Making a picture album on facebook is not the easiest thing

You know sometimes I am really grateful that facebook exists.Living in England for the last 8 years its hard to keep up with all of my friends and know exactly what are they doing.

Social Media, saved me from the trouble as I can find people , find my friends, see what they are doing , talk to them, comment on their photos, play with them games…etc etc etc..

I like all that cause I consider myself an online media freak that wants to know everything that is going on online and getting the latest gadgets. Well, as much as my pocket can afford them.

However, sometimes I really get annoyed when I don’t get what I was promised from the social media that I gladly give my personal information and a part of my life. Cause when you give something, you expect something back and in this case from companies like Facebook I expect –among others- a good user experience.

This Christmas I went holidays to Costa Rica and as anyone that goes holidays on another part of the planet from where he lives, I came back with more than 600 pictures and my new digital camera. Well, as a good social open person that I am, I decided to choose the best pictures and upload them to Facebook so I can share them with my friends that they were in other countries around the world.

After a long process I managed to come down to around 240 pictures which I decided to upload on FB. But at that point all the problems began.

You see even if I have one of the best lines available in the UK –virgin fibre optics- it took quite some time to upload all the pictures to Facebook. Nevertheless I can accept that it can’t be facebook’s fault for that. However, when you change the way that you create an album every 6 months then you create the problems to the users that have to learn everything from the start again.

After I uploaded the pictures finally, I had to put my personal comments in all the pictures that I wanted, name the album, tag the places that I have been…countries etc etc…Before I had to re-order the pictures so the album had a proper timeline according to my holidays. So everyone would realise that this happened in the first days…that happened in towards the end….and that happened in the last days. It shouldn’t be so hard. After all, facebook gives you the opportunity to have a timeline in your profile, so it should be easy to have a timeline in your facebook album right? Wrong.

You see Facebook gives you the opportunity to re-order the first 200 pictures of your album . If you have more than 200 and somehow a picture that was supposed to be in the end  was uploaded first…then you can’t move it.

Not to say that immediately after I uploaded the pictures the browser crashed. Not Google Chrome, but Mozilla also and Internet Explorer.

Even when I tried to upload it again so it will end up in the end of the album…well it was uploaded in the start…

Most probably you ll be thinking now….come on be serious…this is not a serious thing to blame Facebook. Well I am sorry but it is. That’s what you expect from the biggest social media company of the world, to offer you good user experience and not having to spend couple of hours for something that should be easy.  If you don’t do it, then your customers may go somewhere else…yes like google+ as they left from MySpace and Hi5 some years ago to come to Mark Zuckenberk’s creation.

That’s the problem with Online Business, you must always be a step ahead from the competition and provide products or services that are not faulty. If you think that you are on top and you don’t continue to evolve or fix any problems you have as a company then you risk being overtaken by someone else.

And as far as I hear personally there are many people that are continuously disappointed with FB’s services.

Living and working in London gives you the opportunity to do a lot of things. First of all gives you the opportunity to work something that unfortunately isn’t so common nowadays in other parts of the world like…Greece for example…where a lot of my friends are still looking for work.

Working gave me the opportunity to fulfil some nice travels and one of them was in central America that I was planning it for many years.  I had the opportunity to travel to Costa Rica this Christmas and experience the beauties of that country from first hand.

I didn’t have any experiences in other countries of Latin America but I would go back to costa rica any time. The natural beauties of the land are second to none and they are worth a visit if you find a chance.  The only expensive thing would be the tickets if you are travelling from London…and of course you are prepared to skip the big hotels.

Best moment? Scuba diving in the pacific and the Caribbean sea….. Being underwater with thousands of small fishes is something unbelievable…. If I only I could take some pictures underwater…well next time…. J

Manchester United Old Trafford

This Saturday i managed to fulfill one of my biggest dreams as a
football fan. To watch a football match in Old Trafford and Manchester
United. Well, it was enjoyable and a great experience that i will
treasure for a long time. Firstly because i dont know when i will go
back to the stadium again -as i am a londoner- but also because it great
to experience such a good game in the theatre of dreams.

woo themes

Lately I was thinking on how many blogs and sites I have made until now. I realised that number of the blogs were well over fifty either for personal or professional use.

