Greek government aims to control blogs’ content by bringing a new law

Several times in the past bloggers took their guns in order to protect their rights against violation caused by real or so-called intrusions. Most of the times there wasn’t a logical reason behind their actions. What is different now is the Greek government’s intention to bring a real law against bloggers.

Anonymous or not? (Again)

In this website I wrote twice about anonymity. To put it again, I ‘d say that I certainly stick to people who use their real name when writing, not because I hate anonymity.

I do because most of the times anonymous are plausible to tell lies and act without thinking in order to become popular among their peers and practice some authority they think they deserve. Some people select to give their real names out and this way they can be easily attacked by others. Practically these people are vulnerable.

The nonsense

Now the Greek government aims to control all blogs. The new law will help the government access bloggers’ ID easily or at least easier than ever before. Bloggers can be accused anytime for not obeying to what is good for the government. Politicians and authoritarians, people who admittedly have no idea of the Web culture, people who are afraid of technology want to shut some mouths because people in blogs have too much freedom.

I may not like liars who put the blogger mask on, I may be disgusted of such practices but laws like this are going to make things even worse for those who want to control blogs. There are several reasons why Greek people don’t trust government’s intentions, especially when it comes to the Web.

I am pretty certain that this law is going to be a disaster for the government. Not because Greek bloggers are going to act as a team and change things. On the contrary, the more mouths they want to shut the more blogs are going to emerge and outrage against them.

Once more I am really ashamed of my country’s government and laws but I am optimistic and I say that such an action will bring them a lot of troubles. At least I hope so.

Building a 4-level deep navigation system

The way a visitor navigates in a website is not only important but crucial in any case. Creating intuitive and easy to use navigation systems can uplift the user experience and make a website successful at the end of the day.

Recently, I was challenged to create a 4-level navigation system for a customer. Needless to say that it was the most difficult part of the project. I decided to take a look at various implementations and decide later which one was appropriate. I am going to try to describe some of them here and mention the pros and the cons of each one.

The hierarchy

Here it is the given hierarchy of the system.

• Home
• Company profile
       
  • About
       
  • Personnel
       
  • Headquarters
   

• Services
  

     
  • Feasibility Studies
             
    • Buildings
                     
      • For houses
                     
      • For offices
                     
      • For stores
                   

    • Land
      

                     
      • City land
                     
      • Country land
                   

   
  

  • Patterns
    

                 
    • General
                 
    • Orderer patterns
             
• Contact

Let’s move on to the possible navigation schemes. What happens when a user tries to reach the deepest level?

#1 Flyout menus

The following image shows the vertical alignment of the 1st level and, as you can see, next levels open up from left to right.

We ‘re on “For Stores” level and obviously this menu takes up a lot of the screen space. It’s enough to turn this solution down.

Arranging the first level horizontally produces more or less the same ugly and not usable results. Furthermore, flyout menus won’t help a visitor remember how to come back again to the same destination after some browsing. Breadcrumbs can help, but not drastically.

#2 Menus ordered both vertically and horizontally

What is good with such a scheme is the fact that visitors are helped to remember the structure of the website. However there some serious problems with this technique:

• such a design covers a lot of our given screen space
• being at a deep level is visually complicated

#3 Tree menu

Such a scheme is much simpler and reminds the Windows Explorer hierarchy.

However it is a visually poor scheme and it requires a lot of clicks. It doesn’t let visitors concentrate to the content. On the contrary all the spotlights are on it.

#4 Drop down lists

It is one of the most convenient solutions. Everything can be reached from the top of the page and a visitor needs only to make a selection. The whole scheme is easy to be used and it doesn’t take any learning.

What is not good with drop down lists has to do with design. Such lists remind signing up forms and they all look the same unless some JavaScript is applied to change how things appear. Visitors need aid all the time when drop down lists are the main navigation system.

#5 Tabs

It is the scheme that is going to be applied. It includes all the pros of the previous solution, it is friendlier and it can be designed a million different ways.

To create such tabs you also need some JavaScript but this time it has to do with functionality, not design. Furthermore, using tabs is intuitive and all the relevant information is easily accessible. The whole look & feel of the website is much better this way.

Epilogue

Deep level navigation systems used to be a pain for designers and they still are. Some years ago the finally selected approached didn’t exist at all. New tools and technologies prevail because they provide solutions to real problems. Using them just for showing off doesn’t help anyone. Or at least this is what I believe.

Almond tree

For almost 11 months, each time I went out at the balcony of my apartment I used to see a tree which didn’t let me enjoy the view. It looked like a sleeping tree and this is exactly what it had been doing: sleeping.

Until yesterday when I saw it bloomed. Where all those flowers had been? How much time did it take it to become a real beautiful tree? Hours, minutes, seconds… who knows?

I remember the poems, back when I used to go to school, all the poems about the silly almond trees which decide to bloom in the middle of the winter knowing that they couldn’t keep there flowers. The winds or even worse the snow will left them naked again.

For the people who want to believe that all things happen because there is a reason, almond trees could symbolize those heroes who decide to do crazy things knowing that they are not going to succeed.

I prefer to think almond trees bloom because they want to break the winter speechlessness. Or they do it without any reason at all. It’s just great.

The new (newspaper-ized) Greek website

It’s been a while since my last entry in the weblog. This is because I was wholeheartedly dedicated to the redesign/realign of the Greek version of my website.

The new edition could remind you a newspaper or that was my intention. You might also detect some marvelous sketch work. OK, enough said.

Go, take a look at the Greek porcupine colors website. And tell me if you like it at all.