fouldsy.com

With the photo gallery up and running, I was after a way of grabbing basic stats from Coppermine and integrating this alongside the blog stats. Coppermine has some quite nice stats built into, and I was keen to simply get a quick photo + album count. Unless I’m missing something obvious, there doesn’t seem to be a a simple way of getting this out of the database. In the end, cpmFetch seemed like a straight-forward way of doing it, short of writing my own SQL queries, and although I’m not likely to use the ability to grab photos straight from the gallery, at least the functionality is there.

For anyone looking at getting basic stats from Coppermine, simply adjust the location of your cpmFetch install, and customise the formatting of the output:

require_once "gallery/cpmfetch/cpmfetch.php";
$objCpm = new cpm('/gallery');
$objCpm->cpm_formatStats('Gallery: %f photos in %a albums');
$objCpm->cpm_close();

Impressively, the first couple of spam comments appeared in the moderation queue about half an hour ago. Why am I impressed? Because I hardly got any comments for 18 months, and have already had 2 genuine comments today - maybe that’s attracted some attention! I had very few problems with pMachine, probably because it wasn’t powering many blogs so it wasn’t worth the effort on the part of the spammers! There’s probably more scripts aimed at hitting blogs powered by WordPress which isn’t much fun.

So, have set SpamKarma2 to munch any more! I already have links through to Spammers Be Gone and Spam Poison for scripts that harvest e-mail addresses. Which is nice.

If you’re trying to comment (really, you are?!), you might get asked to enter a pretty captcha if it’s not sure what you’re up to, otherwise let me know if there are any problems.

I’ve pretty much got Coppermine image gallery working now, and have shuffled across most of the photos from the old galleries. Annoyingly, I’d looked at Coppermine about a year ago, but didn’t think I’d need something quite as complex and ended up adjusting pMachine to work as an image gallery. Think I’ve just about got enough photos to warrant a proper image gallery now, and reckon there might be a few more to upload this summer!

Anyways, check out my new image gallery here! Sure there’ll be some more tinkering yet, but at least it’s got them back online

Well, after a few problems last week I decided it was about time I made a move away from pMachine. It was the pMachine software that’s ran this site from the beginning, with only minor updates along the way as the code base was de-licensed with their move to ExpressionEngine and a halt on pMachine development. A number of good features made me want to stick with it and I had a number of hacks incorporated, but with the release of WordPress 2.0 I thought I’d give it a go.

Importing all the data from pMachine was actually fairly straightforward, however the multiple categories features of WordPress meant it required manual editing to adjust the old posts into the relevant categories. Also, as pMachine handled tags using bbCode, quite a few SQL queries were required to adjust this back to HTML code. I’ve since realised there’s a plugin for WordPress that allows bbCode, but I’m quite happy with the conversion back to pure HTML.

So, some new features include:

• Multiple categories assigned to each posting if desired (something I really wanted)
• Links to Technorati + del.icio.us tags for each category from posts
• Gravtars within comments section (though hardly used!) to stick a picture next to poster
• Extra customisation for countdown timers
• Proper moblog handling + posting via e-mail rather than my hacks
• A host of extra plugins for me play with!

I must say modifying WordPress is much nicer + cleaner than with pMachine. Although the system is similar when adding plugins, I like the ability to activate + deactivate plugins in WordPress and the inclusion of an editor to adjust the code, which pMachine simply didn’t have. Once the code was included within the scripts directory, that was it, and no editing through the pMachine control panel.

Although I’m not convinced about this default theme, it looks quite clean, I like the layout, and it works nicely. I’m moving all the photos across into Coppermine as I’m thinking there might be quite a few photos being posted during the summer, so figured this was a good time to setup a proper image gallery app, and there’s some neat plugins to allow integration with WordPress to!

So, let me know what you think (if anyone can be bothered!) and if you find any problems with dead links or content not loading properly from the archives, please let me know!

I keep meaning to update the progress of the Ultra 5’s. Might do that tonight if this damn cold clears up. Short story - one server done with a few niggles, OpenLDAP installed + working with users + groups imported from the base system. Second server due to run Samba for shared network drivers, network profiles and printers is done and ready for the Samba + AV components.

But, having got bored during lunch, I integrated Live Bookmarks into the site. If you don’t use a Mozilla browser such as Firefox you won’t notice anything. It was more to find out how it worked, but after realising you just stick:<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Latest Posts" href="http://www.fouldsy.com/RSS2.0.xml"into the head of your HTML, thought I could just about copy + paste that into the blog.

