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.
Today marks the start of a new venture in content generation for me. A podcast.
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.
Ah, the smell of freshly written CSS code on Friday nights. What’s not to love.
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:
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.
