand with padding, position loves top, left, right, bottom, font properties should propably go hand in hand with line-height and letter-spacing, et cetera, et cetera.

Let’s take an excerpt of my CSS3.gr CSS and try to convert it:

.about-more h4	{
	padding: 0;
	margin: 0;
	border: none;
	color: #666;
	font: 14px Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;
	text-transform: none;
	letter-spacing: normal;
	position: relative;
}

In compact multi-line, that would be:

.about-more h4	{
	margin: 0; padding: 0;
	font: 14px Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; text-transform: none; letter-spacing: normal;
	border: none;
	color: #666;
	position: relative;
}

We’ve gone from 8 lines to 5, without sacrificing readability much. How about:

#footer-disclaimer	{
	text-align: center;
	font: 10px Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;
	text-transform: uppercase;
	background: url(./themes/site_themes/css3/skeleton/disclaimer-bg.png) no-repeat top;
	color: #97ACA3;
	letter-spacing: 1.2px;
	padding: 20px 0 10px;
	margin-top: -10px;
}

…which gets the short treatment to…

#footer-disclaimer	{
	font: 10px Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; text-align: center; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: 1.2px;
	background: url(./themes/site_themes/css3/skeleton/disclaimer-bg.png) no-repeat top; color: #97ACA3;
	margin-top: -10px; padding: 20px 0 10px;
}

That’s 8 lines to 3! Quite a score, innit?

Of course, your mileage may vary and benefits won’t always be that obvious. Nevertheless, nothing restricts you from further improving this method, by alphabetizing your inline properties or put them in the order that just feels logical for you (for me, width is always before height and margin before padding).

I haven’t used it (yet), but I think I’ll try it in the FancyCage CSS I’m putting together. Well it’s no Typekit, but it may help you a bit while structuring CSS.

Hey, at least I tried.

If you’re one of the few people that grace my Adium contact list pretending to be away, you should have observed it so far: I gave up on IM. I just had to.

It wasn’t that hard, I just stopped using this means of communication. Nowadays, I mainly use Twitter and e-mail to get in touch with people, the former more so than the latter. OK, I do use IM, but just for intranet purposes at work, using our homemade Pathfinder Instant Messenger. And that’s about it.

Why, I can hear you ask. I’ll tell you why. Because it’s so damn time-consuming I couldn’t do anything with Adium in the background anymore. It was the feeling that I cheated on people and made them feel bad when I wasn’t promptly replying to their messages. That’s why I found Twitter so liberating: noone expects you to be there and reply to every given moment. Well, noone should anyway.

So at first was productivity. I found myself more productive and efficient while at home. I wrote more, designed more and learned more. I learned to manage Twitter distractions and incorporate it in my workflow without serious drawbacks. And everything was fine for a while.

But I lacked something, and that was real-time human communication. And for that, I decided to take my Friday (traditionally at home) nights on IM. Just to keep in touch with friends and add to the overall relaxing feeling. Some light gossip, some link exchanging and that’s it. You give a little but you gain a sense of social satisfaction.

So I was wondering, am I the only one that declared IM bankruptcy? Surely there are more of you that just stopped using it at some point.

Do you still keep tabs on IM friends by logging in every once in a while? Or you just use Twitter and Facebook to communicate with people?

Do share your opinions in the comments.