Boris Grebenshchikov and Aquarium @ Tbilisi Concert Hall

13 April, 2014 | Living in Georgia | 22 seen

Yesterday Boris Grebenshchikov and his band Aqurium performed at Tbilisi Concert Hall. Although I'm not huge fan of him I must admit, he is so called Russian Rock Grandfather and it would be a crime to waste an opportunity to visit his concert right next door, here in Tbilisi.

About concert:

Since I was not very familiar with his creation, first part of concert I just listened, to determine, do I like him or not. His music is really eclectic, so I found something from Visotsky and Tsoi (Kino), then Russian Rock Grandfather turned to reggae, I found both Bob Marley and Bob Dylan, even some Irish folk music was found in his creation.

By now, I can tell you this - Boris Grebenshchikov is an Artist with the big letter A. His is true master.

About Tbilisi Concert Hall:

There was some problems with organization entrance into hall, nobody is left inside, 10 minutes before start of concert, and then there is huge mess and queue.

Overall feeling - It was great evening, learning more about Russian Rock music in pleasant company. 

About Boris Grebenshchikov and his…

Caucasus Tourism Fair 2014

12 April, 2014 | Living in Georgia | 6 seen

Every year in start of April, in Tbilisi, Georgia tourism fair is held. I'm visiting it already third time. This time I got some emptiness feeling, it doesn't looks like organizers has made any promotion both to attract visitors and companies.

As usual at fair you could meet some hotel representatives, trying to give you some crappy brochure, rather telling their unique story. There are few international companies, which seems there are just to make a check box in their long long fairs list. This year seemed one of that kind was TAV airports. 

For example - There was a Geocell stand. Geocell is local large Georgian mobile operator company - but they are offering just some brochures, I was hopping for more, like to touch some cell phone at least. 

As usual there was local hunting and fishing companies, some selling some stuff, some giving more information about their services. Good example of this is Jomardi rafting company.

As usual there was local craftsmen selling their work, like bronze replicas and wool knittings. 

My favourite from those few represented this year was some Ukrainian girls selling coffee, and Mestia…

North Korea - Crossing the line

11 April, 2014 | Documentaries | 5 seen

The film is about a former U.S. Army soldier, James J. Dresnok, who defected to North Korea on August 15, 1962.

The film was directed and produced by British filmmakers Daniel Gordon and Nicholas Bonner, and was shown at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. The film, which was narrated by actor Christian Slater, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the festival. The film was first screened in 2007 on the BBC. The film centred around Dresnok's history, highlighting his unhappiness in America, and particularly his desertion from the United States Army in 1962 to the DPRK.

It also showed Dresnok in the present day in Pyongyang (where he now lives), interacting with his North Korean family and friends. Dresnok spoke exclusively to the filmmakers about his childhood, his desertion, his life in a country completely foreign and quite hostile to his own, his fellow defectors, and his wife and children. Dresnok is also shown with fellow defectors, including Charles Robert Jenkins, who returned to Japan to be with his wife, Hitomi Soga (a victim of kidnap by the North Koreans), while filming was taking place. Dresnok felt hurt by Jenkins' allegations of physical abuse by…

Drupal 7 Archive Drop Down Menu

11 April, 2014 | Drupal Development | 11 seen

In this tutorial I will show how to create Drop-down menu for your monthly archives using Drupal 7 and views.

At first, please read this Drupal 7 tutorial on how to create Drupal archive page. By following this guide, you will learn how to create monthly archive page using views, and we go to add one minor change to change it to drop down menu.

Open that views page, select contextual filters, and change settings from unformatted to jump menu:

That's it, so easy.

For more Drupal tutorials please visit: Drupal development

P.S. If you are considering a hosting for your Drupal website check out Bluehost, their shared hosting starts as low as $3.95/mo or read more about cheap Drupal hosting.

Auto blog to Twitter using Twitterfeed

11 April, 2014 | Blogging | 6 seen

You are managing your blog, not some social media agency, right? Although you have created your profile in different social media, like Twitter, Facebook or Google+? As time goes, you are notifying your social accounts seems dead, what to do in such situation?

Time is money, and you know that perfectly

Automate your posts by using some tools.

There are many options how to syndicate your content over different social media sites, this time I'll explain how to auto re-post your blog posts to Twitter by using Twitterfeed.

Your CMS should have came with enabled RSS. Find that RSS and submit it to TwiterFeed.

Go to TwitterFeed login/signup and start creating your feed:

Continue:

Enter your Feed name and RSS Feed, in this case I'm using Feedburner service, but you can stick with your default feed.

Continue to Step 2:

Click on Twitter, you will need to authorize your Twitter account:

From dropdown menu Choose your Twitter account and press to Authenticate button

Once your Twitter account has been authorized, click on Create service…

Add Menu Classes In Drupal 7

11 April, 2014 | Drupal Development | 27 seen

In this Drupal tutorial I'll show how to add menu classes to your Drupal 7 website using template.php file.

Original of this tutorial has been found here.

Add this function to your template.php file:

P.S. If you are considering a hosting for your Drupal website check out Bluehost, their shared hosting starts as low as $3.95/mo or read more about cheap Drupal hosting.

Redirect non www to www - Apache .htaccess

10 April, 2014 | Servers | 4 seen

It has been years since I last time used .htaccess file available in Apache. I'm using Ngnix servers for 99.9 of mine work.

But today I had an opportunity to work on Apache environment, which uses .htaccess file.

