Uplistsikhe Cave Town in Georgia

24 May, 2017 | Tourism objects | 25 seen

Uplistsikhe is an ancient rock-hewn town in eastern Georgia, located some 10 kilometers east of the town of Gori, Shida Kartli.

Built on a high rocky left bank of the Mtkvari River, it contains various structures dating from the Early Iron Age to the Late Middle Ages and is notable for the unique combination of various styles of rock-cut cultures from Anatolia and Iran, as well as the co-existence of pagan and Christian architecture.

First visited back in 2011, I have returned here for a few times more, though personally, I find Vardzia cave town more impressive, no doubt Uplistsikhe is a great example of rich Georgian history and is pretty easy reachable from Tbilisi by car.

There is a small museum located just after the entrance in the cave complex, a lot of interesting information located here:

Uplistsikhe museum

Uplistsikhe

Uplistsikhe is identified by archaeologists as one of the oldest urban settlements in Georgia. Strategically located in the heartland of ancient kingdom of Kartli (or…

How To Reference Nodes in Drupal 8 + Views Relationships Display

23 May, 2017 | Drupal Development | 41 seen

Lately I feel very enthusiastic working with latest Drupal 8 release, though Drupal 8 have been around for a while already, there are still few drawbacks which keeps me avoiding developing full scale on Drupal 8.

I will write down my notes of pros and cons about switching from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 in some of the future posts, in today's Drupal tutorial series I will provide information how to use reference fields and build something awesome, as usual I will use a live example. We are going to build a views display, listing tours in a blog article.

You can see my previous simple tutorial on the same functionality for Drupal 7 site here: Node reference views display using relationships

In fact if you are familiar with relationship fields and node reference fields in Drupal 7, there is basically nothing new in Drupal 7, with exception that this functionality is already built out of box in Drupal 8, you don't need to download and install any modules

Here is what the final result looks

Referenced node view

You can see a live preview here: John Graham Tours joins Tourgeorgia

Nasdaq Baltics Review After One Month Investment in Dividend Paying Stocks

22 May, 2017 | Investments | 16 seen

I started this year (2017) with a goal to save one million dollars in savings accounts by the time I will turn 60 (that's in 2045). For some such goal might sounds unrealistic, for others nothing so special.Anyway it's not about who is right and who is not. It's all about finance discipline and hopefully sunny days in retirement age. 

It was decided that I will invest $8,561 in 2017, in different investment opportunities- peer to peer lending, dividend paying stocks and mutual funds. 

I've written several articles about my investments in peer to peer lending already, see:

• Review of Mintos Peer to Peer Lending After One Month of Investing
• Mintos.com Review after 3 month investing in Peer to Peer loans
• and  Q1 2017 Online Income Report - $5,886.46

By now investments in Nasdaq Baltics in my portfolio makes 25%, without doubts I'm looking to increase investments here to at least 40% by the end of year.

Investment portfolio May 2015

It was around the end of April 2017, when I decided to diversify my portfolio, and without any doubts I looked on dividend paying stocks as the…

Investment Goal #1 - $100/mo from Dividend Payments

21 May, 2017 | Investments | 14 seen

It has been a while I did set my general goal of saving million dollars before I will turn 60 (there is still plenty of time). The good news I've been on the right track for the past 5 months and I've been investing in peer to peer lending, dividend paying stocks and mutual funds.

I like the idea of getting monthly interest or dividend payments, and I started with investments in Latvian mintos peer to peer lending. Despite pretty high interest rates (more than 11% annually) I feel pretty concerned regarding peer to peer lending, especially in loans issued in Eastern Europe. That's the reason I started to invest in dividend paying stocks, unfortunately or for good, right now I'm still investing the same region I'm concerned with - Baltics. See: Dividend Paying Stocks In Nasdaq Baltic Market By Yield

The good thing about dividend paying stocks in Baltics, in general it's easy to find stocks with annul dividend yield higher than 6%, the bad thing - higher yield means higher risk and companies listed on Nasdaq Baltic list takes the same risk as this region (Eastern Europe). For now, I don't see red flags in the economies of…

Magic Fish - Tbilisi Restaurant

20 May, 2017 | Restaurant reviews | 48 seen

Magic Fish is another interesting restaurant I've discovered in Tbilisi (see complete list with Tbilisi restaurant reviews). The fun fact is following, I had seen this place countless times by passing it by on lively Aghmeneshabeli avenue, but never thought, there is a restaurant located inside.

As flashy banner, and kind of strange name lead me to think there is some disco bar or something. Turns out I was wrong, and Magic Fish actually is a decent seafood restaurant in Tbilisi.

I was taken here actually by friend, I met at gym, see Champions academy in Tbilisi.

Shrimps

Fish

Hard Rock Cafe Tbilisi

19 May, 2017 | Restaurant reviews | 44 seen

I've found one of my favorite Tbilisi restaurants - meet Hard Rock cafe Tbilisi, located on lively Vasil Petrashvili street 1, near Tbilisi Philharmonic building.

