My first simple site, a story about opportunities.

One of the things that I am proud about, as a student of Computer Engineering and Informatics, is the site of Proastiakos (local suburban train). It is a personal victory and a story of turning problems into opportunities.

The Proastiakos of Patras, local suburban train that connects the city centre with the University of Patras, started its service on July 9th 2010 by TRAINOSE, mainly as an experiment. The official site of the Trainose company was - and remains - outdated but the train is cheaper and more accurate than local buses, so the students prefer it. In 2012 the train had 1.340.000 passengers, growing steadily to 1.430.000 in 2013 and 1.600.000 in 2014.

Among those passengers that used the train every day, there were hundreds (if not thousands) of engineering students. Students that had better coding skills than I had, but like a great post I recently read "they knew how to program, but they din't know what to program". I didn't know how to code, but I knew what to code, a site about the train that I was using every day and nobody knew the timetable.

I launched my site in October 2012. It was a simple, static, non responsive, plain html site providing the timetable, tickets and cards information and the route. When I saw that people in the university liked the site (the information, but not the design), I started improving the site and myself. The site became responsive, then I added analytics (on hands approach), Facebook pixel audience, Google Adsense, recently got a massive improvement with html5 initializr and soon will also have an English version.

Since the last update, two years ago, the site has 100 daily unique users, not something impressive, but the best moment was in its first launch when the train company printed my site and used in in the Patra's central train station. This was something. The train company did not have a proper timetable, and an employer printed the only available solution on-line, posted in the central station to inform the passengers.

www.proastiakos.eu site printed in the Patras' Train Station

Anyway this is a post about my best moment as an engineering student. I found a problem, turned it into an opportunity, and in the process I learned how to code and update a proper site, using analytics, advertising and other useful tools that I knew in theory. Trivial for an engineering school semester project, but a client centric, market site that works and has clients.

Adding value to your works using Creative Commons licenses

Back in 2007 I created an account on Flickr, without having a digital camera nor an interest in photography. When I bought my first digital camera a Kodak Z612 Zoom (a compact with 6.1 Mpixels resolution, manual control over the aperture and shutter speed, and 12X optical zoom) I started experimenting with the most impressive construction of my home city, the Rio - Antirrio "Charilaos Trikoupis" Bridge.

Since 2014 the only photograph with some visits was a shaken photo of a bench that looked similar with the Fourier transform of a square pulse. The traffic came from a tweet from Spiros Vathis, a great amateur photographer and mathematician.

#EPIC Παγκάκι Fourier Transformation (via @spyrosth) http://bit.ly/jdv0Ja

— Σπύρος Βάθης (@sVathis) 1 May 2011

When I decided to ditch copyright and to use Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license I just wanted to open my photos and to help the community of the CC expand.

What I did not expected was the traffic increase. Nothing changed in the next couple of months but after less than a year voilà(!) my photos suddenly started to get visits, comments and furthermore I got requests for printed editions.

A cute child playing at Wien St. Stephen's square attracted more than 29.000 visits.

A photo of three children fishing at the beach of Parga, Greece has more than 19.000 visits. The open license helped editors to use the photo without asking, just by giving the credits. The photo was used under CC in a blog here which was reproduced in another site, and in a different blog here.

A simple graffiti photo that I took back when I lived in Karlsruhe has more than 15.000 visits. The photo was chosen as the header of an article here, another article about marriage here, and I got a request to include the photo in a printed book, which I happily accepted.

The Attribution-NoDerivs license is not the most free license, it is a weird mix after all, but it is a good first step once you decide to ditch copyright. I chose No Derivative Works since it provides some rights about reproduction of your works, Attribution for obvious reasons, but I did not include Share Alike nor Non Commercial limitations. 

What is more important about the CC licenses, like all open projects, is the community. The publisher that contact me to ask if he could include my photo in a printed copyrighted and commercial book is just a kind member of the community, since the Attribution-NoDerivs license gives him the right to publish my photos in a copyrighted (since I do not use Share Alike) and commercial (since I do not use Non Commercial) book providing only credits and without altering my photo.

Hello World!

Hello World!
Typical first post, until I write a proper blog post you can watch an Arduino Uno blinking "Hello World" in Morse code connected and programmed using Codebender, a startup from Patras, Greece.