All of us nowadays visit and participate in social sites and networks. Practically a social network is a web site where users take action and not just read content. Digg.com and Facebook are perfect examples of such sites.

PHPizabi is an open-source script written in PHP (like the name shows) which is aimed to help developers create their own social site in fiew steps. As most of web apps (like WordPress), PHPizabi requires:

PHP 4.2.x or above
MySQL 3.23.x or above
Apache 1.13.19 or above OR IIS 5.1 or above
GD2 (Image Processor)

PHPizabi is built with security in mind: there are three administrative security layers and internal structure management, coupled with bruteforce protection. The app seems to be fast (though I have not tested it under heavy load). Modules (add ons) are supported, so developers can expand functionality and features with few clicks.

The end user experience seems to be complete, compared to famous social networks: customizable profiles, internal message sending (PMs), online-offline status, friend invitations, private photo gallery, smilies, comments and all the cool stuff used around. You can see a complete list of the features in the official PHPizabi web site. A demo installation can be found here.

In general PHPizabi seems to be a usefull platform for building social sites and is supported by an ongrowing community. If anyone uses PHPizabi and has tested it under heavy load, feel free to leave a comment and share your experience with us !

Justsayhi is for many users a dating site. But if you visit justsayhi.com/bb you will find a great and funny resource for blog widgets and quizzes for geeks. You can try out to see how many html elements can you type in five minutes or how many css properties you can type in 7 minutes. If you do not like web development you can test how much do you know about the internet or find out how much electricity does yout body produce.

Apart from the quizzes there are several quality badges to stick on your blog (most of them funny, like “the blogger is coffee addicted”) or find out how many germs live in your keyboard or whether you are an apple addicted or not! Geek quiz is nice too! There is also some crazy stuff there, like “take this quiz to find out your possibilities of surviving in a zombie apocalypse”!
The design of the site and its chicklets is cool and thats makes it different from such sites for me. I tend not to review web sites except when they are special or original and justsayhi is! Quizzes use AJAX which makes the pages fast-responding and professional-looking.

The badges you get after completing a quiz looks like this one below (and yeah the code given for sticking them on your blog validates as XHTML 1.0 transitional).

After nine months with this theme, I think its time for a CSS reboot. The new theme will be much simplier than this and much more light which means less javascript, cleaner and minimal look, stylish icons and less time to load. You can see some screenshots in the image above to take a look on how Typpz Blog will look in few days. The theme is customized, widgetized and ready to go, but I have to extremely check the plugins to ensure maximum compatibily before I launch it so I am patient .

Mozilla Sunbird™ is a standalone calendar application. Sunbird is being developed for some years. The latest version is 0.7 (far away from the milestone 1.0 which means that some bugs should probably be expected) which you can download here. Sunbird has small system requirments and runs smoothly without consuming much memory.

The interface is simple but usefull. You can view your calendar in day, week, multiweek or month mode. Toolbar is customisable as well (like in Firefox). Adding events is easy: Just click the “New Event” button on the upper left corner, fill in the details (duration, start time, end time), choose wether or not you want to be notified (Sunbird should be running for notifications to work) and click Save and Close. There is an option for repeating events too.

Next to the “New Event” button there is the “New Task” button. Pop-up window for task adding is the same with the event add, but after saving, tasks are listed in the lower left corner, giving you the ability to give them priority, fill the fullfilment percentage and tick the fullfiled ones.

For social people, Sunbird gives the option for exporting your calendar (or importing a calendar) and publishing your Calendar so it can be shared with others. Calendars can be password protected for more security.

In general Mozilla Sunbird™ offers the basics of a Calendar application and is suitable for the home user or users that do not need advanced features from their calendar app. I’ve been using Sunbird 0.7 for two weeks now and it is really stable (has never crashed) which should be considered to pros.

I visited today the digital technology expo (called dte) that takes place in Athens, Greece from 8-11 November. There were many IT companies stands including Microsoft, Cisco, HTC, EA, Google and LG alongside with some famous greek companies like Otenet and OTE. Although there were many absenses from large resselers like Apple product resselers, Sony resselers etc. Management was pretty good, but I would like to see more cutting edge technology stuff and not only products that are already shipped in the market.

Microsoft had the largest stand, giving out Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition packs, Visual C# 2008 beta cds and presenting the concept of digital home using Windows Home Server system. Xboxes were there too of course. HTC stand was large too, full of the latest palmtops and pdas, providing the ability of real time testing. Google stand was mainly about enterprise stuff like Google Mini and Adwords. The LG stand focused on notebooks and the company’s latest displays (the design of the new LGs is amazing) alongside with LCD tvs playing 1080p High-Definition video via a player that supports both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD media. Cisco featured some of the latest network switches and routers for large networks. Below you can see some photos from the exhibition. Images are also available in my Flickr account.

