RonMertens.com

Well, I finally finished the Grindelwald travelogue. It’s so much work picking the good photos… but there were some really good ones there. It’s such a beautiful place!
Enjoy

Well, we’re back. We had a wonderful time! We stayed in Grindelwald almost the entire trip (12 days in all) and hiked up and down the mountains. That place is so beautiful. Here’s a few photos, but don’t worry - I’ll write a travelogue soon…

Oh… and a happy new year to all

We’re going on a short vacation to Switzerland. We plan to be in the ‘mountains’ most of the time (starting in Grindelwald), doing some day walks and maybe even a longer trek. It all depends on the weather I guess, I hope it will be sunny and not too cold.

Facebook (A social-network site) has opened up their site, and introduced the ‘facebook platform’. Basically it’s an API that let’s you write application for facebook. The idea is pretty cool, and there was a lot of press about it.

We at TripTouch decided to see what’s what, and wrote a small application called TripRecord. Basically it lets you choose the countries you visited, and it displays the list in your profile. Simple, but rather nice, we think.

The application is written using PHP. It’s actually hosted on our own servers. The facebook API is very easy to learn, and quite robust. The documentation is somewhat lacking. Luckily there’s an example in PHP and you can just test and try all sorts of things till you get it right.

If you have a facebook account, click here to get your country list. If you don’t have an account yet, try it - I really like Facebook, it’s an excellent site - those guys are brilliant.

Well, my Bulgarian travelogue is finally online. Not a long one (It was just the weekend), but still some nice photos and experiences.

Enjoy the travelogue!

We just returned from Bulgaria. It was actually a great weekend. Sofia is a good, bleak, east-europe type of city. It got the churches and statues, all right. I would have liked a few more soviet monuments, but you can’t have it all. There was a day of ski (good snow), and we also rented a car and travelled around for a bit - monasteries, old towns, small villages. These were the good parts.

The bad parts? The bulgarian food is not the best… especially if you are a semi-vegan. I had to eat cheese a bit, but I survived. After a couple of tries, we decided to stop going to ‘Bulgarian’ places, settled on a nice Irish pub, and we also found a nice Italian restaurant. Bulgaria is not a tourist country, with very little infrastructure. Kiev was a lot prettier, and Budapest also. The countryside is very shabby and poor looking, but the landscape is quite nice (although it was really foggy most of the time).
But even so we had an interesting time, and a lot of fun.
Anyway, expect a lot of cool photos, and a long travelogue, but in the meantime, here are a few photos I’ve already uploaded -

It’s the annual “oh-no-Ron-has-made-another-travelogue-we-better-run-for-cover” event. The good news is that it’s rather short this time. This year was quite un-eventful photo wise (well, except our wedding, really, but those were not mine, and Michal won’t allow me to upload the photos).

http://www.RonMertens.com/2006/photoCollection/

Check this out -

http://www.istockphoto.com/design_spotlight_details.php?ID=7757

My photo (From costa rica) was used in a  design spotlight at iStockPhoto. It was actually used in a postcard to promote a Yoga retreat in Costa Rica.

Cool.

Heya.

My friend Nir has a new travelogue site. He is a gifted photographer, although I personally think the travelogue is a bit messy. But the pictures are great.

I finished writing and uploading the Santorini honeymoon photos… Enjoy!
http://www.RonMertens.com/2006/santorini