I did wrote yesterday a post saying that poverty isn’t off-topic in any blog niche, and I certainly believe that’s true. Why is, then, so hard to write about it?

Maybe my good friend Jen said it best when she says that any post that comes to mind seems to carry a bit of hypocrisy, and certainly Chris Garret has a point when he says “good intentions are not good without actions”.

According to blog action day stats, Today 12,044 sites have blogged about poverty and hopefully, risen awareness about poverty, but, I’ll join Sue Clark on saying: Just blogging about poverty is not enough.

Awareness about poverty is high enough, what is lacking is attitude and not information. If 12,044 posts have today lead to 12,044 actual actions to fight poverty, then I’ll call it success, but if a good part of these posts are just transferring the responsibility to the reader, then is time wasted.

What can you do?

Actions fall in two categories: long time strategies, and short time solutions. Ideally, actions that fall in the first category will help wipe poverty from the face of the earth, but the short time solutions are essential to supply the immediate needs of people, literally, starving to death or being unable to supply very basic needs.

Short time solutions

• Donate money to an organization
• Engage in activities to raise funds or help manage one
• Donate what you don’t want, instead of selling on eBay
• Donate your professional skills to help find and optimize solutions

You don’t have to cross the world to find people in the need of help. Living in one of the wealthiest cities in the world, London, I tell you there is plenty to do here. I’m sure there’s plenty to do near you as well. If there isn’t, you can always engage online.

Long time strategies

• Educate both rich and poor
• Help create sustainable solutions in terms of cost of solutions/revenue
• Help change the greed mentality

The greed mentality and the credit crunch explained

Nothing is more harmful to the delicate balance of the human beings than trying to have plenty of limited resources. There is only a certain amount of wealth in the world, and is more than enough to all of us.

More often than not people seem to want to be really rich. And what’s that for? The only reasonable answer I see for willing to be rich is to have more stability over life, which is a fair point. Still, it’s a fragile thought.

People believe to think they are as wealthy as they money they have. But money is just an abstraction and, as Christian Heillmann pointed it quite accurately, these days is an abstraction to no real world goods, merely speculation, then, bam, credit crunch! Where has the wealth gone? Nowhere, it has never been there.

But I’m slightly digressing now, the point is, greed is making some people rich and, as consequence, others poor. Make Greed history and you’ll make poverty history. And if you don’t have poverty, why would you bother in being rich to live with stability?

Easier said than done, I hear some saying. I’m not sure, it seems that becoming poor and broken is even easier than fulfilling the objective, while trying to become rich.

Finally, is not about you or me being rich or trying to, but where you shop and what. Is about who you endorse with your money. As my cousin Saverio told me once: You don’t make politics voting, you make politics buying. Chose carefully where and what to buy!

On October 15 last year, thousands of bloggers wrote about the environment and targeted an audience of millions. The environment has become a frequent and recurrent subject but the need for a change of conscience and attitude on that field is still huge and what has been done is not yet enough.

This year, Blog Action Day’s subject is poverty, and so far 8,634 Sites already engaged on the cause and will reach an audience of 9,201,889 subscribers.

Why is your post important?

Now, with all the media coverage on the subject, why is your blog post important?

As a blogger, you probably know that relationship between writers and readers in blogs are much more personal than in traditional media and when you write a post on your blog you might be targeting only a few hundred people (or even less) but these few people are listening to you and if there are bloggers among your readers, they’ll be talking to some people who are actually listening to them.

Why is not off-topic on your blog

Poverty, just like environment, is a subject that concerns every single human being and your blog and your business, as tools for your business, networking or your online persona are part of your footprint on the planet. Being a personal or professional blog, either you or your business have an impact on poverty. Either you are helping, creating poverty or doing nothing, which means, at the very least, endorsing the current situation.

To make a long story short, whatever you write about, has an impact on poverty, either positive or negative, and there is at least some point in which you can discuss the subject inside your niche.

What if I’m wrong?

Say I’m wrong. Say that your niche doesn’t have anything to do with poverty at all, it doesn’t help, it doesn’t get in the way and it doesn’t endorse the current poverty. Well, then the non-relationship of your niche with the subject is so unique that it is on itself a subject to write about and I’d be the first one to read your post.

