Blog updates for updates
2.26.06
zenphoto's gallery
Getting pictures online has always been a desire of mine. Back in 2004, I finally took the time to get Gallery up and running. Over the years, it's more than served its purpose, but alas, it's time to move on.
While browsing through DSLR member's blogs, I came across Will Chatham's site and noticed he was using a gallery system called zenphoto. I was immediately awe struck.
It's clean and feels "light". And, unlike Gallery, the backend code is fairly simple to hack. There is an AJAX gui in the administration screen that allows drag-n-drop manipulation of your albums.
What I like the most, though, is being able to drop a folder right into the "albums" directory and have zenphoto list it and create thumbnails on the fly. No more going through a "process" to get your images online. The focus behind the zenphoto project seems to be getting your content out so it can be enjoyed, and it does that well.
That can also be seen as a downside, since there is no heavy image manipulation available (yet). Other potential downsides are the requirement of a database and, initally, zenphoto is pretty CPU intensive. Since thumbs and cropped images are created on the fly, the gd_lib are called to resize images the first time they are requested. From then on, a cache folder stores 100megs (by default, and changable) of the adjusted images for quicker displaying.
The current version is Beta 1.01. Quite worth checking out if you're interested in a change.
1:20 pm in 7.25.05
Yet more updates to make
Maybe I spoke too fast the other day when I proclaimed the clean up is finished. I'm finding ever increasing bits and pieces that need a tweak or two. Come to find out, my RSS feed isn't as standards conforming as previously thought. No biggie, I'm getting it straightened out.
During this continued adjustment period, I even found time to throw together a search function of sorts. I'm still digging the bugs out of it, but at least Catera owners finding their way here can more easily see the collected wealth of hate for that car!
7.22.05
The clean up is finally done!
I've been playing around with this domain for nearly 5 years. I started my humble exploration into web design with the sole desire to learn how this "stuff" was done, all the while using this site as my testing grounds.
Testing indeed. Often, the backend code used here was quickly thrown together and poorly written. While perfomance issues were miniscule, I've had a mess of a time getting this site indexed correct in various search engines. Certain pages showed up in an order that didn't make sense or were ignored all together.
Well, after getting mod_rewrite up and going, my pages finally started showing up, yet "out of order", relevance wise. Since then (quite recently I might add), I standardized all of my blog entry title bar names...which helped the most! Google and Yahoo like me now.
Even better, I've updated my RSS feed, again, so that instead of creating an actual file listing the feed pulls the info each time from the database. I can finally have an RSS feed that contains any edits I do the included. I'm also including the header link to the feed on each (necessary) page as well.
My latest victory has been one that's bugged me for nearly a year. Getting my "previous page | next page" links on my index and shameless plug pages to stop showing ".php?rowstart=xxx" in the address bar. It was sloppy. The hardest thing about it to work was one stupid, "hard coded" varible on my Plugs page that kept giving me an error. I never noticed the varible in the past, so I figure I kept doing something wrong in my .htaccess file or elsewhere. So packed it up and left it for another day. That day was today and it feels good.
So, why go through the trouble of creating my own blog when there are other free ones out there to use? Because you don't get "this" feeling at the end of the day with those!
3.31.05
Further SQL Optimizations
Well, time came to do that extra clean up work here. At my last post, I was able to get the number of database queries for hits to my index page down to 10. That came with a simple tuning of how my catagory lists on the right pulled it's data. But, I neglected to do anything with these actual posts and comment count.
Each time an entry was pulled from the database, a second query would check to see how many comments were available for it. Though I only show 5 entries on the index page, the catagory pages used the same query method. That means, catagories that have 40+ posts will end up doing 40+ queries...only to increase as time goes on.
Using a method similar to the catagory query, I now use a query somewhat like this:
SELECT table1.*, COUNT(table2.cID) FROM table1 LEFT OUTER JOIN table2 ON table1.id = table2.cID GROUP BY table1.id
This has dropped my index page queries down to 5 and catagory page down to 3 (the additional two queries per page being maintenance records). Schweet!
12.3.04
Optimizing SQL queries really work
I've always knew the sql queries I used on this site were shoddy. I never really tripped off of it because "it worked" and it's not like the traffic coming here is taxing my server in the least.
Well, I recently decided to try to clean them up a bit, not only for learning purposes, but to see what performance benefit is really possible.
Just as a simple test, I changed the way my index page queried the catagory count on the left. Previously, I used one query to grab every distinct catagory in the table, and using a while loop, ran each result though another query to count the rows associated with each catagory. Using MySQL Administrator I seen that the whole page used 26 queries.
To change, I now do the following:
SELECT DISTINCT table.row, COUNT(table.row) AS count FROM table GROUP BY table.row
This lowered the page queries to 10. Impressive. I still have some more to clean up, but seeing the potential optimizing has made me a believer.
7.1.04
Fun with mod_rewrite
I never realized how those pesky question marks can ruin a google indexing. I always figured content on here was hard to search for because of low ranking. Well, that may very well be true, but having PHP strings as part of the URL didn't help either.
Interested in seeing how this new structure will work out.
6.19.04
Finally upgraded PHP
Much to my suprise, I was still running the 4.0.1 version of PHP here. I guess between just starting to learn PHP and improving my knowledge of it over the years, I neglected keeping up with it. That's very bad. Not only is it unsafe, but it allowed me to become sloppy with code development and unfamiliar with beneficial improvements I could (should) have been using.