With the laptop currently being peppered with a Stage 1 Gentoo install for a bit of fun + games, I figured I’d also try it with tools I don’t usually run. This has included things like rox and nedit. Thinking that it’s not a system I’m going to be using a lot and being too lazy to remember websites, I installed Flock which includes built-in features such as using the del.icio.us API for sharing bookmarks.

Have been pretty impressed so far. Is still a little rough around the edges, but a number of Mozilla/Firefox extensions are already ported to Flock. Only themes are missing at the moment, but the default Flock theme is quite pretty as it stands. Automatically synchronising bookmarks with del.icio.us is cool, but made me realise tagging is more important than I previously gave attention to. May need to re-organise things a tad.

I kinda thought Flickr would be a bit more impressive than it is, maybe I’m missing something. Can’t see a way to drag + drop photos straight to Flickr, though pulling photos straight into a blog post is straight-forward, though not something I’d use much really. On the subject of blogging, so long as this appears, the built-in blogging features works too, which is very funky. [EDIT] Actually, it automatically closed it after publishing the post. Think I need to tinker with the xmlrpc a bit [/EDIT]. Again, unless I’m missing something, I can’t see a way to insert normal photos straight from your computer, but using the Blogger API built-in to pMachine makes it easy to configure basic postings.

For a browser still heavily in development, it’s shaping up to be something very useful indeed. Rather than jump straight on and try it a few weeks back when it first arrived, thought I’d leave it till things evened out and people stopped praising just because it was new. I’ve tried it on both Windows + Linux machines now and not come across any problems with it. Managing your del.icio.us tags would be useful without having to go to the del.icio.us page itself, but that may be coming soon. Chances are, Flock will replace Firefox on my desktop machines within the next few weeks.

If you’re here, guess it means the new webserver is up + running. Got sick of running multiple sites off the old server, so moved this site onto it’s own host. Just means I can fill it with more crap. Some images from the galleries may not move right over, but they should be accessible from the old server for the time being. Will move them if I can be arsed.

Since I got my mobile phone bill through a couple of days ago and realised that I use bugger all of my inclusive call allowances such as 500 text / 100 multimedia messages or 2Mb GPRS browsing, I’ve been thinking of ways to annoy o2 by continuing to spend bugger all on voice calls outside my allowance, but push my media allowances to the limit. The moblog script I wrote a few days ago wouldn’t do much as there’s next to no data to send, plus I’m not really gonna sit writing stuff out on my phone.

But, I decided to go open a flickr account and setup sending media messages straight off my phone to them, then pulling in the latest photo onto here. All this before 11a.m on Sunday too! Jessy is our star attraction for our inaugural snapshot, shown a little way down on the left hand side. Until I get bored, will probably take a new photo every day…

So, I got bored at lunchtime. I always steal a newspaper from whichever nice person leaves one lying around. Inconsiderate sods that they are, didn’t leave it on the table where it should be, ready for me to half-inch whilst eating my sandwiches.

That lead to messing around playing uber-geek. Messing around with my Palm, I setup the Bluetooth connection into my Nokia 6820 to automatically bring up the o2 Active GPRS connection to use web-browsing and e-mail on the Palm. It’s never something I could be arsed to do as I never saw the point, but that’s what boredom does to me I guess.

Anyway, that all ran fine, so then I configured the e-mail client on my Nokia to grab my o2 e-mail, which I never used. It downloaded my welcome message from January… But, it got me thinking about moblogging.

Like accessing the Internet off my Palm, I’ve never really seen the need for posting crap on here from my mobile, mainly because pMachine can’t do it. A minor setback. Newer weblogs can, or at least posting via e-mai which most mobiles can do easily, and there is stuff floating around about adding in functionality to post via e-mail, but the couple of scripts that were done a couple of years back aren’t available anymore. So, I grabbed the WordPress wp-mail code and the SquirelMail POP3 class and knocked up some code.

So long as this appears, it works fine! Not that hard, fairly basic stuff, and includes basic authentication to ensure every Tom, Dick + Harry can’t post via e-mail. Nicely cleans things up by deleting e-mail after processing, though doesn’t include posting images. If I can be arsed, might include that at some point. Probably won’t even use all this anyways!

Of course, this might not even work…

Well, thanks to Lycos, the domain got suspended until they pulled their finger out their ass. For some reason, they had decided to check payment status one month before the domain was due to be re-registered. As payment details have changed, it was declined, but no e-mail to warn of this happening. Grrr.

At least it’s all sorted and can get back to writing a load of shite no-one bothers to read…