On 23rd of April 2015, Mihai Șucan passed away due to metastatic
cancer caused by RDEB.
24 July 2007, 11:13
Yesterday we updated the site.
For this site update we made the following changes:
-
Interface updated: more eye candy. It's not a new
interface, we like to say it's just better made, smoother, looking
much better than the previous interface. With this update we made
sure the interface still fits on 800x600 resolutions, and we made
several design corrections. The gallery and the blog pages should
be much better now.
- The interface now uses more CSS 3 selectors
and properties. Try viewing the site with Safari - one of the web browsers
which implement
text-shadow
and
box-shadow
.
- Handheld and print stylesheets. These are new interface
templates.
-
The handheld interface is for cell phones, smart
phones and anything else connected to the Internet. The site now
looks very pleasant on any mobile device. We recommend you to try
Opera Mini and/or Opera Mobile.
-
The print stylesheet is used whenever you want to
print any page from this we site. For this interface we eliminated
the navigation menus, leaving just the content, with no fancy
graphics.
- New feature: Universal Search. All the search
fields in the site provide the following capabilities:
- You can type "/path/to/the/page/you/want" (for
example /mihai/blog). This allows you to
quickly and intuitively jump to any web page you want. Do you want
to contact me? Just type /mihai/contact and submit.
- Automatic input completion: you do not need to remember page
paths. You will automatically see the available pages everywhere
you want. We like Web Forms
2 and for this reason I implemented in JavaScript support
for
<datalist>
. This an implementation which
works with any input form, with any external XML document. The
implementation makes use of XmlHttpRequest (aka AJAX).
- automatic input completion also works with page titles. If you
want to see the images Marius
made, just type "images".
- Site search, just type any keywords you want and submit. The
keywords you type will be searched in page titles and page
contents.
-
Google Custom Search Engine. You can search our web site with
Google as well. Using any search field in our site, you just have
to type "g your keywords" (prefix the list of
keywords you want with "g ").
- Additionally, if you want to go to another external web site,
just type www.ubuntu.com (or
whatever address you want).
All of this functionality works even if you have JavaScript
disabled. Automatic completion works in web browsers which
implement Web Forms 2. Currently Opera 9 implements
Web Forms 2, however ...
due to a bug Opera cannot load the external XML file.
-
Breadcrumb
navigation everywhere in the web site. Move the mouse over the
title below the logo to see the breadcrumb navigation links.
- A new search field everywhere in the site. When you view the
breadcrumb navigation you can click the search icon on left to
activate the Universal Search field.
- Several improvements to the Content Management System. In
comparison with the initial site release, the CMS now has lots of
improvements in the file manager, the Awebitor (my HTML editor). Also, the
latest ReTidy script is now
included everywhere in the CMS. The generated code is a lot
cleaner.
- We've updated several pages and made corrections. One of the
pages we updated is the Site
timeline.
- Many improvements to the code output. I made sure the code has
new lines where needed, making it easy to read. I like clean,
readable markup. :)
These changes were made in preparation for two national Romanian
contests of informatics: see InfoEducatie and ProInfo.
Published in:
maintenance.
20 June 2007, 20:14
Hello world!
This site was kindly hosted by a company in Bucharest. On 26th of
May the company was required to move to a new location. We were not
announced and they took no measures for ensuring server uptime. The
unfortunate coincidence was that the national Contest of Applied Informatics was held on that specific
date. As visitors of this web site know, we host the web site of
this contest and the associated forum.
Unfortunately, we were not announced that the server will be moved
to a new location.
The big problem is that the Internet service provider has not yet
installed the connection at the new location. This is why we
decided to buy a hosting plan from Dreamhost. So, here we are, on a new
server. Big thanks go to Lucian Marin!
For now we were able to only upload our site and the Henri Coandă highschool site. For all the
other web sites we have no updated backups and we cannot upload
them on the new server. Once we get access to the server in
Bucharest, we will make all the web sites available again.
We apologize for any incoveniences the server down time have
caused. This is certainly an unfortunate coincidence.
Published in:
dreamhost,
maintenance.
18 February 2007, 14:30
Hello and welcome to the new ROBO Design web site, version 5.0!
This blog post is not about a new trend, Web 5.0. The title is
intended to be funny. :)
What's new and changed:
- The backend is completely new. Work on this backend was started
with the PRO-net web site, and continued with several other sites.
- The site is now only available in English. Parts of it are in
Romanian. This is a "mixed language" site. We no longer have time
and interest to maintain the entire site in both languages.
- All pages have been reorganized and updated. We didn't like our
previous web sites for the lack of focus: the ROBO Design studio,
or the ROBO Design twins with their works. We've now made it clear:
the ROBO Design twins present their works.
- We've changed the site interface (obviously). Finally,
something clean and simple, fast loading pages.
- Permanent links for those about to rock. :)
- Users can no longer post comments on this site, as on the old
site. Spammers have abused the previous site. Astute visitors of
the previous web site already noticed we've disabled the feature of
comment posting. The "send me a comment" feature in the blog and in
the gallery allows the visitor to quickly and easily send us an
email about anything he/she wants.
- Many of my old blog posts from My Opera have been added into
this blog, as a backup. Small cosmetic fixes for some posts.
- Content Management System. Now Marius can also update the site.
For me it's just easier and faster.
- Throw a party: Internet Explorer was not ignored by us. The
site works properly in IE 6 and IE 7. Sadly, getting the site to
work took me some time.
To see what's new for
Marius, take a look at this blog post. He has lots of new
content. Most of my content is new. :)
Make sure you check out the site
timeline and the radio
dedications (both posted by Marius).
For web developers
Given this site will be visited by some web developer experts and
"wanna-bees", I consider necessary to provide some technical
details about this web site.
If you will try to validate this site,
you are bound to find invalid pages. I don't value validation as
much as I did once. This doesn't mean I've given up on web
standards, not at all. On the contrary, I've learned that
validation is not the only path to a better Web. I will generally
try to keep the site valid - closed tags, no presentation markup,
etc.
I don't use XHTML. Simple web pages which do use it almost
automatically label the authors as "beginners", or at least guys
who want to be "cool". I
used, and I will continue to use XHTML if needed.
Some pages won't validate "thanks" to the home-grown WYSIWYG editor
integrated into the CMS of the site. Given time, I will probably
integrate my existing page cleaner script into the CMS. For those
who don't know, I have a page cleaner script which fixes tons of
problems in pages generated by WYSIWYG editors, Office applications
(e.g. OpenOffice Writer and Microsoft Word). The script is already
tested on hundreds of A4 pages of Word documents. The results were
quite amazing: very clean documents. More details will probably be
posted on this blog.
Another reason for invalid pages is something really simple:
some pages do use
Web
Forms 2. Maybe some HTML 5 as
well.
Conclusion
Last, but not least, we'd like to thank Mobius Solutions for hosting this web
site.
Thanks for stopping by and for visiting our web site. Expect more
updates.
Comments, suggestions, and bug reports are greatly appreciated!
Published in:
maintenance.