Bibra-Online
23. December 2015

I’d like to wish all family, friends, regular readers, commenters and all other visitors Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, A Happy New Year or any other Holiday Greetings you prefer! Of course, I like Happy Newtonmas because Isaac Newton was born on December 25th, but I’m very democratic in that respect and let everyone celebrate the the holiday they prefer.

This is my traditional end-of-year posting with a roundup of things I’ve been up to this year – which turned out to be a lot in 2015! It was a very busy, productive and relatively peaceful year for myself and especially good in the hardware department because there have been quite a few technology updates around her. In addition to a new tablet, I also got my first smartphone in 2015 and finally replaced my aging laptop with something well, a bit less aging. This means that working on the websites and other related projects has become much more comfortable recently with less holdups due to slow or breaking down computers and other devices.

Photography took up most of my time again this year, mostly because this was the first full year with a really good camera. The Canon Powershot SX1 I got in November 2014 turned out to be perfect for me and even though it’s not the most powerful camera around,  While my photography blog, now still with the temporary name GB Photography until I get a better idea, hasn’t changed much on the first glance and I have been posting way too much flowers again this year, I finally managed to upgrade the gallery software so that the Photo Albums are now in somewhat better shape and I tend to update them more frequently. As usual, I post all my photos in the same resolution as on my website only over on Google+, while Facebook and Twitter are just getting the low-resolution previews – I will never give up the blog as the main outlet for my photography, but the interaction on Google+ continues to be absolutely amazing and especially regarding photography it has really become my digital ‘home away from home’. Next year I will be starting to use the Collections feature more for the photography to group my posts into categories, something which I had been doing for non-photography post for a while already.

The ‘Blog’, that means these pages right here, continues to exist as a weird hybrid between a blog and a website for everything else except photography and movie-related themes. This year I’ve been using this quasi-nameless blog a bit more for everything from space and astronomy to computer stuff and even game and book reviews, so this old website, which has been existing since late 1998, is still alive and kicking. Inspired by the over 20000 users who have started to follow my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ recently, I even started up a weekly news roundup from all the posts I usually only share on G+ and in a special community. What I didn’t get around to do yet is move the whole blog to the new Bibra.eu domain (which only redirects at the moment), although I have already put the address into the header when I was fixing the layout a little bit – but that is something which I will do early next year. Nothing else will probably much change, but I hope to create the themed subsections next year!

This was also another big project – when we started the WSH Crew Google+ Community last year to have a place to chat away from the Hangout event pages, we never thought it would become such a popular place. With almost 600 members it’s still a cozy little place with low noise, good content and conversation –  a very engaged core group of posters keeps the community ticking over nicely and we have even become the co-producers of the Weekly Space Hangout, which has had a fantastic half-season with many amazing guests. Because we needed an additional place for documents and other things away from the community, in addition to a very active Twitter Account we created the WSH Crew Community Support Site, with all the latest information around the hangouts, community rules and much more. The website was actually built by me and I’m administering it, but I still consider it a group effort because I never could have done it all alone. The old hangout schedule, which I had been posting and updating on my blog for a long time, has now moved to the new website in a much improved version.

The one thing I’ve been sadly really neglecting this year was DVDLog, simply because there was not so much to talk about. I hardly bought any DVDs this year and I only got around to actually write only two new reviews and otherwise there were just a few more translations from the archives and a few news postings. To tell the truth, I nearly shut the site down in frustration after one of the DVDs I most anticipated this year was completely botched without chance of a fix, but in the end I decided to continue the website after I had calmed down a bit because I still have a lot of old reviews to translate. This is what I will be doing with DVDLog – there will be occasional disc or television news with the occasional translated review or maybe even something written fresh when I actually get around to buy something. The last post of the year over there already gives me an idea what I could be doing for the first post of 2016 – it will probably involve something fluffy!

Last, but not least, there are the Social Networks and I never thought I would be involved so much there. But it’s no secret that I prefer Google+ very much over Twitter and especially Facebook –  while I always post by hand on G+ and tend to comment a little bit here and there, I usually let my blogs publish automatically to the other two and somehow I seem to have forgotten completely about Instagram lately. So my social media use is actually spotty at best, but the best chance to catch up with me is simply on Google+ even tough the platform is heavily in flux at the moment with a new layout in beta testing – it’s still simply the best place for the things I do on the web and to interact with other users. I’ve met a lot of interesting people on Google+ in the last three years I’ve been there and it’s simply a great place to connect with others who share the same passions as yourself, even though most of them tend to be on the other half of the Earth.

As every year, I will not be completely offline over the holidays, but the websites will go on a semi-hiatus until sometime around early January – I will still post some daily images over on the Photo Blog, but this will be the last post of the year here on this site. Have a great winter holiday, everyone!

MERRY NEWTONMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Kategorie: Bibra-Online
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