A few months ago, we wrote about a company called Twitter, an American microblogging site.

As the name suggests, microblogging refers to short blog posts – often less than 140 characters.

Now a Romanian site called Cirip is going one step further than Twitter. In addition to blog posts, Cirip lets users upload photos, slides and videos.

The site hosted the first online course on a microblogging platform.

Cirip means chirp (or twitter) in Romanian.

You can see Simple English News on Cirip here and on Twitter here.

Central Europe is going through one of its warmest periods ever.

Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have all experienced very high temperatures.

Up to five hundred people are said to have died in Hungary because of the heat.

The heat is also being blamed for several forest fires in Italy and Serbia.

Croatia, Austria, Macedonia, Albania and Turkey have also been affected by the extreme heat.