In a previous post, I wrote a review about the social browser: Flock 0.9. Recently Flock reached version 1.0. The update to the final version is recommended for everyone who uses Flock. Many bugs are fixed, and many features are added:

• Flock 1.0 has added a “People” sidebar to support new service integration with Facebook and Twitter.
• Flickr and Youtube have been promoted to “People” services.
• Several performance and stability enhancements have been implemented and several memory leaks have been fixed.

Flock 1.0 has all Mozilla enhancements and security patches up to 2.0.0.8 (not 2.0.0.9 up to now, but a patch will be out soon I guess). You can read Shawn Hardin’s official announcement post here.

The interface is almost the same with version 0.9, except the splash screen which is changed as you see in the image and some addons on the navigation bar. Bug report button (which was placed on the upper right corner) is absent. Default search engine is again Yahoo, but that could be changed with a single click. The default “My World” page is also rebuilt and seems much more easy-to-read-and-manage now. If you would like to update your Flock installation or try Flock for the first time visit the official download page.

WordPress 2.3 is out for a while. For the past 4 months I have been using WordPress 2.1.3 for Typpz Blog. After extended back-ups (database export, contenet files etc) and plug-in deactivation, I updated the blog to WordPress 2.3.1! All plug-ins worked after reactivation, except the post listing plugin which is listed in the WordPress site as non-compatible with the latest version of the blogging platform and the ultimate tag warrior which in not needed as the new WordPress comes with built-in tag support. Tags were not imported as they should from Ultimate tag warrior, so I have to tag my posts again.

I have to say that the blog now corresponds much faster. I also liked the update notifications for new versions of the installed plugins. I recommend to everyone to upgrade to WordPress 2.3. Remember before upgrading: Backup, Backup, Backup (few clicks can save your blog in case something goes the wrong ).

There too many browsers there available for download (for free). Many of them are commonly used, like Firefox and Internet Explorer, and some others are dedicated to smaller user groups, like Shiira and Flock. Vote below for the browser you use! Poll will end on 29 November 2007.

Poll Results:
Firefox 71% (78 votes)
Safari 17% (22 votes)
Internet Explorer 10% (13 votes)
Opera 5% (6 votes)
Flock 3% (4 votes)
Camino 2% (2 votes)
Shiira 2% (2 votes)
Konqueror 1% (1 vote)

Linux Mint is a linux distribution, based on Ubuntu, which is aimed to be user friendly and comes with out-of-the-the-box multimedia support (Java, Flash etc). Linux Mint uses the same repositories as Ubuntu does and the latest version, called Celena, is available in two versions: Main version which is packed with copyrighted stuff and Light version which is packed with open source, GPL licensed stuff only.

Linux Mint is different from Ubuntu though. The interface is much more elegant and smart. Icons are well-designed and the Gnome main control bar is moved to the bottom side of the screen. Main menu is replaced with SLAB. Live search is supported when browsing applications, wich makes app detection much easier. On desktop, there are only three icons: Computer, Home and Installation. Double clicking the computer icon will show your drives, home will bring you to your files folder and installation will guide you to full install Linux Mint (install icon appears only when running the distribution using the Live CD).

Mint is packed as mentioned above with the lates Kernel version and with the many well known open source apps: Amarok, OpenOffice, Gimp, Thunderbird, Totem, Firefox, Pidgin and Java. Beryl/Compiz is also available for 3D desktop lovers (you need to install manually or using Envy the ATI or Nvidia drives for your graphics card). Java and Flash plugins are also preinstalled which means that you can view every web site on the internet correctly.

Linux Mint can install (one-click installation) .mint packages using the MintInstall feature. Here you can find many apps in this format, including Google Earth. The most important point is that the distribution contains drivers for almost any WiFi card and MintWifi app makes Wifi configuration a piece of cake. MintDisk allow users to view and manage NTFS partiotions without installing other software.

To install and run Linux Mint you need a PC with 1Ghz processor and 512 MB or RAM. This distribution is suitable for amateur Linux users and users that want an easy-to-handle Linux operating system.

Tracking the feedback from our users we decided to add some features on Typpz blog. From now on, under each post (in single post page), there will be a list with related posts to help you navigate through the blog. That helps also SEO optimization. Tags are also added to help you searching and finding the post you look for. Tags are displayed above the related posts section and the links to digg and del.icio.us. As you may have experienced when surfing around a blog, some times you make a mistake when posting a comment. We have the same problem some times, so we added AJAX comment editing which gives you 15 minutes to edit your comment after you post it. Just click the text you posted and edit it! Hope that the changes will help you and will improve your experience!