Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev & Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov (Nicholas II)
Look at this! It’s incredible!
Don’t know them?
The first one is the actual President of Russian Federation – Dmitry Medvedev, the second one, is the latest Russian Tsar -Nicholas II. Nicholas II was executed by Bolsheviks in 1918.
However I found this similarity very funny but also somehow strange. Maybe beacuse of history. Nicholas II stands for last moments of non communistic Russia . History has made Nicholas II and his whole family (which was executed too) very symbolic. It’s difficult to explain. However very strange for me.
P.S. As you see, I’m back again, have much to do, so has to wait few days or even weeks 
I found this picture here
12 day’s sun and sea
Tonight a plane will take us to our holiday destination. That means I’m not at a PC and maybe even not reachable on telephone for at least 12 days. 
That is my first big holiday trip since two years, and a first holiday with my little son.
Nevertheless I have some ideas on improvement of W-Popularity Plug-in. I think we should give up compatibility of DB-Tables with Popularity Contest Plug in. As i think that should eliminate all possible inter-operation problems with the Plug-in of Alex King, including those activation problems, some of you have report in the comments to my ???????? ????? ????????.
I started already work on version 0.9.4 but i will release it after I’m back again.
W-Popularity version 0.9.3
>user of my W-Popularity plugin. Some of you have pointed me to problem with activating W-Populariy plug-in in WordPress 2.5.
I have fixed this problem now. Please use newest version of W-Popularity
No other functionality was changed in this release.
Little story about school education in Germany
This is a personal blog. Isn`t? – Yes. Can I write my personal opinion in my personal blog? Let me think… Of course! Should my personal opinion be somehow conform to the mainstream opinion? – I think you should know the answer
However, during Google continues to mark my site with malware warnings (), because the Google test of cleaned sites takes Sooooooo Looong. , I want to tell you one story, concerning a theme which scares me already for a long time. Don’t laugh, but I wanna speak about school education in Germany.
Maybe you heard already about Pisa Study Results of German “Schuler”? If not, I tell you, their results are really not impressive. How it comes…? Read in the following…
Historical
After the WW2 in West and East Germany began denazification. Germans have done good work and succeeded in that by throwing out everything of the Third Reich. Also the education methods in the Third Reich where considered as unappropriate, I’m not an expert but can imagine that they can appear as too strikt, too idealized for modern times. And therefore totaly unappropriate for modern children. The same happened also after the “unification of Germany” in truly unification is the wrong word, West Germany incorporated East Germany. And of cause education concepts of the “East-Block” (also of the enemy) where thrown out of the window, not even to look on them.
Personal Impression
If I look around and speak with my friends, who have children in school age, I gain the opinion that, the primary school is a place where children are doing everything, except of learning.
So I’m also a big friend of playing. But excuse me, if my son goes to school, I expect that he learns something there! In best case, my children should can read and write and simple math after the first year in school not after the third or even fifth one!
It’s nothing impossible for every child! But children have to be motivated to learn, to be smart, to be educated. I don’t wanna say they should be compeled to learn, mostly it won`t have much success without motivation, but teachers and parents have to be strikt with that in every case.
However, it’s very difficult to be a teacher in our times, teachers have NO rights and might over their pupil, further they really believe ( because it is taught them at the university) that children can learn better without the stress of competition and without any effort and any pressure to perform at least in the beginning of the school. Bullshit! Children love to succeed, love competition. To compete, to win, to learn and to enjoy-this is their natural urge, I can see it every day, when I look at my little son.
But let me tell you one story of many, which finally lead me to write this article, one story I heard today.
The Story and the Questions
One friend of my wife has a child, who is the age of 5. The girl goes to the normal German preschool everyday, where they are doing something, as I think playing 
Once a week the same child also goes to a Russian preschool called “Azbuka”. Now the question: In which language does that child read? The Answer is indeed Russian!
The next question is: What the hell are they doing at the German preschool? With the same success if not better this child could play 5 days a week at a playground…
In my opinion these children are under-cultivated by the German education system in their best years! And many parents have no time to educate children at home because they are working hardly.
P.S. I remember my first “Gymnasium” class teacher, who did laughed at me, when I talked to him that German School Education is far not the best in the world. It was few years before the first smashing Pisa Study got publicity.
What if you get google malware notification?