What’s in for me?

Well before being bloggers, entrepreneurs and professionals, we are all human beings and I’d be happy if that were enough reason, but if that’s not, then let’s roll up the sleeves for some simple math.

There are 8,634 blogs registered and a fixed audience of 9,201,889 Readers and the numbers are growing. It is quite likely that this event will have a lot of more traditional media coverage and the networking happening on this event will be massive and you risk end up knowing interesting people you wouldn’t normally meet.

No. Not at all! But in the last four months or so a series of serious changes in my life have drained most of my energy and I had little choice but to stop writing for a while.

The good news are that the serious changes are mostly (if not all) positive and were actually the realisation of projects I was actually investing in. Some of the major changes are to be living in London now (a longtime project of mine) and working for Yahoo! which is a source of so much web goodness that I can’t but be proud of working on a daily basis with some of the guys and girls who shape the web as we know it and write some of the best web literature around.

It is also (hopefully ;) good news that I’m into blogging as much as I used to be and now, with recharged batteries, I’ll try to share the best bits of what’s going on the piece of the web that surrounds me.

I could tell you myself the story of how this happened, but yesterday I’ve been the featured designer on Designers Who Blog and since Cat decided to tell it in a much funnier way I’d be able to, then you’d better just go there and read it from her.

To me it was already a reason for pride that my plugin was the base for such a giantic and useful blogroll, but, makes me even prouder to be featured shoulder to shoulder in such a front line of great designers in DWB.

And by the way, did I mention how useful her blogroll is? I can’t stress that enough! If you are looking for great design blogs to follow, you should start there.

Lessons learned and achievements

Two years blogging really changed my perception of the web and aside for professional opportunities I also made friends in the blogosphere. Among the best things that happened in these two years I can count:

Friends on the blogosphere

In Italy people say: “Le montagne stano ferme, ma gi uomini s’incontrano” (the mountains are still, but people meet) and that is completely true. You never know what can turn out from an aquaintance. And being friendly on the blogosphere had brought me friends and work opportunities like few times before.

Guest-blogging

I haven’t guest blogged a lot, but the three posts I wrote for Domestik Goddess (1, 2, 3) and writing for the January writing project at The Giving Hand were a door to indulge my will to write about subjects other than those of my own blog. There are so many things to write about that is a waste writing for a single blog.

The Mediterrasian Cooking Blog

One of my inspirations for having a blog, initially, was food. I’ve always loved to cook and one of food inspirations was mediterrasian.com. I can’t but be proud I’ve been invited to join them to create the MediterrasianCooking blog, officially launched yesterday.

Cultural diversilty

Thanks to my deep plunge on the blogosphere I had come to know blogs about all kinds of different subjects and their bloggers. Besides all the fun, it has been a rich cultural experience.

The road ahead

Provide more value

I think in these two years I have been too shy in submitting valuable day-by-day content and have focused too much on big discussions. I intend to add more tutorials and doable stuff. Make it a blog more result-oriented that it has been so far.

Video and podcasting

I had a very pleasant experience publishing my first two videos, I’m willing to do more. And I like to combine this with the previous topic: tutorials and results.

More regular posting

I hadn’t been very nice in being predictable. My post frequency is “about once a week”, but just looking to the archive you can see one can see that I should try it a little harder.

More out links

I read a lot of things on the web, really a lot. Yet, I link back in very modest amounts. This is not because I like it this way, it just happened. I want to engage this blog on a bigger discussion with other blogs and links exist for this purpose.

More comments

It must be something with my writing style, because despite the reasonable high number of visits and subscribers, there aren’t as much comments as I’d like. I’ll have to work out a way to make the readers more welcome to join the discussions.

More guest blogging

Definitely, as a blogger, writing is intransitive: You have to write! And it is a pity to be restricted at your blog’s subject. I see myself guest-writing a lot more and maybe I should open the door for some guest-posts here in Zo’C.

