Sveiki, all!

Here we are, at the end of another year. That the next marks the centenary for all the Baltic states gives rise to reflections upon the struggles of small nations and their people for survival. But, for the moment, we put that aside to wrap up 2017 on a lighter note regarding LATVIANS.COM.

First, counter to the rest of the web, we're deleting cat memes from our site. Not all cats, but in going through our past travelogues, this picture of a black cat in Old Rīga along with its black-and-white version wasn't anywhere near as clever or artistic as we had convinced ourselves. We bid our good-bye to this image from 2004...

Old Rīga black cat...

...and not-so-clever black-and-white black cat

Eventually we (still!) plan to post even more pictures from Peters' October, 2004 trip as part of his intended "Along the #11 Tram Line" photo feature. Although in honesty that whole project is getting a bit long in the tooth given Google street views are now available for Rīga. (So is our project of a view at every intersection down every street in Old Riga.)

Over time, you'll also see us restoring our old page title font. "In the early days of browser technology" we had to create each title as a graphic, this example retrieved from archive.org:

Page header graphic circa 2004

We gave up on graphics when the site got too large. Eventually, we coded a method to substitute graphics, letter for letter—a mechanism we've used for other web sites. But now, using "styles" we can restore Decotura Inline as our headings font after we added the Latvian alphabet characters it was missing.

See you in 2018, Latvia's 100th anniversary and LATVIANS.COM's 20th.

Ar visu labu,

Picture Album

Our replacement for Peters' 2004 trip album's black cat. We also finished up our project reprocessing our entire 2004 album into larger-sized (1200 x 800 pixel) images.

View along Klostera iela in Old Rīga

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