sugarenia.com

The obligatory Greek Blogger Camp post…

On Saturday and Sunday, 1st and 2nd of June, the first Greek Blogger Camp is organized in Ios, a beatiful greek island.

I look forward to meet fellow greek bloggers and see the island (as weird as it sounds, I’ve never been to another greek island before, except for mother Crete).

So for anyone attending the event, search around for a brown-haired girl with big red glasses, looking suspicious and unfriendly. That’d be me.

gbc, greekbloggercamp

By working with tons of text displayed on web every day, I’ve developed some particular pet peeves as far as structure and presentation of web content is concerned.

The rules are simple, bloggers / copywriters / web journalists:

1. Never ever use CAPITAL LETTERS to emphasize words.
   CAPITAL LETTERS are meant to be used in names and at the start of sentences. No matter if it’s a strong word you want to accentuate or your company name (the most common case), it must follow the rules of proper CAPITALIZATION.
2. Avoid center aligning text
   Center alignment may sound more logical to you, as it brings the text viewport just in front of reader’s eyes, but you must avoid it while writing long passages of web content. Struggling to find the start of every sentence is tiring for the eyes and disorientating, so avoid that.
3. Don’t use different colours in the same passage of text.
   If you do, use colour to symbolize hierarchy: main text should be darker, dates or other additional data should be lighter etc. Don’t use colour to emphasize, there are attributes exactly for this reason, namely bold and italics.
4. Do not use suspension points at the end of every sentence, hoping to look “cool”…
   These make you look neither cool nor mysterious… They are supposed to be used where you want to leave a sentiment linger - and nowhere else…
5. Do use white space.Absence of decent white space in e.g. a blog comment over 10 lines is a recipe for unreadability (if that word exists).Do not hesitate to hit that Enter button, it’ll make your text passages easier to scan and pay attention to.

These are all pretty basic, really, but you’d be amazed how badly content is written for the web. I can relatively withstand grammar and syntax errors (I make mistakes all the time too), but those above, I really cannot forgive.

I’ve done something like that before - now it’s the time to do it again.

After more than six months, I present to you (tadaaaaa) Sugar’s Funniest Home Seaches part two!

These phrases below are what (according to AWstats) people were searching for until they stumbled upon my blog:

• stuff that is always green and no other color
  I tell you man, that’s deep. Really deep. Now name a stuff that’s always green and no other color, people, name one. See? There are none. Respect to this bad mofo - but the answer is there: 42, dude.
• greeks suck
  Yup, we all do. Suck is a profession some of us do very well. You’ll find plenty of sucking here, I’m sure.
• porsche
  Bingo! You’re in the right place. If you happen to find one lying around, drop me a call, will you? Please? Pretty please? Pretty pretty please with sugar on top?
• (personal favourite)girly stuff to do when your bored
  Sigh… I could tell you, dear friend, but do you think you’re up to it? Will you take it, knowing what I do when bored at home? Think not. *nudge nudge*

It is fun, really. What were these people thinking. And what in God’s name did they think after visiting my blog?

search, search engine, search terms, statistics

After many months of development, countless bugs and tweaks, numerous litres of liquid caffeine and several precious times (”What do you mean, I wasn’t supposed to overwrite this?”), it is here:

The NEW Pathfinder Shopping!

Pathfinder Shopping, the new version. This is the new baby of Pathfinder, made with much effort (and love) from all of our team. For the oblivious, it is an e-shop aggregator with advanced features, having more than 200 greek stores and over 650.000 products, making it easily the leading greek product search engine.

It will get polished. More features are coming. More shops will be added. Usability will be improved.

After all, it’s just a beta.

If you’re greek and you’re looking for something to buy online, you’re more than welcome to try the new Pathfinder Shopping and drop us a line or two with your suggestions / remarks.

*phew*

pathfinder, shopping, pathfinder shopping

P.S. Image editing done by Picturesque, was just playing with it.

…at least for all us European users.

I learned it from Techchrunch yesterday and I have to say, I’m thoroughly pissed. Pandora has kept me company through good and bad, relaxing and creative times online. There are many alternatives, I know, but Pandora was the first project of this genre that I got involved with and the one I stuck with till now.

And all this because of copyright laws. Pandora must lose over 50% of its user base because of that. Instead of taking these numbers to their advantage, companies thought that refusing access to all Europeans (and not only) would be the right thing to do.

So long, Pandora. Till next time. You’ll be sorely missed, despite your shiny competitors.

pandora, techcrunch, MPAA, RIAA