Zo'C powerblogroll - A plugin to make powerful blorgrolls with favicons, descriptions, notes and RSS links]]> http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2008/02/happy-birthday-zoc/feed/ 20 http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2008/02/new-blog-mediterrasian-cooking/ http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2008/02/new-blog-mediterrasian-cooking/#comments Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:02:16 +0000 Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2008/02/new-blog-mediterrasian-cooking/ Back in the old cooking times of Zo’C, when it was more personal than anything else, one of my main inspirations for content was MediterrAsian.com.

I’m proud to say that a few months ago, I was invited by the talented MediterrAsian team to join them on a blog project and today we are launching a multi author blog named “MediterrAsian Cooking“.

Mediterrasian Cooking is a blog to share cooking experiences and ideas based on the concept that Asian and Mediterranean food is not only delicious, but a great source of health.

You don’t have to enjoy the site with moderation, it is quite healthy, use it a much as you want.

By following some principles contained on these cuisines and lifestyles you can live longer and better and have more fun out of food and life. After all, who doesn’t like to eat Italian, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Lebanese, Thai, Korean? And the list goes on.

The blog is authored by Ric Watson and Trudy Thelander from the original team and have been joined by Emily Seah and me. The blog was co-designed by Ric and me based on the mediterrasian site.

And the best part. You don’t have to enjoy it with moderation, you can have as much as you want, because despite its great flavor, is quite healthy, you can use it on every meal.

Zo'C powerblogroll - A plugin to make powerful blorgrolls with favicons, descriptions, notes and RSS links]]> http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2008/02/new-blog-mediterrasian-cooking/feed/ 0 http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/12/have-a-great-christmas/ http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/12/have-a-great-christmas/#comments Mon, 24 Dec 2007 20:15:33 +0000 Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/12/have-a-great-christmas/ This post is just a quickie to wish all Zo’C Readers a Great Christmas. And I hope following this blog this year has been as interesting for you as mantaining it has been for me.

Also, warm feelings to the nice people at Authority Blogger Forum, which is friendly community and an invaluable resource for bloggers.

Zo'C powerblogroll - A plugin to make powerful blorgrolls with favicons, descriptions, notes and RSS links]]> http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/12/have-a-great-christmas/feed/ 2 http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/10/dove-onslaught-soundtrack-la-breeze-by-simian/ http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/10/dove-onslaught-soundtrack-la-breeze-by-simian/#comments Fri, 05 Oct 2007 10:22:08 +0000 Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/10/dove-onslaught-soundtrack-la-breeze-by-simian/ Regarding my post of Tuesday about the Dove Onslaught Video for the Campaign for Real Beauty a question of many is:

Whose soundtrack is that?

And the answer is “La Breeze”, by UK group Simian Mobile Disco

The lyrics to follow along:

La Breeze (Simian Mobile Disco)

Here it comes
Here it comes
here it comes
here they come!
here it comes the breeze
That’ll blow away
All your reason and your sin
Same with your minds
So do your best to run away
but take a ref and you will pay
You cannot hide
There’s no place to hide
whoa here comes the breeze
whoa here comes the breeze
whoa here comes the breeze
whoa here comes the breeze

Zo'C powerblogroll - A plugin to make powerful blorgrolls with favicons, descriptions, notes and RSS links]]> http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/10/dove-onslaught-soundtrack-la-breeze-by-simian/feed/ 2 http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/10/dove-onslaught-talk-to-your-daughter-before-the-beauty-industry-does/ http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/10/dove-onslaught-talk-to-your-daughter-before-the-beauty-industry-does/#comments Wed, 03 Oct 2007 12:24:45 +0000 Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/10/dove-onslaught-talk-to-your-daughter-before-the-beauty-industry-does/ When I saw the Dove Evolution video for the first time I just couldn’t keep my jaw from falling. They have achieved to stand out with a campaign that at the same time makes women feeling good about themselves and does a great service to society at the same time.

The whole Campaign for Real Beauty is at the same time a first class marketing strategy and a brilliant human campaign but the second video, Dove Onslaught, has achieved to tell you why their competitors are the bad guys and they are the good ones in a way that a sensible person can hardly disagree.

Now, I only wish is that the fierce and agressive marketing campaign behind the very true and enlighted message doesn’t prevail and hopefully the whole beauty industry starts to align itself with this ideology.

By the way, if you have children don’t miss very interesting activities on the campaign website. And when I say children I do mean both boys and gilrs, because if boys keep on thinking that anorexia is beautiful, hardly ever you will convince the girls otherwise.

