About two months ago, I was invited by Basilis Kanonidis of creativeg.gr to speak in the second greek WordCamp, which would take place in Thessaloniki in early June.

At first, I reacted as I always react to new challenges: I won’t be good at it. I won’t know what to talk about. I will stutter and lose my train of thought. An ACME anvil will fall from the sky right on top of my head. You know, it’s a cruel thing, sabotaging yourself, but I’m trying to get over it.

Then I realised, there is something I want to talk about, something that disturbed me every time I checked the Wordpress premium themes marketplace. So I forced myself to steer clear of procrastination and work on this idea, and soon realised I really, really liked working on it after all. Plus, I’d get to visit beautiful Thessaloniki again after 11 years and have fun with some dear friends! What more to ask for?

Skip to 4th June morning.

Mild pre-presentation stress. Rehearsing the slides in my mind while brushing my teeth. Arrived early with Thanos, so we had the chance to break some glasses socialise a bit more. Marveled at the weird Thessaloniki weather – scorching heat, cloudy and then, pouring rain? Wow.

Then the event started, Basilis gave us an intro and Dimitris hopped on stage to talk about what he loves more, blogging. Since I was second in the speaking schedule, I tried to focus on what Dimitris was saying without worrying about that ACME anvil – I think I succeeded.

Then, it was my turn. And I talked about this:

(I hope it makes sense without my presenter notes. If not, leave a comment and we can discuss it over e-mail.)

Phew, done! I think it went well. Worry-free now, I sit comfortably to watch the next presentations.

Apostolos gave us some hints on good theme design practices from a blogger’s viewpoint. Thanos talked to us about typography (and his project WireframePlus – do YOU know what WireframePlus does?), Vasilis gave a very informative presentation on using Wordpress as an advanced CMS, Gerasimos introduced us to the pros and cons of Wordpress frameworks, Fotis decided that merging CodeIgniter and Wordpress would be fun so he told us to go for it, Basilis showed us how easy it’d be to setup a mini social network using BuddyPress, while George Kanellopoulos from Microsoft gave two presentations, on Wordpress & Microsoft Web Platform and on HTML 5 that I’m sure many found interesting.

It was excellent.

I love the vibe of this kind of events – many savvy people in a room, talking about what they like best and socializing, networking, having plain stupid fun. If I changed one thing, it’d be the fact that I didn’t talk with as many people as I wanted to, as I’m kinda shy – next time, if you see me around drop by and say hi!

These two days were such a welcome break from my routine – walking around the city discovering places (and ruining my feet – damn you, strappy sandals), having good food, being lazy in Navarinou Square, gazing at the lovely Roman Forum view from our hotel window, walking by the sea, all lovely and a great start to my summer.

Thanks to everyone involved and special thanks to Thanos, Yiannis, Gerasimos and Eleni for showing us around the city. You rock, peeps.

Here’s to a great third WordCamp next year!

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.

Enjoy.

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:

.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.

Spring comes and passes by with some interesting free-time projects.

Stelios and me started working on a simple thingy, just because. It’s called FancyCage and it’s fun.
If you’re curious about what-the-heck this is, just look around the landing page. There’s gotta be a comment hint somewhere!

You can subscribe and keep in contact with FancyCage by filling in your e-mail address in its brand-new landing page. Or just follow the #fancycage Twitter stream for real-time updates.

Keep posted for more!

I’ve expressed my heavy crush sex relationship love for Twitter before. Buzz and social media aside, it’s the only social thing that stays on during all my day, keeping me connected to interesting (or not) people, who have some nice (or not) things to share.

It’s only normal that I’ve tried a dozen of Twitter clients during those years, both for the Mac and the iPhone. I liked some, I loved a few, but I keep going back to my initial choice: Twitterrific, for both environments.

I really cannot get the whole fuss about feature-rich clients, to be frank. User lists and the whole hullaballo spoil big time the direct effect of Twitter I love so much. I suspect that people use lists to avoid the noise from particularly vocal Twitters, but if you never check someone’s tweets, why have him in the follow list anyway?

From time to time I go to un-follow sprees – but they’re short. I think my list now is noise-less enough and I intend to keep it that way. And I tweet mostly in afternoons and weekends, when I supposedly have more time to spare, I guess.

So my question is: How do you Twitter? What do you use? When do you tweet the most?

I’d be fascinated to learn about your tweeting schemes. Shoot me.

You know Mindmeister, the online mind-mapping tool, right?

It has an awesome sharing feature that permits you to collaborate on mind-mapping with other users, editing your mind maps in real time. It’s pretty cool, use it and you’ll see what I mean.

But because I felt über enough during this fun productive Friday, I decided the best use for Mindmeister is chatting. Check it out:

Why not? Come on! It’s live, you can invite as many people as you want (I think), there are emoticons, and the logic of mind-mapping can help with conversations that span multiple subjects. Plus you get nice previews for adding links and there’s even some Wikipedia love.

No, think about it. Really!

*fades in the background*

Blizzard has confirmed its existence to cause us orgasms again. They’ve gone and announced Diablo 3, complete with single player goodness and Battle.net love.

All vibed up, sexied up and ready to burn away our precious free time. Seriously, it’s the first time I’ve actually watched a gameplay video and I must say, I’m ready for this!

So.

Who’s gonna team up with my sorc on Battle.net?

blizzard, diablo, diablo3

…give it cherries!

It’s all work work work these days, both at work (duh) and home. So I decided to give myself the luxury of this awesome looking delicacy tomorrow, because hey, I’ve been working hard all week.

My advice: do the same.

Photo courtesy of yummy web place opensourcefood.com, member gingerslice.

chocolate, brownie, cherries

It seems that every year, it’s getting better and better. GBC08 came and passed, but we can still taste the aftermath when we browse the pics and videos uploaded.

Lots of great people, some known, some unknown, interesting talks, lots of booze and sea and fun.

P.S. I think I now own the Guiness Record for “most times thrown in the Ios Palace pool while screaming my ears off”.

gbc08, ios