Restaurant Imeruli Ezo

Restaurant Imeruli Ezo is a nice roadside restaurant located in Natakhtari (this area is famous for its restaurants)We made a lovely dinner here at the start of June 2020, returning from our adventures at the Poppy fields near MchadijvariInside yard at Imeruli EzoIn direct translation from Georgian to English - Imeruli Ezo - means - Imeretian yard. And yes they are serving here Imeretian style food.The food at Imeruli EzoWe ordered some salads, mcvadi, badrijani, Turkish Coffee, and some Georgian lemonades. 

Georgia |

How To Create a Custom Drupal 8 Theme based on Bootstrap

When building a new Drupal website I prefer working with a Bootstrap theme and apply a subtheme 

Just like in the case with Drupal 7, theming a subtheme based on Bootstrap is super simple - in a few words - download and enable a Drupal 8 bootstrap theme, then in the Drupal themes folder create a new theme folder and make a custom info.yml file

here is a live example from OptionsBrew.com theme


in the themes folder, create a new folder -> optionbrew
in the optionbrew folder create a new file - > optionsbrew.info.yml


in the optionsbrew.info.yml file paste following:


core: 8.x
type: theme
base theme: bootstrap

name: 'OptionsBrew'
description: 'A custom Drupal Bootstrap 3…

Drupal Development |

Happy Kids Saldus

Happy Kids Saldus is a cool kid's amusement park in the town of Saldus, Latvia.I first read about in on a local Latvian Daily Business newspaper, and soon as I had the chance took our baby girl to play here.Amusement park "Happy Kids" at the Saldus bypass road has created a place to celebrate children's parties and other holidays.Happy Kids indoor amusement park in SaldusWe visited this park on March 2020, back then the entrance fee was like EUR3/h per kid or EUR 5 for 2 hours. Popular party place for kids parties in the areaPlayground for the little ones (toddlers)

Latvia |

June 2020 Dividend Income Report - $82.11

Welcome to the thirty-eight (#38) dividend income report, covering earnings I've made from dividend-paying stocks and peer to peer lending in June 2020.Just like the previous months, the last June we also spent in a self-isolation (because of Covid-19) here in Georgia. More of the strict lockdown measurements were lifted (inner tourism, restaurants and hotels were opened for public)  we did a few weekend trips with an overnight stay at local resorts here in Georgia.  Baby girl is started to attend her pre-school, she is doing great - talking a lot, putting together sentences, mixing languages, figuring out new words. Awesome. Quite…

Dividend Income |

Poppy fields near Mchadijvari

Summers in Georgia are very beautiful, traveling around the country is a pleasure. One such travel happened at the start of June 2020, when we decided to find the real poppy field.Let me explain, a couple of weeks ago we already started to search for a poppy field here in Georgia to make lovely family photos, we did found one little field near Marneuli, and we even took very good portrait photography,  but this time we decided to find a real, rich with flowers, good for photography, and luckily thanks to the hints on Facebook we got location details - Poppy fields near MchadijvariPoppy fields near Mchadijvari in GeorgiaThe destination is quite easy reachable from Tbilisi…

Georgia |

Saint Dimitri Tesalonikeli Fathers Moanstery near Mtksheta

This is a little monastery near Mtskheta, best reached via Mtskheta-Shiomghvime monastery road.That's how we actually discovered this place at the end of May 2020 - during a random drive to the Shio-Mgvime monastery, we looked for some nice picnic areas to dine outdoors, we did a few stops here and there until noticed this place.We didn't picnic here, but in the nearby forest after a brief trip to the monastery.Probably not as impressive as the Jvari monastery or Svetistkhoveli cathedral in Mtshekta this place has some magic.Little wooden roadside in Georgian The monastery complex is at the end of the road. Next to the monastery, there is a forest park and some horseback…

Georgia |

Oskars Kalpaks Museum and Memorial Place "Airītes"