Zo'C powerblogroll - A plugin to make powerful blorgrolls with favicons, descriptions, notes and RSS links]]> http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/10/dove-onslaught-talk-to-your-daughter-before-the-beauty-industry-does/feed/ 12 http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/09/three-weeks-later/ http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/09/three-weeks-later/#comments Sun, 16 Sep 2007 11:40:10 +0000 Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/09/three-weeks-later/ Dear readers,

Before I moved to Italy, I prepared a series of posts on photography basics to cover me while I was unable to write, but it seems that I underestimated this time and this is why this blog has been silent for the last three weeks.

I wasn’t even able to mantain the Bee Side of Zo’C which is a personal blog and much easier to fill with trip pictures and stories.

But, by no means this blog is abandoned, I have finally reached a point of comfort here and I am back on the track of writing, while I am still having a hard time to follow the blogs I usually do (If you own one of the blogs I read, I promess soon I’ll be active again).

Sooner that you can imagine, new Zo’C posts will be published.

Cheers,
Guilherme

Zo'C powerblogroll - A plugin to make powerful blorgrolls with favicons, descriptions, notes and RSS links]]> http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/09/three-weeks-later/feed/ 0 http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/08/new-blog-the-bee-side-of-zoc/ http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/08/new-blog-the-bee-side-of-zoc/#comments Mon, 06 Aug 2007 07:14:20 +0000 Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/08/new-blog-the-bee-side-of-zoc/ As I said in my previous post, Anna and I are moving to Italy and I’ll have plenty to write and pictures to show that won’t fit here. So, by popular request, The Bee Side of Zo’C blog is born.

The Bee Side of Blog is just that, a B-side. I make no promises except that I’ll keep my writing style and the usual felling but the themes may vary. It is a blog in which the only off-topic subjects would be the ones that perfectly fit this one (the A side, if you wish).

You are welcome to join me in new themes and much more fun that is not web/software/photography/design related.

The title of the last posts of the Bee Side blog will be shown on the sidebar on the section named “What is happening on Bee Side of Zo’C”. You can also subscribe the mailing list or sign the feed.

How to cook original style: Guest post
Who is on stage? Slappy and Skippy
Sunday Morning Cartoons and Michigan J Frog
Europe, the biggest city in the world
Piazza di Fiera
Pictures from Trento
A night in Milano on the way to Trento
Where did the personal posts of Zo’C go?

Zo'C powerblogroll - A plugin to make powerful blorgrolls with favicons, descriptions, notes and RSS links]]> http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/08/new-blog-the-bee-side-of-zoc/feed/ 0 http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/07/moving-to-europe/ http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/07/moving-to-europe/#comments Wed, 01 Aug 2007 04:34:01 +0000 Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/07/moving-to-europe/ Dear readers, I apologize for the long time the blog has been left outdated. Most of the time I try to keep my writing on about 1~2 posts per week, but lately I have been just too busy.

I do have a bank of posts for the hard hours that is actually a large one but, I must confess, nothing on it is completely finished and revised. Yes I know, shame on me!

The reason why I am in such a hurry is that Anna and I are permanently moving to Europe in less than two weeks, and the amount of time such a move consumes is just huge.

We are going to Italy, either to Lucca or Trento, which are two places in which Anna has family and this will be the starting point of a new exciting phase of our life.

It is also time for new and exciting professional changes.

In the last years I’ve been working with many very-computer-related stuff, I taught Algorithms and compilers in college, I developed software for Linux and Linux distributions, and in the last two years I worked developing Software Prototypes for Sony Ericsson.

(by the way, I must add, this has been an amazing job, and I really want to thank all my colleagues and managers both in Sweden and Brazil for the very fine time I had).

But now I left this job and I think the time has come for changes and to face some new challenges.

Some 10 or 11 years ago, before I graduated in Computer Science, I studied Architecture and I worked as a web designer for many years. Web design was the path I wanted, one I really loved and I was even awarded for.

I think I found so many exiting things in Computer Science that eventually followed a different path. Now, I am coming back to the web. I have been freelancing some web projects for the last 18 months, after some 3 years of web inactivity and this very blog is offspring of this.

