Category: Site News

This website is very old. It’s been with me for many years. There are plenty of articles which are useful both for myself and the rest of the world. Bit by bit, word by word, link by link, image by image, this site was filled and filled over the years. Technologies changed. Some new techniques and concepts came up. Some old ones faded away. Spending as much time as I possible can (after everything else) on this site, sometimes I manage to introduce big changes – like a new bit of functionality or a totally different look. Not to confuse and scare everyone, I try to be open about the changes that were made. When something big is changed I post a description of what it was and why I felt the change was needed. These updates are published in this category.

Yet another reorganization of photos

After some more thinking and consideration, I decided to reorganize my photos yet again. Having several hierachies based on date under one tree (/photos/2005/04/… and /photos/Projects/POTD/2005/04/…) is way too confusing. It makes finding things too hard. Also, having photoblog without RSS feed an annotations (except for EXIF comments) doesn’t seem right. And because I am such a control and centralization freak, I decided to do it too.

Anyway, I will restructure my POTD folders in the following way: folder named /photos/Projects/POTD/2005/04/15/ will now be named /phots/2005/2005-04-15_POTD/). In other words, POTD folders will be mixed together with the normal albums.

But you won’t have to look for them too hard no further. I will be posting selected images to this blog. The image will be thumbnailed to 400 pixels or whatever fits my current theme. I will also be posting the link to the album where the image can be seen in bigger and/or original size along with other images from the same day. All POTD images will be categorized as, well, POTD. Additional categories will be assigned as appropriate. No EXIF data will be posted. Those curios enough can get images from the album and scan those for EXIF. Maybe I will change this later if I find a better solution.

I have started to move things around, so you might have minor problems for a couple of days or so. After that, locating and navigating images will be a bliss.

Update: While fixing POTD, I decided to reorganize the normal albums aswell. I have created a separate category for them too. I’ve went back and fixed all POTDs and normal albums from the beginning of 2005. I’ll do the rest shortly.

Installed del.icio.us Smart Tagging Plugin for WordPress

I’ve installed del.icio.us Smart Tagging Plugin for WordPress. Here is a brief explanation of what it does by the author:

As you may have noticed, there are lots of little checkered images in my blog now. These are links to my del.icio.us tags. I decided it would be interesting if my blog was smart tagged so people who read entries on this blog could visit my del.icio.us links on the subject to learn more about what I am discussing.

Installation of this plugin should stimulate me into supporting my del.icio.us bookmarks – adding new ones and tagging old ones properly.

Downtime

The site was down for a few hours today. This was caused by weather conditions which brought my Internet connection down. And, of course, I was deep sleeing after my night shift in the NOC to notice the absense of The Web. Sorry.

On organizing photos

I am looking for a better way to organize my photos. I have a whole lot of them and a lot more are coming.

Currently, I have a somewhat good organization but it is not very convenient to use. I have all pictures in the photos folder. Most of them are sorted into albums by date and name (/photos/year/year-month-day_album-name/). Others are organized into projects. Actually, I’ve had only one project so far – “Picture of the day“. I am using it to store single pictures and pictures which don’t belong to any particular album (/photos/Projects/POTD/year/month/day/). I have also created a Photoblog, which basically shows one picture at a time using the reversed date sort of my “Picture of the day” images.

Locating albums is fast and easy, but they are not adding up at the speed of singled out images. Single images need easier navigation. I’d go even as far as searching. Thus they need tagging or some similar mechanism. I also need a better photoblog with previous/next/today navigation, comments, and RSS feed. I also want to be able to use my images in posts for this blog once in a while. Ideally, I would also want a way for offline browsing of these pictures. In any way, I don’t want to store images in the database – they are just fine on my hard disk.

There is also something else. For some time now I am postprocessing all pictures that I publish. I want the original image to be stored somewhere handy. It shouldn’t be visible from the web, but it should be trivial to find if I need it.

From what I want, it seems that I need some database usage at least. Even if just to store the tags/keyword and comments. If I’d go in this direction, I want it integrated with my blog as much as possible. I want the same user and SPAM control.

I have been looking at different plugins for WordPress, as well as integration of some 3rd party tools. So far I didn’t manage to try any of them.

Do any of you have any suggestions based on my needs? I’d really appreciate it.

Update: Tried Gallery. Doesn’t work for due to the way it integrates to WordPress and impossibility of using EXIF comments as image titles during the import of albums. Other than that, seems to be a good piece of software.

Update: Tried Coppermine and didn’t like it for the above reasons.