Hard Rock Cafe Tbilisi, in fact is first Hard Rock cafe I've ever visited, but now I know, there is a good reason to visit them around the World.

Hard Rock Cafe Tbilsi

​Located steps away from Casino Sakartvelo in the historical Vera District of Tbilisi (the capital of Georgia), our brand-new cafe combines the modern style of the Hard Rock brand with a sense of local history. Hard Rock Cafe Tbilisi is located within a restored wine factory, which was originally built in 1896 by famous Georgian industrialist and philanthropist David Sarajisvili, who is known as the founder of brandy production in Georgia. In fact, our building is listed as a cultural heritage site.

Fish & Chips

Amazingly well done, I had a chance to try fish & chips in US based Red Robin place, well the one you can get in Tbilisi is 100 times better than that at New Jersey's Red Robbin. 

Delicious Oreo biscuit cake

Now…

Drupal 8 Custom Taxonomy Term Pages with Views

18 May, 2017 | Drupal Development | 211 seen

By default, out of the box, Drupal taxonomy term pages are styled kind of ugly, but with the help of just a few simple tweaks, we could style them as we wish, just by using CSS. In today's Drupal tutorial series, I will provide a simple how-to on how to create custom Drupal 8 taxonomy term pages using views.

Luckily, you won't need to install any additional modules, as in Drupal 8, views are already built in the core, and if you are already familiar with how to style taxonomy term pages in Drupal 7, it will be an easy task in Drupal 8, as most of the steps involved are the same.

Although this aticle was writtne for Drupal 8, most of it still applies in Drupal 9 and Drupal 10 versions. If you need any help with configuring Drupal taxonomy pages I might be just the person you're looking for. As the founder of Terramatris.eu, a Drupal development agency, I have years of experience working with this platform and helping clients achieve their goals through custom Drupal installations. Learn more at Terramatris.eu

Default taxonomy term page view in Drupal 8

In the above example, you can see the default taxonomy term page…

EU Cookie Compliance For Drupal 8 Website

17 May, 2017 | Drupal Development | 7 seen

I'm not an expert in EU laws, but as far as I remember since 2012 there have been passed a law, so called EU Cookie Compliance law, asking website located in the territory of European Union to provide cookie disclaimer to website visitors if any cookie installed on website. 

To play safe, I have enabled cookie information bar on my blog (you can see it in the bottom of each page)

As, recently I started Drupal 8 development on .eu domain website, which actually is hosted from EU territory I decided to wrap up a simple tutorial on best practice how to enable EU cookie compliance notification bar for Drupal 8 websites.

The good news, there is a special module to handle EU cookie directive: EU Cookie Compliance

This module intends to deal with the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications that comes into effect in the UK on 26th May 2012. From this date on, you run the risk of enforcement action if you are not compliant or visibly working towards compliance. More information can be found here: Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive 2002

The above information applies to the UK however the EU…

How to create related content block using taxonomy term in Drupal 8

16 May, 2017 | Drupal Development | 75 seen

There is no secret that related content can help to improve over all page views for website. More page views means more engaged website visitors, resulting in more sales and higher profit.

In today's Drupal tutorial I will write how to make related content block using taxonomy term field in Drupal 8. For Drupal 7 tutorial see: Related nodes based on taxonomy terms

In short, if you are already familiar how to create related content block in Drupal 7, there is no huge difference in Drupal 8. If you are new to Drupal, keep reading.

• Content type with taxonomy term enabled. 

For this tutorial I will use live example from tourgeorgia.eu here we have content type Tour and attached taxonomy term field: Tour type. What we want to build is a related view listing related tours from the same category as given article, for example cultural tour.

Related taxonomy block in Drupal 8

You can see a live preview here

Create a new content based block view - give it a nice name, Related Items…

Rainy day in Tbilisi - Time Lapse Video

15 May, 2017 | Digital Photography School | 8 seen

That time of the year has come and as usual, in April I return to photograph that lovely brick wall opposite to our apartment, turning green. This year I decided to excel in time-lapse photography and video.

A few months ago I bought an intervalometer (around Christmas time) and today was actually the first time I put it on real action. 

I did a few tests to see how intervalometer actually works, and once get the basic understanding put it to capture 120 shots with 30-second interval (making 30 minutes in total). On-Camera settings, its manual mode, f 11, and ISO 400 (as it was a rainy day, I wanted to make it bright enough). Shot in RAW mode.

Making time-lapse videos are fun, during this 30-minute session I was able to make a coffee, upkeep some things on the blog, and do other stuff. Making this time-lapse involved using Adobe Lightroom for post-processing images, and Adobe Premiere making a video.