One such improvement is to run PHP as an Apache module, rather than calling cgi executions. Doing this really does make a noticable performance increase, as well as greater flexibility.
While I was making changes, I also decided to, finally, turn off register_globals. Boy was I in for a shock as to how much clean up work I was in for. Actually, I'm really glad I had this experience. It helped me to appreciate how important it is to keep up on "best pratices" for usability and security.
5.13.04
And the Gallery is now working
I've been meaning to install Gallery for while now. I've downloaded it, but never got around to configuring it until last night. I have a lot of photos I could add in there, but I think I'll start fresh with a new crop.
So, without further ado, here are ] :: my trivial photos :: [
9.28.03
Further changes
Aside from being out of town last week and having no Internet access, it looks like this little site will be on hold for a moment. I'm going to move this site to a paid hosting service. I'm, sadly, getting rid of my static IP addresses on my DSL, and with Charter's Pipeline service offering more speed for less money, I'm going to go that route.
Might not see too many updates here for a second, but I should have everything working again shortly.
5.19.03
The better feed, XML style!
Now that I got the initial feed made, I had to find a way to improve it. The last one was just a PHP file that "mimiced" a RSS feed. It worked, but I wanted a way to show the XML when you clicked on the link to it. Well that one didn't work.
Now, I have it set up that when I make an update to this blog, it will create a new XML file and fill in the information into it. Older files are simply over-written.
It's kinda nice to get something to work the way you want it.
5.17.03
My nifty little RSS feed
I just got into this whole RSS/XML feed thing this week. I really never too the time to learn the benefits and purpose of using and having one. Well, since I'm finding myself visiting more and more blogs lately, I can appreciate sites that use them a lot more now.
Not only am I able to see the gist of an update MUCH easier now, but using the aggregator I can keep up with local news. "Yeah, big whoop" you might say...well this really beats endlessly clicking through web pages...especially on company time ;-)
All in all, my first attempt at this has been a success and I'm now I'm wondering why I waited so long go get with the program!
3.3.03
On a side note...
In case anyone is interested in a tutorial on PHP/MySQL user authentication, I found this one at Site Point very helpful.
Managing Users with PHP Sessions and MySQL
2.28.03
Persistance pays off
I finally got a comment system up and working! I've actually been working on it for a while, but I could never seem to get it just right. Well, after searching many posts about row counting and such, I made a very simple set up that can keep track of blog entry comments and post counts! I consider this a small victory in my book!
12.7.02
Finally got it to work
Finally got the carriage return to work on these updates.
Now I don't have to make those html breaks to have spaces ;-)
11.29.02
bland and boring
That's what I'm starting to feel about this layout. I like the ease of navigation of it, but the dull colors isn't making a "feel good" mood. I will be working on a more..."me" layout soon.
10.10.02
OK, I lied
I tried the whole "no tables" thing again and realized that the download page I added needed them to get everything aligned. Ah, who cares. I give myself an "e" for effort.
10.5.02
Look Ma, no tables!
Or depreciated tags for that matter! Finally got my site completely over to CSS. Kinda nice to know that I'm not wasting my precious bandwidth on bloated text file, HTML tags that can be described in a simple css file!
...pushes his white tape, nerd glasses squarely back on nose
9.19.02
My first CSS design
Well, once again I've decided to change the layout of my site. I've really been wanting to get away from frames. While they do come in handy at times, they are a pain to keep straight and limit what you can do to a site. All CSS here baby!...well, for the most part that is!
8.20.02
Shoutbox changes
This should be the last update plug you should see for a while. I changed over my shoutbox from a pop-up link to a static list. I think it will work better and I'm sick of pop-ups. Convient in some aspects, but annoying in most. This one will not scroll down, so messages will be cut off. Sucks, but best I can do for the moment. Oh well, feel free to add to it!
8.15.02
Exploring PHP sessions
OK, site updates are getting to be a bit boring to read through, but kinda excited about learning to use sessions to control access to various portions of this site...mainly administration stuff.
7.1.02
Introducing version 3
Things are still progressing here. I typically shy away from having a lot of graphics on my websites because I want it fast loading for dial-up users. Now a days, I shy away because I'm hosting this over my DSL connection with only 128K upload. Well that all changed with this lay out. While it isn't too bad, this is the most I have ever used images to add to the look of my sites. Hope the effort pays off.
6.29.02
Shameless plugs are back
The improvements are coming along. I finally took the time to figure out how to move the "plug your site" info from being stored in a text file to the database. It seems to be up and running just fine too :). If you have a website you want to share, feel free to add it.
6.26.02
The minimalist look
Well, here it is! Yeah, I know. Pretty sparce, but I like the minimalist approach ;-). I'll be adding more graphics-wise over the coming days, all of the old content will be back as well. Till then, post over in the shoutbox and feel free to plug your web site!
And I know I said below that this would be a frameless site, but they just come in so much use every so often!
6.22.02
A complete redo in the works?
I think the time has come again to update the look of this site. Since I have been working on the back-end changes, might as well change to a new front-end format as well. While I do like the frames in this site...and they actually help the security of this site, I will be switching to a frameless design. The works should begin soon, so keep checking back!
6.21.02
From flat files to databases
The migration is almost complete from moving this site's news to the MySQL database. Instead of having a long, drawn out list of updates I've added, there will be an archive available to look through.