Building a blog can be difficult if you have no knowledge regarding sites and the internet as most of the people. Needless to say that 2-3 years ago I barely knew how to build one site. Despite that things change and by know I think I am quite good in building different kind of blogs with wordpress.

The main problem that people have is having a nice design that they can use and play around with it personalizing it to their own taste.

You can find a lot of sites that are selling their own customize wordpress themes but I have to say that I had the best experience working with woo themes. Either when I had to make a site for personal use or for a project on my work. There are various reasons why I prefer to work with those themes and ill try to explain them.

Designs

Honestly they have a variety of designs you can choose from that fits more or less every site you want to make. Is it a magazine? A travel blog? Food blog? News? You want to show your portofolio? Well it’s there for you to get.  The funny thing is that most of the themes have different abilities. So for example if you take for example the Canvas word press theme, you can easily change it from a magazine, to a blog or to a more interactive one as it has various abilities.  In addition to that you can see the demo of the site so you can be absolutely sure on what you are getting.

Easy to work and build

All of the themes have their own framework and modifications that make it easy for newbies to come and make a new blog that is seo optimized, or have picture galleries or videos without the need to know any HTML or programming. The funny thing is that the themes are so easy to play around these days that many of my friends thing I have some special computer knowledge. Which I assure you I don’t!

So for example most of the themes have built in plug ins to connect your blogs with your flickr galleries or with your twitter accounts.  You don’t like the colours? You can easily change them from the platform just by clicking the colour you like and then checking if it’s good or not.  That’s the difference, on other themes for most of the things you want to do you must search for the relevant plug in, install it and then change whatever you need. In woo themes most of those stuff are already pre-installed.

Free themes!

Well yeah! You can register and download thirteen free wordpress themes that look good and are stylish! Not only they give free themes but they give a lot of so you can choose and believe I have used almost all of them in different cases. The prices to buy a theme are not really expensive even if I am sure you will find even cheaper themes on the net. Despite that I believe that if you try some of the free themes and see the quality and how it easy to play around with them…eventually you will end up buying a better one.

I have worked with woo themes for quite some time now and became a big advocate of the brand as in my opinion they offer good quality for bloggers that want to set up there site without paying a lot of money. Surely if you are more experienced maybe you will use some of your own plug ins but if you are not?

Even if I have affiliate links on this post, it’s not an advertising post rather than explanatory of the abilities you can have with woo themes.

Personally I have built as I said more than 50 sites with woo themes (one of them is the one you are reading) so if you want any help and you can’t get it from there support (highly unlikely) then feel free to contact me.

This act has united all the “big boys” of the online industry against the US government and i think they have their points.

Check out what this means for the internet according to americancensorship.org

p.s. google is fighting greatly against this bill …no wonder

One thing that i really hate is to see flash banners dominating a web page. It seems sometimes companies are working only on the basis of getting as much as money possible from the advertisers rather than satisfying there customers.

In a time where even adobe admitted defeat in there “war” with apple some websites keep filling there pages with as much as 17 flash banners covering in that way most of the content. Unfortunately it makes me sad to see how greek sites like sport-fm.gr and many more are following the same technic just for some extra cash, forgetting with that way that they are earning money but in the long term they will loose customers.

I will not mention how bad that is in terms of SEO …after all i dont think they really care about that…  However, webmasters that decide to increase the number of flash banners should always think the result that this will have on there visitors. Do you really want to go to a site like that www.dailystar.co.uk or that www.telegraph.co.uk

Have it in mind!

Sometimes it can be really hard to explain to most of the people what exactly it is as very few people know this art.

Well this is a video with highlights of my teacher Roger Gracie and you can check more in the relevant wikipedia page over here.

If you really look to get active in your life then i higly recommend it to you.