Import images to Lightroom, adjust some settings if needed, auto-sync all images, export as jpg 1920 pixels, make sure to remove the watermark

The final comp was made in Adobe Premiere adding a…

A tutorial for creating HDR images in Photoshop

12 May, 2017 | Digital Photography School | 74 seen

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and it is a technique in which many images – usually around 3 or 5 – are merged together, so that details from all the different images show up in the final HDR image. It is simply using the dynamic range over many exposures in one single image.

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Photoshop is a great and very effective tool for merging the series of photos of the same scene you have taken, to give an HDR image with lots of details and tones. In this article, I will tell you how to take photos for merging them into an HDR image, and then how to use the photos for the actual process of making an HDR image in Photoshop.

The logic behind an HDR image is this – one single photo cannot show all the details from the highlights and the shadows. But, if we over-expose an image (make it brighter), we start getting details from the shadow region. Also, if we under-expose an image (make it darker), we get details from the highlights. What if we could do both the things together ?

HDR, in simple words, is combining an over-exposed image with an under-exposed image and a few other…

Facebook Like & Share Buttons on Drupal 8 using Views

11 May, 2017 | Drupal Development | 8 seen

In this tutorial you will learn how to setup custom Facebook like & share buttons for Drupal 8 website using views display. No doubt, there are many great modules set and forget configuration. Though if you are looking to display functional social share buttons on views based pages, you will need to come out with custom solution. 

There are many pages and even blocks in Drupal social share buttons to be featured, like custom blocks, taxonomy pages, custom pages and so on.

For Drupal 7 see: Facebook share button for Drupal views

Here is live examples with Facebook like & share buttons I built for Drupal 8 site - tourgeorgia.eu

Custom Drupal 8 views display with Facebook Like and Share buttons

Above you can see a custom block, featuring most popular tours on tourgeorgia.eu.

Facebook social share buttons on Drupal 8 custom pages

Above you can see example with social share buttons on blog page.

Here are two things you will need to take care to make Facebook like &share buttons available on Drupal 8 website

• Add Facebook JavaScript SDK code to html.html.…

How To Add Open Graph Protocol For Drupal 8 Website

10 May, 2017 | Drupal Development | 35 seen

In today's Drupal tutorial series I will write down my notes, how to add open graph protocol for Drupal 8 website. 

The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. For instance, this is used on Facebook to allow any web page to have the same functionality as any other object on Facebook. While many different technologies and schemas exist and could be combined together, there isn't a single technology which provides enough information to richly represent any web page within the social graph. The Open Graph protocol builds on these existing technologies and gives developers one thing to implement. Developer simplicity is a key goal of the Open Graph protocol which has informed many of the technical design decisions.

Make sure you check out more information about Open Graph protocol and its use: The Open Graph protocol

Also, for Drupal 7 example, you should check out this tutorial: How to add Open Graph protocol for your Drupal site

Now let's start with a basic, out of the box, Drupal 8 website, with no Open Graph enabled yet, let's try to share some of the articles on Facebook…

How to send OneSignal RSS Push Notifications Using Zapier

7 May, 2017 | Blogging | 7 seen

I've been using OneSignal to collect web push subscribers for my blog, since November 2016, by now I can brag with more than 12,000 web push subscribers for this blog. As I keep writing on many topics, I don't find it a good idea of sending RSS notification for each new article.

How To Setup Web Push Notifications For Drupal 8 (Or Any Other Site) Using OneSignal

Actually this is the thing I'm missing on OneSignal, a better segmentation. By now I keep sending web push notifications manually - once or twice per month.

Recently I started to develop another website, selling tour packages in Georgia (tourgeorgia.eu), and I did find it a good idea to collect web push subscribers there as well. Since tourgeorgia.eu has better user segmentation than my personal blog, and posts aren't published everyday, but about 5-10 times per month - an automated solution like RSS to web push subscribers seems an ideal option.

Unfortunately there is no support of setting up RSS to push subscribers directly on OneSignal, yet, though there is a great and free service Zapier, making the missing connection and allowing to…

How To Setup Web Push Notifications For Drupal 8 (Or Any Other Site) Using OneSignal

6 May, 2017 | Drupal Development | 44 seen

Web push notifications are hot in 2017, we will see them more in future for sure. I've been using web push notifications for my personal blog and from what I've seen - it's very powerful marketing tool, allowing you to reach your audience very fast - for blogs and websites that means more returning visitors, for commerce sites that definitely means more sales.

In the past I've tried a few web push notifications providers, but at the end I've chose to stay with onesignal.com, because of it's absolutely free, no matter how many subscribers you have. Right now this blog has more than 7,000 active web push subscribers, growing at the rate of about 2,000 users per month. As my blog covers many topics, I've a pretty high unsubscribe rate too. This is the thing I'm missing in onesignal - more segmentation, as right now web push notifications are enabled on every page on this site, and at the end I have little control figuring out how to segment them.

Anyhow, recently I re-launched an older website covering tourism activities in Georgia, with promotions and deals - and then I realized - this is the right place were to use web…