At first it is quite bad bad feeling. All pages of holbreich.de flow out of google index . According to Murphy’s Law that happened when I was at Project Management Seminar and therefore had no time for my personal page.
Google is kindly enough to try contact you i such case, when they about to throw your site out of the index because your site is malware infected or even is a malware distributor. In such one unlucky case you get the Malware Notification. Normaly this Notification goes to following addresses of your domain.
- abuse@
- admin@
- administrator@
- contact@
- info@
- postmaster@
- support@
- webmaster@
Therefore you are good advised to listen to at least one of them on your own domain.
The Malware Notification Mail points you to some affected URL’s (In my case there where two). Alterantive the same information could be found in Google Webmaster Tools
As next, you have to investigate the cause of this notification and clean your site. In best case you should find and fix the bug which was used for infiltration.
As you maybe remember my side was already attacked in the past, so I do not wander as much that such thing happen. Also in my case i did found the modifications on some post, where commented iframe with a linked to a bad site with and .php script was included. Maybe just some tracking or something like that. I wonder if such construct works still in any modern browser, but I’m not expert in such.
However as I think I also have found the source of the problem. I do not exactly understand how could it work in my case. But i seems to be the bad Trojan (By Antivir): HTML/Crypted.Gen.
Dancho Danchev describes a similar case. Maybe someone can tell me how exactly it worked in my case.
However. Now I have the newest version of WordPress, newest Version of Plug-Ins and clean posts. I have notify Google through Google Webmaster Tools to check my site again. Hope they’ll do it in the nearest time.
Back again
It’s pretty difficult to start write again after such pause. My wife and my Son are away for a holidays, so I must found some time to write to my blog. But where to begin. So many thing are happened in the last time.
Ok , I know I begin with the introducing of the My wife’s Blog. It’s about books, travel and geography, because my darling do study at the Faculty of Geography. You might find it also interesting even when you will not find there many articles about IT However her English is much better than my
Back to this blog. As you know WordPress 2.5 is out. And somehow there are no security updates at that time. How it comes? Did the WordPress guys didn’t their work really good this time? Seems to be. So I consider to upgrade in the next time.
Magento 0.9….
Yesterday I tried Magento again. As I tried it it was a very very slow and buggy CMS. However last days I played with the brand new Version 0.9.17740 of Magento E-Commerce Solution and I was positive impressed.
There are only few bugs remained in that late version, even if I was still able to find some of them. Furthermore Magento-people have really speed their System up, which was enormously important to my eyes. So now it seems that Magento becomes really competitive E Commerce Platform and that is just great! If the development goes so further on. None of the competing Systems will survive.
However one need much time to get familiar with Magento. That platform brings very much functionality and configuration options, so configuring Magento can become a new Profession! Unfortunately Configuration Options are just sparse documented at that point, so there is bunch of try and error till one can get his first Online-Shop of dreams.
On the other side Magento has growing online Community, which is effect more worth as full documentation.
In the meantime
My last Post is nearly ten days ago – unforgivable Unfortunately I have had no time or better say I had few time, much small things to do and no motivation. Yesterday I had my birthday and thank goodness, that has marked some turning point in me. So today I was more productive and a little motivated, I’ve even begun write this article down. And I’m more confident about today and the weekend.
Calender and Car
Furthermore I realized that I need again my small personal calendar, Google online calender is not enough. After using it more than 1,5 years I realize that its comfortable to plan long term events with google online calendar, but maybe not so comfortable to plan activities for the next day or even for today.
I also noticed that it is also good to relax more often. So it is not good to drive 50 minutes to work by car. Driving car efforts brain activity. I prefer to drive fast, so driving deserves the biggest part of my attention, the other part is listen to the radio or slips And that not good. It is better to travel by subway, where you brain can be used for other things like thinking about mission of a day to be more effective, thinking about things you normally don’t’ have time too, cause you work to much or just sleep
So think twice and be effective, good luck!
DIGG Effect is worth it?
My depicts few facts of success in social communities. Here I wanna be more concrete and give you some interesting Background information of the DIGG and DIGG effect. Finelly I give my personal adwise not to try to be the top DIGGER, read why.
DIGG Effect
Eric Enge has wrote very good article about succes on digg. Some of details he presents my be not true at the moment, because DIGG evolves and changes internal algorithms. However some facts are really interesting.
