I’ve done some site maintenance over the last few days, the biggest single upgrade being that of the gallery. This shouldn’t affect you as a user too much (except for the use of tags, more on that later) but it increases security and flexibility. I’m now also using a spam filter to counter commentspam, as this was getting out of hand. And last but not least, I’m working on bilingual support so all posts will be available in Dutch as well as English, but this isn’t ready yet.
Now, about the tags. These will allow you to browse through my photo’s in an entirely different way. Tags are like keywords or labels that apply to individual images in the gallery. You’ll see these listed along with the photo’s if you visit the gallery now. Clicking on any of these tags will show you all images with that tag from the entire gallery. For instance, you’re browsing through “Rome, Summer 2006″ and you see a photo of the Colosseum. This will have, you guessed it, “Colosseum” written below it. Clicking on “Colosseum” will then show you all photo’s of the Colosseum, from “Rome, Summer 2006″, as well as from “Rome, Autum 2006″, etc. How nifty. That’s not all though. There’s a new link in the navigation bar that says “Tag Cloud”. The tag cloud is a collection all (or the most popular, if there are too many) tags. The bigger a tag is printed in the tag cloud, the more images it has. Again, clicking on a tag will show you all images with that tag.
I’ve decided not to assign every imaginable tag to my photo’s. That means that if there’s a photo of a tree, it will not be tagged ‘Tree’. It will simply remain untagged. This is because there would be so many photo’s that could have the tag ‘Tree’, that more relevant tags (like ‘Colosseum’) would be snowed under and the Tag Cloud would become useless. As for different names in different languages, I’ve chosen the way mapmakers have used for decades, if not centuries. Things are tagged with their original name (St. Peter will be tagged with ‘San Pietro’) unless the English name is significantly different from the original name (Not everyone will know or understand that the Italian’s call Florence Firenze, so it will be tagged ‘Florence’).
And so it has, like all things eventually do, come to an end, and we’re back again in The Netherlands, after being on the run for more than five months. Though not quite back were we started. How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back. There are some thi… Oh wait, that’s from another story.
Na zondag op de carmarket de auto verkocht te hebben zijn we naar Whangarei vertrokken, om nogmaals te duiken zodat ik eindelijk die verrekte certificatie heb zodat ik overal kan duiken. Het duiken was leuk maar het zicht was bar slecht (10m), en vandaag is alweer de laatste volledige dag in Nieuw Zeeland. De auto is net opgehaald door de koper, de tas is gepakt (oke, half dan) en morgen zullen we nog wat rondsukkellen alvorens de shuttle naar het vliegveld te nemen. Eenmaal aangekomen op het vliegveld zullen we inchecken, boarden en als het goed is om 23.30 opstijgen. Na 11.37 uur zullen we aankomen in Hong Kong, daar 3.5 uur niks doen en dan KLM vlucht 888 naar Schiphol nemen. De geschatte aankomsttijd is 16.00 uur (ofzo) maar houd teletext pagina zoveel in de gaten als je wilt weten hoe laat precies. Tot over 55 uur (ofzo)!
Published on
April 2, 2007 in
Logbook.
This is my travel history. I’ll update this post everytime I have the chance, so you’ll know where I was even if I don’t have the time to write an entire post with all the details. Cheers!
Woops, this post was getting a bit long! Please click on “Show me more” if you want to, well, see more… Continue reading ‘New Zealand Travel History’
Selling a Car
As you probably know, we’re selling a car. To do that, you either have to sell it off to a dealer (you won’t get much if you do that), put an ad in a local newspaper (you won’t get many reactions if you do that) or go to a carmarket (bingo). So we went to a carmarket yesterday, right in the middle of Auckland. Strange how a patch of undeveloped, barren land can survive between all the skyscrapers. Oh well. So we were there at the market from 8.30 to 12.30 and all in all we had about two people who were interested. Bugger. So today, we decided to be smart and slash $200 off the price. We drove in and the first one interested was the guy at the entrance giving the directions. We parked, Nienke went for a coffee at one of the numerous stands and before she was back there were already half a dozen people swarming around my precious Corolla. I went for a testdrive with a potential buyer before my cappuccino was even drinkable and the car was sold before I had finished it. Wow.
It was, ofcourse, a much more professional market: a dozen people giving directions in stead of one, coffee stands everywhere and change of ownership facilities on site. Were there were about 25 cars yesterday including vans, there were at least 250 today under $5000 and the same amount over $5000, and there were more buyers than sellers, unlike at the other carmarket. Well, how should I’ve known that that one would be such a waste of time? But I reckon I could have gotten a lot more for it: I bought it for $4300, sold it for $3400. The price was $3800 on Saturday, $3600 today, but I could’ve added instead of slashed $200. Oh well… The dollar’s really strong right now, so that means I’ll get more euro’s for them.
In Auckland
We’ve been in Auckland for a week now, and it’s surprising how much you can do here. We’ve been to a really bad movie (Black Sheep) and up into the Sky Tower (187m in 30 seconds) on Friday, to a carmarket, Geoff (A cousin of Ian’s) and the Stardome Observatory & Planetarium yesterday and today we sold our car and it’s not even noon yet. We’re going to Whangarei today to finish our diving course, which I really dread because it means driving on the motorway a fair bit. Like Geoff says, Europeans really like driving on the motorway because it reminds them of home: all the slow people are in the right lane. It’s Sunday though, so we should be alright, but we’ll have to get back here on Tuesday…
I’ve made some really cool photo’s of & from the Sky Tower by the way, but I’m too lazy to connect my camera for one photo and the others are all a big panorama so I’ll have to stitch those together first. You’ll see it in a few days when I get home. Wow, only four days left now…
