Category: WordPress

WordPress is my favorite Content Management System (CMS). Once in a while it helps me make some extra money. Once in a while it helps me look at the problem from a different perspective. But even when it doesn’t, I still enjoy using it for this (and a few other) websites. And I enjoy interacting with the community. I use this category to share bits and pieces which are WordPress related.

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.

On long posts

Looking at my recent posts you might be thinking something like “What’s wrong with these guy? These are like paragraphs and paragraphs of text. I can’t even be bothered to read all that crap!”. Well, if you do, I’ll tell you that I am surprised myself.

I tried to analyse this change of my writing habbits and pretty quickly I realised that it was the migration of my blogging software to WordPress that triggered that change.

As you might remember, one of my main dissatisfactions with Nucleus CMS was the editor. WordPress provides an excellent editor, which is fast, comfortable, and easily extendable (quicktags are easy to add and edit).

With editor hussle out of the way, nothing stops me from writing more, and thus I am free at expressing whatever I feel like and freeing my head from thoughts that would stay there for ages. The more I dump, the more space (or rather thinking power) I get. And the more thinking power I get, the more thoughts I get again. As you can see this is the vicious circle, that I can’t break. And even if I could, I woldn’t do so just yet.

So, for all of you out there who like short posts – my temporary appologies. I will try to put some short items here too, but they will be mostly in the Links category. That’s my educated guess. :)

P.S.: 5 paragraphs to say a simple thing… that’s graphomania or some other disorder.

Migrated to WordPress

I have finally managed to migrated to WordPress. Database statistics inform me that:

There are currently 1,884 posts and 479 comments, contained within 22 categories.

As of now I am still fixing minor glitches here and there, but major things work. Just to let you know what is broken:

  • Permanent links. They are not working yet at all. Fixed.
  • Old links. None of the old links are working. Partially fixed. All of them won’t work anyway. Let me know if you find anything that I missed.
  • Users. I haven’t created any except for amdin account and myself. Feel free to register though. Not a bug. My brother managed to register all by himself, thus there is no problem.
  • Thumbnails. Some pictures come out in their original size and thus really mess up the look and feel. I will attend to this problem shortly. Too much editing required. Only new posts will have proper thumbnailing. And those that I will fix manually. Please complain.
  • Google Ads. I don’t yet have it installed. I will fix the temlate very soon. Fixed. Google Ads will now appear only on full item pages. This should improve the click-through ratio due to better ad suggestions. Keep clicking.
  • Blogroll. WordPress has an excellent tool for maintaining a blogroll, but it is not very useful to me, since I have mine at BlogLines. I’ll fix the exporting script shotly. Fixed.

If you are subscribed to the RSS feed, please change the address of feed in your preferences to this RSS feed.