Oskars Kalpaks Museum and Memorial Place "Airītes" is a branch of the Latvian War Museum established in memory of the hero of the Latvian War of Independence Colonel Oskars Kalpaks in "Airītes", Zirņi Parish, Saldus Region.On March 6, 1919 during the liberation battles of Latvia, colonel Oskars Kalpaks, commander of the First Latvian Special Battalion; Nikolajs Grundmanis, the First Commander of the Battalion's Special Company; Peteris Krievs, Lieutenant-General of the Cavalry Squad and Johans-Hans Srinders, Lieutenant of the Baltic Home Guard Artillery died near Airites.AirītesFrom 1922-1933 monuments in remembrance of the four heroes were unveiled here, and the Oskars Kalpaks Memorial was…

Latvia |

Church of the Archangels of Mchadijvari

Mchadijvari Archangels Church is an architectural and historical monument in Georgia,  in the center of the village of Mchadijvari. We discovered this church when searching for the poppy fields in Georgia, at the start of June 2020 (hint poppy fields are next to the church, some 5000 meters on the right.Church of the Archangels of MchadijvariThe above picture is made from the Dusheti - Mchadijvari-Odzisi highway site. This time we actually didn't visited the cathedral, but here is what I was able to find out from Georgian WikipediaThere is a construction inscription on the church. According to the inscription, the church was built in 1668…

Georgia |

Khatsiri Forest Park

Khatsiri Forest park is a nice recreational area next to the town of Tianeti in Georgia. We discovered this place by accident after spending a day at Kuzh Park in Tianeti (sometimes we love to drive to the Tianeti town to walk in the Kuzh park with our baby girl).Way back home to Tbilisi we decided to make a stop here at Khatsiri Forest Park - let me say in one word - WOW. I was impressed.Picnic area at Khatsiri Forest parkWe are planning to come here often and make a picnic quite often. Also this is yet another addition to our picnic places around Georgia.View to the town of TianetiLocal farmers are grazings cows and sheep in these meadows.There is a little church a top of the hilli…

Georgia |

Eat For Fit - Healty Food Home Delivery in Tbilisi

Eat for fit is my favorite healthy food home delivery service here in Tbilisi.

Recently these loss-weight / dietary food delivery companies have started to pop up like mushrooms in the forest after the rain here in Tbilisi. We have tried a dietary menu from Eat for fit twice - and both times the result has been excellent. 

One thing should be added - we are the gym goers - and the great weight-loss results comes both from the physical activities and well-balanced food. Eat for Fit are great with calories counting and they cook really delicious food. There has not been a day I felt starvation. All was well calculated and prepared individually. 

We paid about…

Expat in Georgia |

Tsilkani cathedral

The Tsilkani cathedral of the Mother of God is a Georgian Orthodox church in the village of Tsilkani, Mtskheta Municipality, in Georgia's eastern region of Mtskheta-Mtianeti.Originally built in the 4th century, the church was repeatedly remodeled in the Middle Ages. The extant edifice is a domed cross-in-square design, contained in a walled enclosure with corner towers. It is inscribed on the list of the Immovable Cultural Monuments of National Significance.We discovered this church in early June 2020, when traveling the Natkhtari - Tsilkani - Mukhrani highway (we were in the searches for poppy fields, which we later found…

Georgia |

How to Install Drupal with Nginx, PHP-FPM 7.4, MySQL, phpMyAdmin on Ubuntu 20.04 - Linode Guide

In this article, you will learn how to setup webserver for serving  Drupal  websites running with Nginx, PHP-FPM 7.4, MySQL and phpMyAdmin on Ubuntu 20.04

For the following tutorial, I used very much the information from my previous guide with Ubuntu 18.04, but I decided to rewrite it for Ubuntu 20.04 version as it is shipped with php7.4 version and will work for Drupal 7, Drupal 8 and most probably for Drupal 9

Prerequisites


Ubuntu 20.04 
Root privileges.


You can get a cheap VPS starting just $5/mo from Linode. That's what I did - bought a new nanode from Linode



Deploying server with Linode

Literally in a couple of seconds, the new server was up…

Drupal Development |

File Permissions for gmap_markers.js

Time after time I'm facing this issue with gmap markers. As mostly this happens when I'm doing something on the server side with file permissions, I decided to keep the notes

here is the problem


GMap is unable to save the marker bundle, so the markers will not work. Please check file system permissions of the public://js/gmap_markers.js!