In fact, this blog wasn’t a professional one at first, but eventually became, and now I can’t write more off-topic stuff here, so I’d like to launch a new blog before my trip.

This would a place where I can put random stories and pictures about my move to Italy itself, thoughts about Italy, cultural differences and of course, Food and Lifestyle, that was the original theme of this blog, before my professional side took over my entire self.

Of course, the trip to Italy would be only the first theme, I’d like to talk about many themes that interest me but would be off topic here.

And you, would you like me to write on a new blog?

Zo'C powerblogroll - A plugin to make powerful blorgrolls with favicons, descriptions, notes and RSS links]]> http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/07/moving-to-europe/feed/ 8 http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/07/a-huge-step/ http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/07/a-huge-step/#comments Wed, 04 Jul 2007 14:14:59 +0000 Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/07/a-huge-step/

Recently, the Manage all your email accounts with Gmail post on Zo’C has been featured on lifechacker.com, which is a huge step for a still young blog.

I actually wrote that post thinking on some friends of mine that needed to do just that, but published it as a post because I thought many people would be interested, so I sent an email to the nice people at Etc blog, and they were kind enough to feature it.

What I couldn’t figure out is the huge amount of interest it would provoke, tens of thousands of people entered that post alone in just the few last days. The post have been featured in more sites that I can acknowledge, has been top ranked on some news agregators and has even been translated to Japanse.

Has anybody translated it to some other language? I will gladly link to it.

Also, I added trackback link on the blog, that was missing and I found out was really a grave fault. You can find the trackback link for all posts on top of the comments area.

Zo'C powerblogroll - A plugin to make powerful blorgrolls with favicons, descriptions, notes and RSS links]]> http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/07/a-huge-step/feed/ 4 http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/04/a-fluid-and-elastic-new-layout/ http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/04/a-fluid-and-elastic-new-layout/#comments Sun, 22 Apr 2007 18:36:35 +0000 Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/04/a-fluid-and-elastic-new-layout/ A fluid layout for a web page is one that adapts itself to the window size, an elastic layout is one that adapts itself to text size. When nothing of this happens, the layout is said to be fixed.

A layout that Fluid and Elastic is a step towards a future with high screen resolutions

One of my great ambitions for the Z’oC Layout was to have a layout that was both fluid and elastic layout, and this is just what I have done. I completely redesigned the layout to be fluid, elastic and more reader friendly.

A layout that is both fluid and elastic means that you are able to take advantage of all screen, whatever format and resolution your public may have and, additionally, means that you can increase the text size a lot without breaking the layout.

One of the main problems of online reading is that the resolution of the monitor is too low compared with a printed text. This may be solved in the future by having displays with extreme resolutions and increasing the relative font size.

However, if you measure everything on your site in pixels, the layout may not stand a font size doubling or more. If you measure key aspects of your site in a text-size related unit like em the layout can adapt itself to whatever text size is needed.

In fact, if the screen resolutions continue to grow and the text size remains unchanged the characters, that are only a few pixels tall, will become so small that they will be unreadable. What’s the use of a high resolution if you can’t read the text.

In a fixed layout, a little increase in text size may be work fine, but extreme changes will break it for sure. It is just a matter of how much is the threshold.

On a fluid layout, you may get over this problem, because the text fields may adapt themselves to the window size, but still, you rely on the user to adequately resize the window to best fit your page. While this may not be that bad, it would be nice to add enough intelligence to the site, so it can take advantage of both window and text size.

In my opinion, this is a subject of accessibility.

In a world where screen resolutions vary from 800 pixels wide to over 2 thousand, you need elastic layouts in order to be accessible by all

Accessibility is a buzzword on the development community these days and opinions diverge. Some people say that accessibility is about planning pages to be accessible by visually impaired people. Other people defend that accessibility is about planning pages to be accessible for as many people as possible with very different conditions, including poor internet connections, poor screen resolutions, mobile access devices and so forth.

In a world where screen resolutions vary from 800 pixels wide to over 2 thousand, you can’t be prepared to please everyone without being prepared for text size changes, and this is a matter of accessibility, because a site should be accessible by users in both extremes.