As he says, stories that where able to reach the digg home page receive an average of 129 links, and more than 10,000 visitors in an hour. Some stories have brought even more than 1,000 links and 100,000 visitors. This shows how important DIGG is and why there are so many legend and so much attention from SEOs. So it has happened many times that stories which have made the home page, have brought the server of the story site can’t handle the traffic load. This is well known phenomena is known as the “Digg Effect”.
Of cause the quality of this kind of visitors is “bad”. Don’t expect that they will by your products and click Ads. Do not expect big growth in comments, DIGG users often comment regarding a site on digg itself instead of on the dugg website. Digg users comes to see only that what they would inspect in the story description on DIGG itself.
I don’t wanna be a Digger
So after reading several articles about how to success on DIGG i realized that it would take very very very much time. So as every body know time is money, but moreover time is life! In my opinion the truly success on DIGG starting from null will deserve much to much time in comparison to the revenue.
Personally I don’t have much time and will not spend it to fullish site like DIGG, voting for silly topics of US tanagers So at the moment and I think also in the future will not spend much time on DIGG or other communities.
I mean isn’t it better to spend time to create wonderful content? It would give you personal much more satisfaction than any DIGG effect. But however good content have in any case good chance to achieve one DIGG effect after another!
So by by DIGG, may others vote for my content, I will not spend my life for Digging
P.S. It doesn’t mean i will not continue submitting my articles to it
Factors of Success in Social (News) Communities
Initially I just wanted to report about some experience on DIGG but then i noticed that i try to cover at least two different topics in one post, so I decided to split. In that article I will cover key factors of success on news driven Social communities like well known DIGG and will cover my firs serious steps with DIGG in the next article.
Currently I’m the number 49 of top users of the Russian DIGG sister called news2.ru, therefore I think to have some experience and some kind of instinctive feeling for mechanisms we have on that page. News2.ru is a typical example of social news-driven page and is quite similar to DIGG. Therefore my experience can be useful also for DIGG users and other similar Web2.0 sites.
Success factors of digging
As I think there a only two main factors your success (success of your submissions) depends on. That are the quality of your stories and friendship. Yes only them two and some sub issues its quite simple. Such an statement my appear as vague for you, therefore I’ll try to be more concrete.
High quality stories
High quality stories are known as:
- unique
- unusual
- very actual
- interesting for everybody
That are primary properties on successful story. Now you may think that the appreciation of these attributes is highly subjective, that is partly true. However everyone can achieve good objectivity by analysing the actuality of post. E.g. U.S. President election is quite actual at the moment, Cold War maybe not. However with some experience thee appraisal of these properties will get better and better. I can say I began to feel what kind of stories can reach the TOP.
To be actual and have many stories to choose, it is recommended to subscribe to RSS feeds of news portal of your wish or several of them. If your social-community portal presents websites statistic , you are well advised to study it and chose some with the best success rate.
So what to do? How to begin? The answer is clear too, you just have to star and play a bit around. If you are non completely new in the field of social news community, then you just can’t leave this step out. However as already mentioned the success factor of your news will grow with experience.
It is difficult to provide some examples of good or bad news, because it’s highly depends on the time context and also other things like presentation! Presentation is one of the sub factors I wanna say some words about:
- Always use pictures! Choose them with care.
- Use headlines that magnify attention (Compare: “Microsoft considers to by some Yahoo shares” vs. “Microsoft takes over Yahoo!”)
- But use headlines that are precisely express what is in the content behind them. Otherwise your messages can be considered as spam or inaccurate.
- Be aware of duplicates
- The content at it self should be good presented and layout carefully. Don’t write to much, but try to make your link sexy. Don’t lie.
- Use the right category!
Doing so you will create solid and high potential submissions, and you has learned this, the second factor comes to a play which helps enormously to use the potential of your submissions.
Friendship
If in the beginning of your “career” maybe non of your messages reach the top, at a master level the rate of your positive submissions can rise up to 50-99 percent (depending on social service and other factors). But this success is only possible with a active circle of friends!
How to get friends on social communities? You should be able to answer this question at your-self, because it is not much different as in the real life. Friendship grounds on mutuality and deserve much time. Decide for yourself whether you are ready for it. However gaining new friends is in any case new experience and enrichment for everyone.