Here is the solution


sudo chmod 755 /sites/all/files/js/gmap_markers.js

Drupal Development |

Simple CSS trick to Make Table Responsive

Working on the OptionsBrew.com project (website is powered by Drupal 8) I faced the following responsive table issue while browsing content with a table on smaller screens (phone)Broken Table on a smaller screenLuckily there is a simple CSS workaround:in the .css file add the following to table properties: display: block;
overflow-x: auto;like this:table{
border-collapse: separate;
border-spacing: 0;
width:100%;
margin: 25px 0 40px;
display: block;
overflow-x: auto;
}here is how it looks nowResponsive tableYou can see a live example here: Top 20 Most Active Stock Options May 2020

Drupal Development |

Poppy fields near Marneuli

We love poppy fields, we have featured them a couple of times here at the Piece of Life seriesBeautiful Poppy Field Near P104 (Jaunpils-Tukums) Road (Latvia)Railroad crossing in Skrunda municipality, LatviaToday we are going to share a brief photo story with poppy field near Marneuli, next to the Милена Оптовый Магазин (Milena mall)It was one of the first days when travel restrictions between Georgia's inner cities were lifted and we decided to head to the Marneuli side looking for poppy fields (my partner have seen online some beautiful photos of poppies the day before). I love these wandering around days.We didn't find the special poppy field, instead we found poppies.…

Georgia |

Drupal 7 Fix: SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1231 Variable 'sql_mode' can't be set to the value of 'NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER'.

I was migrating Drupal 7 website to a newer infrastructure (PHP 7.4) and during the migration process when tried to connect to the MySQL database  I faced following error - SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1231 Variable 'sql_mode' can't be set to the value of 'NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER'.

Here is the error code:


Resolve all issues below to continue the installation. For help configuring your database server, see the installation handbook, or contact your hosting provider.

Failed to connect to your database server. The server reports the following message: SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1231 Variable 'sql_mode' can't be set to the value of '…

Drupal Development |

May 2020 Dividend Income Report - $225.17

Welcome to the thirty-seventh (#37) dividend income report, covering earnings I've made from dividend-paying stocks and peer to peer lending in May 2020.Just like the previous month of April, in May we also spent in a self-isolation (because of Covid-19) here in Georgia. Some of the strict lockdown measurements were lifted (like using a private vehicle and going from city to city)  we did a few road trips here in Georgia.  Baby girl is doing her online class, learning about animals, shapes, continents, and even planets. Quite fascinating what a 22-month-old can do. Development is very rapid.Saint Dimitri Tesalonikeli Fathers Moanstery near…

Dividend Income |

How To Swap / Transfer IP address with Linode VPS

Recently I was rebuilding a compromised VPS on the Linode - this was a small web server serving some 3 established websites. It took me a few hours from A-Z  - launch a new Linode, install a new webserver on it, then transfer data from one host to another.Once all migration works were done, there was an option to change DNS entry to point to the new server. Nothing complicated. But there is a neat feature from Linode called - Swap IP (IP Transfer). That's a little perk from Linode and quite good for SEOYou can get a cheap VPS starting just $5/mo from Linode. That's what I did - bought a new Linode just for $10If you have two Linodes in the same…

Servers & Config |

How To Block IP Address in Drupal 8

Unlike in Drupal 7 version where IP banning is enabled by default, with Drupal 8 version, there is one more step added - IP banning must be enabled from the extend section.

Here is how. (source)


Log into your Drupal 8 admin interface.
From the top menu bar, click on the menu tab and then the Extend tab from the second menu bar.
You are now on the modules list page. The Ban module is listed under the Core category. To enable it, simply click on the checkbox to the left of the module.
Once selected, scroll to the bottom and click on the Save Configuration button to enable the module. Now that you have the Ban module enabled,…

Drupal Development |

Under The Georgian Sun / King Davids Tower (s)

It was on the evening of April 27, 2020, I decided to switch glass (from the kit lens to telephoto) and make some photo for the month of April to put in the description in the monthly dividend income report.The photo of the month turned out to be a sunset in Tbilisi with skyscraper in the foregroundKing David Towers in TbilisiFrom the KDR websiteTwo landmark towers King David Residences and King David Business Center are harmonically united in an exclusive multifunctional complex King David.King David creates a five-star lifestyle within exceptionally elegant residential and business towers with beautifully designed amenity spaces organized enticingly as a multistory urban resort and…

Expat in Georgia |