Over the last couple of days I have been receiving some feedback from different folks who have indicated how difficult it is actually reading from my weblog. To get things started it actually takes a substantial amount of time to load the page because of the leaves background and also the different graphics. Secondly, there are some items from the design itself that are somewhat distracting from the main content and since you folks are also somehow an integral part of this weblog I have now decided that I am going to start moving into another WordPress theme, which will be a lot easier on the eye and also a whole lot less distracting.

So while I am still validating elsua I will also initiate the process of upgrading to the new theme and add the different components that are now part of the standard weblog template. So you would have to bear with me for a little while till that gets done. And then I will be back to normal. Let’s see how the changes will take place with the new theme. Hopefully, they will be improved.

Technorati Tags : Metablogging, WordPress

… Nature itself just destroyed it in a matter of hours and all of that thanks to the tropical storm Delta. There have been some casualties and lots of damage, indeed, all of them irreparable, along with the so-called El Dedo de Dios (God’s finger), one of the many symbols from the North of Gran Canaria, which is no longer what it used to be.

Here is a picture of what it used to look like

And here you have got another one after tropical storm Delta hit the island during the course of yesterday:

Thank goodness that it was just a tropical storm. Can you imagine the devastation if it would have been one of the many hurricanes we have seen hit the other side of the pond ? … Phew ! We have been lucky, I guess.

Technorati Tags : Gran+Canaria, Gods Finger, Dedo de Dios

A couple of weekends ago, two good friends and myself decided to check out the countryside from Gran Canaria just after a couple of days of heavy rain. We knew we were just going to get ready for some stunning landscapes with lots of green all over the mountains and all that topped with some charming villages scattered around the different places we visited. Of course, I took my digital camera with me and this week’s pictures from my Flickr account are just a very small number of the good bunch that I took but that will give you some good ideas about how magnificent things can get after a day or two of some very much needed rain. So here we go with the three of my favourite pictures of the week so that you can get to see what it is like:

Degollada de las Yeguas

Risco Blanco

Degollada de las Yeguas

WoW! Amazing, right ? Well, just today we have got a warning while tropical storm Delta arrives to the Canary Islands, so this week there will be some more wonderful pictures waiting for us out there, I am sure !

Enjoy them !

Technorati Tags : Risco+Blanco, DegolladaDeLasYeguas, Fataga

Over the weekend I have been doing some catch up with my RSS Newsfeeds and while going through Scobleizer’s (Who by the way, has now moved over to WordPress.com, in case you may not have noticed) I bumped into this weblog post: Tim Bray says corporate sites’ HTML is borked and although my weblog hasn’t got anything to do with corporate I decided to give it a try with the validation button I placed on the bottom of my weblog template and see what the results would be like.

Surprise, surprise ! I got a whopping 325 validation errors !!! Jeez ! That is just way too much, folks ! So I decided to look into the first view from the top of the list and to my astonishment I am finding out that most of those validation errors are due to weblog posts created with Qumana. Indeed, there are lots of HTML tag errors that are getting created while posting content with Qumana and I never thought there would be so many. As if we didn’t have enough with the 15 character limitation bug already mentioned elsewhere. Sigh

Oh, dear, this is going to be a painful process, folks, since I have started to update all those conflicting weblog posts to get rid of those validation errors. So far I am now down to 308 and I am hoping that over the next few days I will be done with most of them. Either way, I have already contacted the Qumana support team asking them for some advice as to when they would expect to have this serious problem for pro-webloggers addressed and fixed and until I get some further confirmation details that these issues have been fixed I am no longer going to use Qumana (No need to redo weblog posts any longer, at least, for the time being). So I am back to w.bloggar, my default weblogging tool for my Intranet weblog and now also for the external one. Let’s see for how long…

Will keep you posted, folks, about how far we go with this, but how about you ? Are you validating yet ?

Technorati Tags : Metablogging, Qumana, wbloggar, Validation

During the course of the week I have received it from a couple of friends about three or four times already. I lost the count. But every single time I still get hooked and have to watch it through again and again. Quite stunning ! Yes, folks, I am talking about this Flash animation called The Good Earth, a multimedia view from our planet Earth as seen from satellites, the space shuttle and the International Space Station. I must admit that most of the pictures are quite beautiful and breathtaking, from a place that we should be all cherishing and nurturing much more than what we actually do. Hopefully, upcoming events like Habitat Jam may help promoting that preservation of what we have got over here before it is too late.

But in the mean time if you would want to go for some impressive Flash animation with some of the most impressive pictures from some wonderful places on Earth I would suggest you spend a few minutes relaxing, sitting back and watching The Good Earth. You may like it so much that in the end you may also go for Deep Space.

Enjoy it !

Technorati Tags : Earth Flash Animation, Frontier+Multimedia

Yesterday I mentioned briefly how there is a new version of Qumana out there and although I did not talked about it too much I thought it would be worth while now including a few lines on the subject. To start with, if you head over to the Qumana Blog you will be able to find two different weblog posts providing some further details on the latest version of the weblogging software. But also you could head over to the Qumana Overview web site and right there you will be able to read it all.

I must say that I upgraded to the latest version yesterday morning and since then I have been able to create a number of different weblog posts and I am really happy with the results so far. To start with the new set of buttons makes publishing content a lot easier; now different options are much more intuitive to access and its ease of use is as good as ever. Yes, I know, the new buttons are cute, too ! hehe

However, what I really like about the latest release from Qumana is the fact that it continues to evolve providing advanced webloggers with the possibility of inserting their own HTML tags to customise posts the way they would want. This very handy feature, along with the growing list of keyboard shortcuts, makes it even faster working with and sharing your content in your own weblog. So if anybody would ask me for a weblogging software tool to work with I would be more than happy to recommend Qumana. why ? Because it delivers pretty well what it promises. As simple as that. And not many offerings and show that off.

But where is Qumana going from here ? What would be the new features put together into future versions ? I am not sure what they will be, folks, but I do seriously hope they have got something to do with improving the overall handling of previous posts. I know that it is possible to retrieve now a number of different weblog posts, edit them and repost them back, but I am thinking it would also be a very nice feature to be able to edit a weblog post based on its unique ID, so that I would just go straight into that post looking up its ID as opposed to have to load a whole bunch of them before I can interact with it. I have been looking for this feature in the current release and haven’t been able to find it, so I am hoping it will get added soon.

Also it would be quite nice if the Preview page would be available as a tab from the main weblog post interface, without having to open up another window that will not allow me to continue working with the text further. I wouldn’t think it would be too bad to have that tabbed Preview option and certainly the software would gain tremendously with it. Oh, and another neat feature would be the possibility of adding Trackbacks directly while we are composing a weblog post to reference another, like other weblogging tools can do already. I wonder if they have got plans to include this one as well or not. We shall see…

Finally, I would very much like to see how Qumana continues to work further to integrate itself with other popular weblogging platforms, like Roller Weblogger Project. I know I could go ahead and make use of the MetaWebLog API but it would be better if I could set up my Roller weblog as easy as I could now with WordPress, for instance. Anyway, we shall to continue watching the space and check what the next version will bring.

For the time being, if you are looking for a weblogging tool that would stand out because of its ease of use at the same time that is feature packed then look no further. Download Qumana now and give it a try ! Once you start using it you will not go back !

Kudos to the Qumana developers for another outstanding piece of work !

Technorati Tags : Metablogging, Qumana, Roller, WordPress