Tony Abou-Assaleh

As of today, the following plugins are active on this site:

1. Akismet: A popular anti-spam plugin the screens and blocks spammy comments
2. All in One SEO Pack: it gives a great flexibility in editing meta tags for individual posts and pages, but I use it most of it’s out-of-the-box good templates for default meta-tag values.
3. bib2html: With some in-house mods, this plugin powers the the publications page from a BibTeX file. Very convenient.
4. Exec-PHP: I use this plugin to execute PHP code on the popular posts page.
5. FeedBurner FeedSmith: provides RSS feed serving through FeedBurner.
6. File Icons: the idea behind this plugin is neat, it automatically ads meaningful icons to links based on the extension of the destination file. I’m not too happy with it though. I feel it’s a bit clumsy at times. See it in action on the publications page.
7. Google Analyticator: simple Google Analytics integration
8. Google XML Sitemaps: very useful plugin that automatically generates a site map every time a new post is added. Highly configurable too.
9. WordPress Popular Posts: a new addition to the site. It power the popular posts widget in the right column as well as the popular posts page. The popularity can be based on page views or comments.
10. WP-ContactForm: I use a modified version of this plugin to power the contact page.
11. WP-SpamFree: Another plugin to reduce comment spam. It shows the comment form through JavaScript, reducing automated comments.

Milan has an extensive public transportation system that consists of trains, metro, trams, and buses. The train connects the Malpensa airport to Milan. The ride takes about 40 minutes and costs 11 euro. The city of Milan and the suburbs are covered with a star-shaped metro system. The metro run regularly, and there is insignificant wait time between trains during the day. City travel is only 1 euro, but if you’re coming from suburbs then it’s 1.5 euro.

Covering the suburbs is a network of over 60 bus and metro lines, augmented with about 100 lines for urban area. Needless to say, such a large network can’t be printed meaningfully on a map. So while the metro map is posted all over the city and on all maps of Milan, the bus map is only accessible from the ATM website. Unfortunate for me, the ATM website was recently redesigned and the English version is “coming soon.” If you speak Italian, however, the site is quiet amazing with search functionality and public-transit routing directions. The map is interactive allowing you to view the bus/train arrival times for each stop. Keep in mind that Milan transport is imprecise, and it was common for the bus to arrive 5 minutes early.

One inconvenience for visitors is that bus ticket must be bought it advance and validated on site. So if you’re at a hotel in the middle of nowhere with no stores selling bus tickets nearby, you’re out of luck. Or are you? You can still ride, as long you don’t get an inspector on your ride.

As for private transportation, namely taxi, two things to keep in mind: except for high volume tourist areas, you pretty much have to call for a cab; and they take cash only. And it doesn’t matter that you call for a cab with credit card capabilities, they still take cash only and have a thousand excuses why they couldn’t process your credit card. I speak from a sample of 3!

Milan metro map is courtesy of http://mappery.com.

The Twitter Times is an interesting news site that is built on top of the Twitter real-time stream. The site describes itself as:

“The Twitter Times is a real-time personalized newspaper generated from your Twitter account.”

It basically monitors the global real-time Twitter stream, identifies news stories that are tweeted and re-tweeted, cross-references them with you friends and their friends, and brings them all in one, well-organized place. The best part of it all, you get the all the news stories on one page – no visiting multiple sites, no following links to see what the tweet is about.

The Twitter Times is a time saver for me. I follow almost 200 streams on twitter. There is no way I can read them all. Some of these streams are of my friends, and I’d like to read them all; others I follow for the news they post, which I can now read on the twittertim.es.

I had the pleasure of meeting one the creators (@mariagrineva) and speaking with another (@maxgrinev). Congrats Maria and Maxim!