Some of the features of the new layout that I am particularly glad about are

• Main text area is fluid, but the paragraphs inside are elastic
• Sidebar is elastic
• If the window is stretched beyond the maximum paragraph size, the blank area on the right becomes a column for the pullouts

Some of the features above may not work on Internet Explorer, but still the site will be fully functional, fluid and elastic. So I decided not to support IE uselessly, once they not support the basic things they are supposed to.

In safari, opera and firefox, everything works just beautifully.

Zo'C powerblogroll - A plugin to make powerful blorgrolls with favicons, descriptions, notes and RSS links]]> http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/04/a-fluid-and-elastic-new-layout/feed/ 6 http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/04/different-ways-of-learning-takes-to-diversity/ http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/04/different-ways-of-learning-takes-to-diversity/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2007 01:53:20 +0000 Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/04/different-ways-of-learning-takes-to-diversity/ It is curious how sometimes either you are so glad with your own learning path that you are terrified with the possibility that it have been different or else, you admire so much someone elese’s knowledge that you anguish yourself for experiences you hadn’t.

Like many other people, I had felt both those feelings before and I am sure I will again.

I think this is much the feeling on this post about digital photography and the learning oportunities being missed by the lack of obstacles, now overcame, of traditional photography (like film prices and a long developping process).

I migh identify myself with the feeling, but I do not share the mixed feelings about technology he describes, at least not from the creative point of view nor the learning experience.

It is true that we see far more garbage today that we did on the past. Loads and loads of uninteresting pictures featured all over the web.

However, I also never saw so many good pictures and so often in my entire life. Ten years ago, you could see great photography on expensive books or the National Geographic magazine, but, unless you were among a group of serious photographers, hardly ever you’d find great artistic work among your friends, neighbors and family.

If you browse a little bit through flickr for instance, you can see some great work there. There is a lot of talent being exposed in flickr. Side by side with a lot of garbage, is true, but it wasn’t much different in the past, just the volume of pictures was smaller.

I think that limitations imposed by the price of buying and developping film in the past are certainly motivational to some. To others is just a turn off.

But is an illusion to think that just because we have almost endless storage and electricity to take pictures we have no limits and boundaries to being pushed these days. I think that we must absorve what we have available, find the limits and go for new challenges.

As it is possible to point out that people who have never valued a roll of film have a worse background, you may as well say the same of people who had never the experience of using wet plates to take photos like the early years of photography, which could have been a great source of knowledge.

I think most of us, even the older ones, never used wet plates, and I can say that no one’s photography skills are impaired because of this.

Much on the contrary, I think the important thing to know here is that, no matter how proud we are of one’s knowledge and learning path our how much we envy other one’s, there are many valid ways of learning things and is useless to want the same learning process for everyone.

I am much in favor of digital photography, no restrictions about that. If in the past, the cicle of shooting with film forced the photographer to value each and any shot, it also prevented a lot of people from experimentation.

If these days everyone can take a couple hundreds of pictures in a day and learn from this, that is for the better. The possibility exists that a single picture is less precious to the photographer, but that has nothing to do with the process, but with the culture surrounding him/her.

Probably, this is the people who wouldn’t be taking pictures at all ten years ago. And, by the way, it doesn’t seems to me that there is anything wrong about not being in love with photography as well.

Zo'C powerblogroll - A plugin to make powerful blorgrolls with favicons, descriptions, notes and RSS links]]> http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/04/different-ways-of-learning-takes-to-diversity/feed/ 0 http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/04/zoc-outage-today/ http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/04/zoc-outage-today/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:40:27 +0000 Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/04/zoc-outage-today/ Just a quick message.

The Zo’C website had an outage of about 5 hours today. Actually Dreamhost had and outage and for some reason the Apache configuration of my account was corrupted.

Sorry for those who tried to reach the site and couldn’t.

Now the Z’oC site is back. Not all domains I host are working properly, but Dreamhost support team is already taking care of the issue.

Have fun.

