User:Mcskoufis

Hello Wikipedians!

My name is Pavlos Skoufis and run my worldcuplatest.com website with one other friend of mine, a website which more than 10,000 people visit to read our articles daily. I have a passion for good football, so my interest is more on international football rather than Club football. My king of tournaments of course is the Fifa World Cup. Since the subject I am editing is related to football I think it is a good and honest approach to let you know that I am a Panathinaikos FC and Greece national football team fan.

My main worry about football are the commercial mega-monsters which football can not do without and some of the people and decisions of Fifa, the governing body of world football. I just think that some of their rules have not made football more spectacular, and there are new restrictions in place as time goes by, which as their decision to ban players from getting their T-shirts off after scoring shows, have altered the image of football I had since I was a kid (I am currently 29 years old).

My main workday is to maintain the websites I am involved in and also continue practicing my journalistic skills on my main sports news coverage website, which is syndicated across the globe. It is one of the sites that I am really proud of, as we are literally 2 people behind this whole project and some times we manage to get the stories out before some of the big boys do.

Since the day I am writing this, the Trinidad and Tobago national football team managed to draw with the Sweden national football team, despite the fact that they were a goal down. Brilliant team, solid defence, rock-solid goalkeeper and they even threatened the Swedish goalkeeper. Many congratulations to them they are well worth it! Many Soca Warriors fans have been registered on worldcuplatest.com with my site as their favourite which makes them my second favourites to Grece.

I am generally a very busy man, trying to earn a living. I run artzweb.net as well, which is a web hosting and web development company, which we are managing (a small team of people). This company provides support for all my customer and personnal projects. Also I am the person administering and maintaing the worldcuplatest.com and westhamfans.org websites.

Worldcuplatest.com is a collective effort, which although it might seem like a big corporate entity, is providing unique coverage of international football and it is a real pitty why my submission as external link has been rejected twice by other Wikipedia members. Maybe an independent and innovative website which is run by real football passionates is really turning them down, or can't think how this site can be trustworthy. If only they knew what we've been through to get the site in it's current form...

Currently, I am also a student at the University of Greenwich, studying on the MSc Computing and Information Systems. My key scientific research is on database systems and recently a project about a multi-user, multi-environment software package to be implemented on an OpenLDAP Directory Server.

Other interests of research are content management systems and I must give my personnal award (yeah, who cares) to the wonderfull Drupal system, which is behind worldcuplatest.com and which is the most stunning solution I've ever experienced. It is like a dream come true. Try it out, you will remember me. Big thumbs up to the Drupal community.

Also database management systems, such as MySQL, Oracle, etc. really fascinate me, although I always opt for Open-source solutions. My other skills include business management, project management, quality-assurance management, web development, PHP programming (although I consider my level as poor).

Specifically for PHP I must give credit to Dr Mohammed Dastbaz, head of the Information Systems & Multimedia department of the University of Greenwich for a wonderfull 15 minutes walkthrough of PHP's basic internal mechanisms, which opened a whole new perspective for me to start looking at programming from a different perspective. Much much credit must also go to Mrs Joan Knight, Course Leader of the MSc Computing & Information Systems programme, for her brain-twisting lectures on database technologies, methodologies and other issues related to the analysis, planning, modelling, implementation, testing and producing cutting-edge applications in the minimum amount of time possible. Thanks guys!

More on me as soon as I have some time available.