I thought I would just make a quick post outlining some of the changes you have noticed on this site. Some of these are still ongoing.
Given that it is now a New Year, 2014, I thought it’s about time to refresh this site a little bit. The first thing I did was to alter the colour scheme a little bit and your feedback on the new colour scheme with the maroon and grey of my college replacing the earlier background and tab colours respectively, and the header amber colour matching the colour of the stars which I hope you give five of everytime I write something more…
I repurchased the upgrade for customising fonts, which had lapsed, and chose a new font for the whole site. I hope you are enjoying that and there are no problems in reading it.
In addition I purchased for the first time a new upgrade, namely the no ads upgrade. I don’t know if any of you were seeing much third-party advertising on this site before — the site owner doesn’t actually see it — but if you were you won’t be seeing it from now on.
I’ve also started to add in some of the more recent header photographs – the ones which self select at random at the top whenever you choose a new page or refresh an existing page. I added in 13 new ones and I will start to add in probably another several hundred, I don’t even know where the limitation is as to how many will be allowed. The new photography being added to the headers is all my work and made with my new Canon camera which I purchased in the third-quarter 2013. So far there weren’t any of the Canon photographs included in this blog although some of you will have seen them on Facebook and on You Tube. I also wanted to put into practice some quite interesting hence I had about composition and cropping from a book on photography which I had purchased halfway through last year and only now reading.
Content-wise I haven’t really done anything, bar this update. I’ve tried to catch up with people’s questions. I’ve added into the box file on the right-hand side of the files about the Goldlist method which people have been asking me for. For those of you who are Polish taxpayers and who don’t already have your favourite charity to give your 1% to under the 1% scheme, the Flyers for my dear wife and children are also in that box file. They contain instructions for how to assign a value of 1% of your Polish tax to my wife’s multiple sclerosis needs and my children’s autism needs without there being any costs to yourselves. Taxpayers from other parts of the European Union can under EU law also donate to Polish registered charities like these ones tax effectively, unlike the Polish scheme that would involve you in actually paying your money, and to be honest I prefer to ask people to do things which help me but don’t cost anything more for them. The use of my Amazon store which is also linked on the right-hand side is another example. In this case your purchases cost you know more than they would do if you went directly to Amazon, but I am on 4%. If you don’t feel like enabling either of these forms of support for my family, that is fine. All my language courses and other materials on YouTube as well as the Goldlist method are free and will remain so unconditionally.
I added a few more widgets, especially the ones at the bottom you will see, tidied up some others, and did a little bit of editing and some of the old articles. I hope you get some pleasure from the new look.
New content is on its way and also the project of uploading all of my YouTube videos but properly classified – that will move the head quite quickly once I catch up with my backlog in producing and playing out films. At the moment I have a backlog of just over a year.
You’ll probably notice that some of the style of earlier posts with the enriched content is now gone – that’s been taken away by the programme at WordPress. The earlier articles with enriched content like relevant articles below, pingbacks, links and images suggested by the system – this all disappeared and I can’t find any explanation as to why it did. Nothing unusual there, then. This seems to be par for the course on the internet, unfortunately. It’s not really a big deal though. Blogs are supposed to be about the content made by the blog owner and the rest is icing on the cake. I get that.
That’s all for now, and I hope you remained subscribed and hope to see you regularly.
And another thing – I replaced as you’ll see the tagline of the site. Instead of “Languages and Travel – Turn the camera on and something will happen” the tagline is now “Languages, Travel, Humour, Thought, Discussion” – these are the main things we are about. What other things there are can always be seen in the navigation on the right. I’m especially keen on having more discussion – once a new person has been approved once (which can take time if I’m busy – sorry about that) then they can post from then on without moderation (unless they start spamming or offending other guests or engaging in illegalities – but other than that I’m very reluctant to moderate or censor, basically you can give your opinions) and I hope that people will discuss with other participants as well as with me. I am always pleased to see such cases, and there aren’t enough in my opinion.
Also the fact that YT now does have a certain improvement going on in that the Google + threads properly now and doesn’t have a strict character limit doesn’t mean that this is redundant. WordPress still seems to thread better – up to 7 deep not just a few as on YT. Also here you are allowed to give your ranking in terms of 5 stars – as it used to be on YT – which means you can vote down as well as up – a feature missing once discussions get waylayed onto Google+ or Facebook. I am not afraid of you disliking something – you are perfectly entitled to dislike something. More than that, I’d say that the liking or plussing or thumbs-upping button actually becomes meaningless in the absence of a thumbs down. It is the internet equivalent of the single party state. It’s a “like-it-or-lump-it” mentality whereby we see the eroding of democracy not merely at state level throughout what we used to think of as the civilised world, but also sadly in the on-line world, which is more and more clearly not the virtual Utopia we once fondly envisaged.
Absolutely agree with this :
“It’s a “like-it-or-lump-it” mentality whereby we see the eroding of democracy not merely at state level throughout what we used to think of as the civilised world, but also sadly in the on-line world, which is more and more clearly not the virtual Utopia we once fondly envisaged.”
I’ve been depressed at the ever-growing erosion of meaningful freedoms in the western world.
Too much political correctness ; too much state interference with what should be private affairs; too much insistence on conformity ; too many young people being manipulated by state propaganda; too much framing of the state “education” curriculum to meet industrial needs rather than the true educational needs of the young mind ; and the list goes on ……
How long will it be before technological ingenuity enables the “Thought Police” to become a menacing reality ?
The only change to Uncle Davey’s words I would make is to change “eroding” to “demise” !
Alan,
Good to hear you on this topic.
The Polish National Anthem says “Jeszcze Polska nie zginela, poki my zyjemy” which means “Poland is not dead yet, while we live” – they sung it even when there was no Poland as such and they were fighting to re-establish it. I would say the same about democracy and freedom. The day nobody lives who looks for it or believes in it any more, then you can say it is dead. A fire is not fully out while the embers burn, it can ignite again.
Will this be the year there comes a turning point? After all the revelations of 2013, we are not living anymore with the fuzzy feeling that everything is OK with our freedoms, and in the years to come, 2014 and the next three years, making one electoral cycle, that is the key time to show the elites that we’re not happy with what’s being done in our name, that – whether for personal material benefit, for the gratification of power and control or just out of a misguided sense of duty – they’ve gone ultra vires and a different set of rules for them needs to be laid down afresh.
Is it possible to purchase general books and materials (beyond your selections) on Amazon through oioioio.com? I am not in the market for what you’ve curated for us over there at the moment, but I have some other books to buy. I’d love for the 4% to make it’s way on to you if possible.
What a wonderful suggestion. I wholeheartedly second this idea. Many of us who visit Huliganov T.V. Would probably be buying different titles from the Amazon store each year so a large number of fragmentary amounts going to uncle Davey would help with the cost of running the Huliganov T.V. site. This has to be better than Amazon accumulating every bit of profit from the sale of the books.
That’s very kind. Either by starting there and searching other books within that framework or by telling me which nooks to feature there that you would like to buy should do it.