So in order to rewrite non www to www in Apache I added following rulles to .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

For Ngnix please read this article:

http://www.reinisfischer.com/ngnix-www-non-www

Da Vinci's Demons Season 2

10 April, 2014 | Worth to Watch | 17 seen

<p>Da Vinci's Demons season 2 aired on March 22, 2014.&nbsp;</p><p>I really enjoyed first season and was inpatient to see Season 2.&nbsp;</p><p>Maybe of very interesting ending at finale episode in season 1.</p><p>In this season you will meet new characters like Amerigo &nbsp;Vespucci, which in Da Vinci's Demons is portrayed as an alcoholic and con.</p><p>Good, interesting and popular SCI-Fi. Don't rely on this film to much, do your investigation more about Leonardo Da Vinci's work,as I did after watching first season.</p>

Add Viewport in the <head> in Drupal 7

10 April, 2014 | Drupal Development | 21 seen

In this Drupal Tutorial I will show how to add a new HTML in Drupal 7 head section.

I'm using responsive design to enable my blog work pretty ok on mobile devices, but yesterday looking through Google PageSpeed Insights suggestions I found that there is no viewport defined, so it might not render CSS as I might want, but instead to scale webpage to device.

Your page does not have a viewport specified. This causes mobile devices to render your page as it would appear on a desktop browser, scaling it down to fit on a mobile screen. Configure a viewport to allow your page to render properly on all devices.

What is the solution for Drupal 7?

I did a quick Google search, and found webomelette article with solution.

I added to my Drupal theme template.php following function:

Change YOUR_THEME to name of your theme, save…

A Time Lapse of green wall - Day 1

9 April, 2014 | Living in Georgia | 9 seen

There is a one really nice looking wall located in Tbilisi, I would like to show it to you, that building is left from the brick wall building opposite to me, and I'm seeing it every day, for the last one year. 

The wall is grown with some greens, and in Summer it looks cool green, in Autumn it turns red, in Winter it's naked, and now I'm looking to make a time-lapse of this wall turning from naked into the green.

Here is a Day 1 photo:

I'm not sure how many days I will need, to see that wall completely green, but I promise that at the end I will create a Time-lapse video, like some 30 seconds or like that.

Georgia - Day of National Unity

9 April, 2014 | Living in Georgia | 6 seen

25 years ago, on April 9th, 1989 in Tbilisi, then Georgian SSR tragic events took place, what later were named as Tbilisi tragedy, Tbilisi Massacre or April 9th Tragedy. 

Nowadays April 9th is marked as public holiday and called a the Day of National Unity.

Basicly Soviet Government turned against it's citizens and sent tanks out in streets to dispress opposition. Tbilisi events later turned to Vilnius events and other.

Prelude of Tbilisi tragedy

The anti-Soviet movement became more active in the Georgian SSR in 1988. Several strikes and meetings were organized by anti-Soviet political organizations in Tbilisi. The conflict between the Soviet government and Georgian nationalists deepened after the so-called Lykhny Assembly on March 18, 1989, when several thousand Abkhaz demanded secession from Georgia and restoration of the Union republic status of 1921–1931. In response, the anti-Soviet groups organized a series of unsanctioned meetings across the republic, claiming that the Soviet government was using Abkhaz separatism in order to oppose the pro-independence movement. The protests reached their peak on April 4, 1989, when…

Performing Joomla 1.5 convert to Drupal 7

8 April, 2014 | Drupal Development | 10 seen

Over past couple of years, I have many times seen a bad Joomla site, which either is hacked or is not working as it should, and I have converted those sites to Drupal.

The most strange things is, there is always some Joomla developer, who has created that site, but when problems occur, that Joomla developer is gone.. Strange right? How can one call himself a Joomla developer, when first problems occur, he is gone?

So I got another Joomla site request to perform a Joomla major Upgrade from 1.5 to 2.5. 

I thought, hell, why not - let's fix this site, by not converting it to Drupal (As I usually do), but let's stay on Joomla.

Site works, there has been no hackers yet. So I started to do Joomla upgrade. At first I made a minor upgrade, to update Joomla database to latest stable. I was reading a lot Joomla developer forums and blogs, what are they suggestions. In order to perform major upgrade for Joomla, you have to install some mystic upgrade extension... Ok, I did, I followed to all the best practices from Joomla community for upgrading Joomla site... And then.. It sucks.

There…

Father's David church, Mtatsminda pantheon and other

7 April, 2014 | Tourism objects | 19 seen

What to do in weekends when in Tbilisi? Grab your camera, and make some scenic views.

This time - photos from Tbilisi, taken in April 5th, 2014, visiting Mama Daviti church, Mtatsminda pantheon and other.

6 month of blogging each day has passed

6 April, 2014 | Blogging | 5 seen

I started this blog on October 4th, 2013, and I started my blogging experience with a promise to blog 365 days in a row (including Christmas, New Years day and other)

I'm half way there. So I decided to give some insights how I'm performing for now.

My blog traffic stats has raised from very modest to decent modest, in January I even experienced my first traffic spike, when someone posted link to my blog, on highly popular site.

I'm experiencing traffic gains step by step, last month (March)  I got 542 unique visitors which of course is pretty modest number. My plan by end of September is to get stable 6000 unique visitors per month. Pretty much to grow, right? I must increase my traffic by some 12 times. 

Top 10 articles

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As you can see, some economical articles are more popular over other types of articles. I like economics and statistics, so for now, it seems, pretty ok. 

My AdSense earnings for my blog is really modest, it might me some $3 over last 6 months. So I decided to work with my sites layout, to get higher CTR.…

My online income report - March 2014

4 April, 2014 | Blogging | 11 seen

My online income in March dropped by half, and totalled to really modest $5.51.

In average I earned about $0.177 a day, what is significant drop compared to previous month, when in daily average I earned $0.34

• Highest earnings per day: $1.06
• Days making more than $1: 1
• Days without making earnings: 7