The mind map is by no means complete but this initial version lays out the main tools I use to publish content, push news, share thoughts and interact with the world online.

Explore my social toolbox either in the embedded map bellow or by following this link to a full screen view.

The problem is: I can’t always practice what I preach.

So, it’s been over a year since I last updated my blog! Mostly because I wanted to make it better. Bottom line? If you have a look at my blog so far, it can barely be called a blog. I posted 37 items including this one in 5 years! That’s one every other month or so.

Ok. I done a lot of things in the meantime. I never intended to be a blogger anyway. These are comforting thoughts. Nevertheless I wanted to have a good blog. And I always had lots of interesting things to share. Practical stuff and theoretical stuff too.

Anyway. I will take a note of my mistakes as far as my blog and my related activities are concerned, try to correct them and move on. So here is the list:

• High expectations
  resulting in increased number of man-hours needed to accomplish the goals.
• Indecisiveness
  resulting in an overload of tools and a lack of clarity in their roles.
• Bad time management
  resulting in lack of a regularly allocated time-window for accomplishing goals.

Of these mistakes, the most critical was the last one: bad time management. The truth is I tried to correct this mistake in October 2008. I allocated three man-hours every Sunday night for working on lower priority personal projects. Nevertheless I had a more important project to which I diverted my attention since then (Blues.Gr) which had to take precedence because it involved people other than me. Still the mistake remains the same: bad (or “inadequate” to put it more gently) time management.

Indecisiveness was not so critical because had I allocated enough time for the for the job, I would have cleared things out first. What I could not decide about was what tools I should use and how to purpose them. There is a plethora of tools on the web for doing variations of mostly the same thing: publishing stuff. Eager to try new stuff I would very often add a new “must have” tool in my toolset making the function, purpose and utility of the rest of my tools obscure or even obsolete sometimes. I guess this is a common problem to a lot of people and actually I wanted to blog about the tools I use on the web and the purpose I have assigned to each of them.

Last but not least (which brings us back to the subject of this post) was my megalomania (to exaggerate a bit my thirst for notable accomplishments or even greatness). I always like to ask a bit more of myself than usual. Raise the bar a bit. It brings a challenge to everything and makes life more interesting. Nevertheless I didn’t hit the balance right on this one. I wanted to excel in my online interaction with the rest of the world, so I kept adding requirements and dependencies to all the tasks that related to my publishing activities.

So there you have it: Not a single blog post for over a year.

I’m not really all that fair to myself with this critique. To give me some credit I kept trying all this time to improve things on all fronts and I actually I achieved a number of goals. Still, I have to do better. So top priority now is get my online act together:

• Drop any expectations that are unrealistic.
• Clarify the utility of each of my tools and make the best of them.
• Make some more time in my weekly “personal projects” time-slot by moving the Blues.Gr project out of it and delegating some of the maintenance work it requires to qualified volunteering members of the site.

These will allow my online presence activities to fit into the allocated time frame and hopefully I will have a more concise, consistent and admirable online presence.

Moving on.

Maybe you want to have a look at it here. It’s a free download.

A friend and I, just created a community web site dedicated to open discussions about the situation in Greece as it evolves from the flames that stormed the country these days. Find it in http://fires.eware.gr/.

Remember my recent blog entry about Netscape 8 excitement???

Remember I told you that the good news was that you can switch to IE engine with a click from within Netscape 8?

Well… here is the first bad news:

• Go find a site with a textarea control to fill in.
• Then switch Netscape to use the IE engine.
• Try to enter text in the textarea field. While doing that, try switching the active language (from Greek to English in my case). You know; by pressing Alt-Shift.
• Well, there goes the focus out of the control! Unless you pick up the mouse and move the focus back in, you will not be able to continue typing from where you left off.

The “bug” does not appear in textboxes (<input />). Just textareas (<textarea></textarea>)….

Try to participate on a forum (i.e: a CS based forum), where you need toy change language frequently while you are typing… Hopeless…

Now I am wondering… Who’s “bug” is this Netscape’s or IE’s engine’s???

We ‘ll see…

There are also a number of other issues I ran into from time to time (most related to IE engine’s usage by Netscape. For instance try to hit the back button to return to a page with Greek Encoding. Page encoding does not always get applied resulting in an unreadable page you need to refresh. Probably this does not have to do with ISO-8859-7 (Greek) or Windows-1253 (Greek also) encodings only.

So far, although cool, the ability of Netscape 8 to try to function like IE (I suppose by using the browser control) is not that useful all the time…