www.lewiz.org

Just hacked the folderblog comments support and integrated it onto the main viewing page (instead of a pop-up page as is default). I’m happy to say that this is the first time that I’ve used this much JavaScript and “dynamic” CSS. The comments menu is now very (well, okay, a little bit) Web 2.0 in that you must first click the comments link before it appears. I’m happy about this as I don’t want the main photo display site to become too cluttered.

Already I’ve added a few more fields that I didn’t really want. Instead of showing just a title, I added the comment field that folderblog supports. I will likely just be using this to display the location the photo was taken (as per the current two entries), and not much more. I guess it could come in handy for other things from time to time.

Actually, the whole comment dialogue needs tidying up a bit… by default folderblog doesn’t suppress the “view current comments” when there are none. Because of the way folderblog is designed, this sort of makes theming it a little difficult (this isn’t strictly true, it just means going against the model/controller-view design). I’ll get it sorted out later on though.

Only other outstanding issue I can think of is the odd rounding of the EXIF info—i.e. apertures of f/5.59999997 instead of f/5.6… and the truly bizarre shutter speeds that span days. I believe this is more an issue with EXIF export from Bibble than with the PHP EXIF support.

But anyway… get leaving some comments :)

Photoblog now available at www.lewiz.org/plog !

Please subscribe to the RSS feed or bookmark that URL. I’ll do my best to upload a new photo every day or so.

I’ve mostly finished this photoblog… there are a few things to tidy up but I’m planning on making the first image available soon.

In the process I came across an old version of my website, which you can see at www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~lewiz/sites/lewizsite2/ (did I post this already?) It make me think what a totally ace site that is… to be honest, it’s probably better than this one, only I don’t think I can include images and other stuff.

If that wasn’t good enough, I coded the whole thing to work without a SQL database! Damn, I could be bothered to do things back that… what went wrong?

:seriously considers scrapping Drupal and installing modified version of lewizsite2.

Right, I’ve spent all night messing about installing crap photoblog software… I swear there is not one decent package out there… half of them don’t work, some have the most nasty hardcoded values and so on.

I’ve decided to write my own (as I’ve already mentioned). My photoblog software will be very simple… and will likely operate in a very similar way to folderblog. If I can be bothered I’d rather use a database (probably with some abstraction, e.g. PEAR::DB) so as not to rely on either image names or last modified information to provide the image ordering. Right now I don’t care about comments, but something like that is always easy to add at a later date.

I came to the conclusion that a good photoblog is defined largely by a) the photos (duh!); and b) the site design. The whole idea of this thing is that it is very simple and allows you to concentrate on the photo, not all the whizz-bang camera settings, image manipulation, big site logos and other stuff. With this in mind I’ve come up with a prototype design in HTML and CSS (no PHP yet) that fits these needs quite well.

I’m in two minds about the little RSS logo and text at the bottom-right corner of the page… on small screens this will overlap the image, which isn’t good. I think 1024×768 is my basis for the design, which is a fairly safe bet—trying to design the site for 800×600 is a bad idea as I don’t want to provide tiny images like most other sites do these days. Images will be 800 pixels at the maximum dimension (so for a 6”x6” photo it would be 800×800).

Anyway, the idea is at www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~lewiz/photos/photos.html—let me know what you think!

P.S.
I know the RSS thingy stick to the bottom corner… I guess some fancy stuff is required to make that work. Just imagine it does for now.

EDIT: Well, I’ve made the RSS thing do what I wanted, although it doesn’t seem to do horizontal scrolling… I’m tempted to just ignore that ;)

New logo! Yes, new ways to procrastinate and waste my time!

Fear my amazing Inkscape and katakana skills!

... a photoblog!

Yey! I figure that instead of pointing people to TE all the time I could have a “latest photo” on the front page, along with a link to my regular blog and other stuff. In addition to allowing quick and easy access (RSS too!) to my latest photo… this will have the added advantage of pissing Vlad off. What more could one want from a photoblog?

I’ve had a very quick play with a simple PHP folder-based script and you can see the results (after some minor hacking) at www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~lewiz/photos/fb.php—I reckon I could either fix all of the bugs, remove the cruft, etc. from that one, or just start from scratch with my own—it will hardly be difficult as I don’t want any of this “leave comment”, “rate”, “tell your mates about this photo” crap. It just needs to display a photo that is in a directory.

Anyway, it’s getting late and much as I love MC, I don’t think they can love me as much… so I’ll be off.

This is not a test!

It seems my readership may have increased to the rather whopping count of four people, yes, you heard it right, four people!

I set up a Google sitemap plugin for my website when I upgraded yesterday and in a vain attempt to see if it worked I searched Google for “lewiz” and came across my sdf-eu.org webspace. I still log in to sdf-eu.org from time to time, usually to test email settings and things like that. However, I really wasn’t aware that I had any stuff in my public_html directory.

Among the contents is a very old version of the hymersyearbook website, a copy of the first few pages of what was going to be the yearbook a whole pile of junk and, the star of it all, a complete archive of my website from quite some time ago.

This is better than theWaybackMachine… check out an old version of my website!

I’ll probably even go as far as importing the old journal entries into this blog… why? Because I can.

Update: I’ve now mirrored the whole site on my CompSoc account. You can also visit it at noisy.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~lewiz/sites/lewizsite2/

I’m just in the process of upgrading to the latest version of Drupal, which is what powers my website. I’m also checking for the latest optional modules that I’ve got installed and updating those too.

If anything is a little bit wonky, don’t worry, I’m probably working on it :)

As a few people have noticed, my website has been down for what I think to be around one day. An unpatched vulnerability in the blog software I use to drive my website was exploited. Fortunately CompSoc/inomine shut my site down as quickly as possible to prevent further harm to CompSoc in general.

I’ve spent a little while going through the logs and SQL database to check everything is in order. Normally I would have been up-to-date with security patches but I didn’t have Internet access as the problem was announced. Fortunately the guys who exploited the vulnerability didn’t cause any major hassle, for which I’m thankful. The site is now all patched and up-to-date so I’m hoping there won’t be any more problems in the future.

I’ve added a new image gallery (current it just has the photos from my last entry) called ShangLi School, which I will do my best to keep updated with any photos I take of the school while I’m here.

I’m up reasonably early tomorrow morning so I need to get some sleep. Bye.