Zo'C powerblogroll - A plugin to make powerful blorgrolls with favicons, descriptions, notes and RSS links]]> http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/04/zoc-outage-today/feed/ 0 http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/02/one-year-of-zoc/ http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/02/one-year-of-zoc/#comments Thu, 22 Feb 2007 12:36:38 +0000 Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor http://www.z-oc.com/blog/?p=32 On february 22, 2006 the Zo’C blog started as a gourmet blog about food and lifestyle, but the need for a broader subject made design , photography, web development, book reviews and a couple of more things to show up.

Initially it was a project together with my wife, but I ended up giving her the annazuhlke.com domain and she started her own blog that now resides at www.annazuhlke.com/whiterabbit. By the way, that is where the Zo’C name comes from, it stands fror Zühlke-O’Connor, the common part of our surnames.

As a birthday present to myself and the Zo’C blog. I have upgraded it from the basic blogger blog to a fully hosted WordPress blog in dreamhost.

It took me over a day to take the old and nice Zo’C layout and implementing it to suit the base of the wonderful Sirius theme. Also I had to tweak a lot of the internal PHP to make it look just like the old one.

Well, not quite…

You may see some differences, now there is a calendar on the right side menu, and the posts are categorized.

You can see the categories just below the calendar and you can subscribe to feeds for specific categories. This is something I was wanting fora long time. Now I can write about several themes without bothering people that are interested only in specific subjects.

A search engine is also a new feature to the blog, but at a glance, all seems the same. Just added functionality. Now the code is much more mature and is far easier to add content to the menus.

There are plenty more things I want to do on the blog, but one step at a time: I want to make the text area a little bigger, I want a fluid layout. Iwant to put recommendations of books a and other cool stuff I like. Just give me some more time… they will show up here.

Not to talk about the Zo’C site. It is a shame not to have anything around the blog. But now that the site is properly oiled things will move much smother.

And, once you have reached the end of the post, please leave a comment. Many people read this blog regularly (I know by my tracking system) but I would be delighted to hear from you who you are and what do you think of the Zo’C blog.

Have fun!

Zo'C powerblogroll - A plugin to make powerful blorgrolls with favicons, descriptions, notes and RSS links]]> http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/02/one-year-of-zoc/feed/ 1 http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2006/11/dove-evolution/ http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2006/11/dove-evolution/#comments Fri, 17 Nov 2006 17:41:56 +0000 Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor http://www.z-oc.com/blog/?p=24 In face of models dying of anorexia and on the other hand, almost every woman that is not a model finding herself ugly, the Dove campaign for real beauty is not only a beatiful and brave advertising campaign, but is also an inspired humane one.

Be sure to enter the blog to see the video.

Zo'C powerblogroll - A plugin to make powerful blorgrolls with favicons, descriptions, notes and RSS links]]> http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2006/11/dove-evolution/feed/ 5 http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2006/11/1000/ http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2006/11/1000/#comments Sun, 12 Nov 2006 06:31:00 +0000 Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor http://www.z-oc.com/blog/?p=23 My flickr has reached 1000 views, mark that the Zo’C blog had already reached some weeks ago.

This may not seem a lot, but still I’m happy with this, because, after all, both are very young.

So I’ll celebrate publishing this commemorative picture.

Zo'C powerblogroll - A plugin to make powerful blorgrolls with favicons, descriptions, notes and RSS links]]> http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2006/11/1000/feed/ 0 http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2006/11/the-story-zoc-logo-owl/ http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2006/11/the-story-zoc-logo-owl/#comments Thu, 02 Nov 2006 21:48:56 +0000 Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2006/11/the-story-zoc-logo-owl/ I have recieved a lot of nice feedback regarding the new layout of the Zo’C blog and one of the most commented items is the logo, and people wonder where idea came from.

The idea came from a little wooden owl that I have for years, since I was a kid.

I don’t really know, how it happened to become mine, but I have it for more than two decades now, and it is been sitting over my computer’s monitor for almost a decade.

So I decided that this nice and loyal little fellow would give good inspiration for the logo.

The logo is actually its silhouette, cutted vertically on halves and mirrored, to have perfect simetry.

The owl being a symbol for people who like to work at night, like most computer related developers is a nice plus, but was not the main reason for the choice.

Zo'C powerblogroll - A plugin to make powerful blorgrolls with favicons, descriptions, notes and RSS links]]> http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2006/11/the-story-zoc-logo-owl/feed/ 4