Apostol Apostolov

While a book's narrivative rarely ever launches into breath-taking action without a proper introduction, a blog rarely dives into the Internet foray with a short welcome. Or as Wordpress promptly puts it, Hello World! ApostolApostolov.com is live, or re:live based on the fact it has launched a year ago as a futile attempt to get me back into blogging. Back in 2001-2004 I have been very active in the first wave of Bulgarian bloggers with my old blog RaynerApe.com focusing on a mix of social media and internet news, gaming, gadgets and some personal issues in between. The need to funnel it back on a proper website has been growing ever since. Finally, it has reached the point where last year I started ApostolApostolov.com as a self-branding blog for gaming and technology analysis. It was a futile attempt, being too busy and too distracted to put myself into the writing routline of a blogger. This year, prior giving up on blogging entirely, I am putting yet another strong effort to restart ApostolApostolov.com. The blog will be oriented towards both technology and social media issues and cater to the international crowd.

Until mid-September, ApostolApostolov.com will be publishing couple pre-launch articles covering my experiences with configuring and fine-tuning a modern social media blog. As I keep tweaking and hacking a fairly vanilla Wordpress installation with tons of extensions and social services, I expect it to grow into a monster of a blog, at least interface-wise. I am currently experimenting (update: unsuccessfully!) with WPML for language-specific front pages and aside from few minor (update: major!) annoying issues with translating themes for each specific language, it seems to be doing a marvelous (update: so-so) job. Stock commenting is thrown out of the window as I will be using Disqus v2 (in preparation of v3, which can be seen demonstrated on this speedy video) for your social spread of comments all over Twitter, Facebook and more. You already must be feeling Disqus-love from other blogs, so I oblige. Social services juggernaut Twitter is represented by Tweetboard, a twitter-based pseudo-forum for sharing your opinion about pages and the site as a whole. Just pull on the green colored overlay on the left edge of the browser screen to leave your "Tyke wuz h3r3!" tweet. Links of companies, products, Twitter accounts and such are prettified by Apture, their service is an amazing media search tool that integrates tightly into Wordpress. And SEO is a hot topic everywhere on Internet, I concur, so I am basing it on HeadSpace SEO plugin and I will be probably giving it a dedicated post in the coming days.

P.S.: Shit happens. Priorities do change. Days after launching ApostolApostolov.com in the wild with a dual home pages catering to both international and local Bulgarian readers, due to Wordpress plugin incompatibilities and realistic writing schedules I had to give up one of the two in order for the other to function. So I have decided to work on a professional face with a blog supported in English as a gaming and technology analysis and buying advice blog. Whether I made the right choice, it'll show up rather soon.