Month: February 2008

Hacking Flickr Manager 1.5.1

I am looking at moving all of the photos on an existing site over to Flickr. The plan is to convert the site over to WordPress and use the images from Flickr so I wanted an easy way to insert photos. I was looking for something that would be as simple to use as ImageManager or WordPress’s existing interface. So I went over to WordPress.org/extend/plugins to see what everyone was using.

The most popular Flickr plugin was PhotoXhibit by Benjamin Sterling. It has a lot of appealing qualities. You could bring photos from Picasa, Flickr, and Smugmug. It has a lot of sophistication and it used jQuery for the heavy lifting. I just could not get it to work right. It was unbearably slow showing the pictures.

Then I tried Flickr Manager. This plugin worked despite the fact the ReadMe file says it needs PHP version 5 and my PHP version says it is 4.4.7. It looked really good. It used a very straightforward and intuitive way to insert photos. My only complaint was that it had this Lightbox thing going on. That meant that my web page was going to load the prototype JavaScript library and its friends(~100K). Recently I found a jQuery version of Lightbox that is a much lighter load so I really did not want to go back to loading prototype and his friends.

The next plugin I tried was WP-Flickr. This plugin worked but had less features than Flickr Manager. I thought about hacking this plugin to add support for jQuery Lightbox to show the larger picture when you clicked on it. Before I had gotten too far in my thinking I was struck with the thought that Flickr Manager has more desirable features. Maybe I should look at changing Flickr Manager to work without the prototype library. It was an easy change. All I had to do was comment out one line. I even found the lines to change to get the Lightbox feature to work with the jQuery version of Lightbox. Well it kind of works. I did not get it to work properly with single photos. It never finishes loading the larger photo from Flickr. The demo at Trent’s site shows the Lightbox feature working with photo sets. Lightbox is a “would be nice” feature for me. The way it works now is to take you to the Flickr page of the larger photo. That’s not that bad so I decided to stick with the slightly hacked version of Flickr Manager. Now I can start uploading pictures to Flickr.

A quick review of two Related Posts plugins for WordPress

 Mitcho found a post I wrote about adding Related Posts to a WordPress blog and said:

I would recommend to you and your readers a plugin I wrote, Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. It’s similar in functionality, but has been built with admin-friendliness in mind, and doesn’t require you to edit your theme files. Check it out!

I checked it out and I am impressed! The idea behind related posts concept is that a reader may want to see other posts written by the author that are related to the post he or she is reading. A good related posts plugin  should automagically create a small list of related posts and attach it to the end of the post. Creating a list automatically is the easy part. The hard part is the magic used to find the posts that are related to the post.

A popular related posts plugin is the WP 2.3 Related Posts plugin by Denis PaoPao. It uses WordPress’s native support for tags to build the list. For this plugin to work you must add tags to each post. I have used this plugin on this blog since I upgraded to WordPress 2.3.

Mitcho uses a different technique. He gratefully acknowledges the work of several people, Peter Bowyer, Alexander Malov, and Mike Lu. The key part of this plugin is the algorithm to identify related posts. Peter uses MySQL’s fulltext search score to identify related posts.

Since I am an empirical type of guy I put it to a little test. I activated the plugin on this blog and put the related_posts call in the main WordPress loop. Although the plugin is admin-friendly you have to manually edit your theme to get it into the main loop. Now each post had two lists, one generated by YARPP and one by WP 2.3 Related Posts plugin. This makes for a wordy post but I expect to print both lists for a short time. Since my main page had twenty posts, I printed off the main page of the blog.  I found that I preferred the YARPP related post list for ten posts. Some of the lists were actually quite good. Two of these posts won by default. I had forgotten to add tags to the post. That is a plus for YARPP. Since the YARPP algorithm does not require tags it created a list where WP 2.3 Related Posts plugin did not. I found it interesting that I did not find a related post list created by WP 2.3 Related Posts plugin I liked better than YARPP. Hmm… Another interesting fact I learned is that I found ten posts in which neither related posts list were particularly related the post. Oops!

After this small test it is pretty obvious that although YARPP is not perfect, most of the time it creates a list that I preferred over WP 2.3 Related Posts plugin. At its worst YARPP creates a list like the list created by WP 2.3 Related Posts plugin that is unrelated to the post. Great job Mitcho and thanks for the tip!

Test your web design in different browsers – Browsershots

 

del.icio.us bookmark this on del.icio.us – first posted by lordpet to browser webdesign tools design test – more about this bookmark…

Test your web design in different browsers – Browsershots
lordpet
Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:30:00 GMT

This is an interesting site but do not expect quick results from the web site. It creates screen shots using different browsers by using distributed computers that upload the screen shot. It created 29 of the 41 screen shots I requested. It took about thirty minutes for the 29 shots to appear and I did not find any web page design problems. I suspect that my testing with Firefox 2, IE 6 and IE 7 are adequate for catching most problems but this might be handy to show tor clients who are looking for maximum interoperability.

Share This (jQuery): a WordPress plugin » Semicolon

Today I ran across Bennett’s jQuery version of the Share This plugin. By using plugins based on jQuery rather than Prototype library, I reduced the load time for several web sites. I still had one web site that used the Prototype library and I suspected it was because of the Share This plugin. By switching over to the jQuery version of Share This, the Prototype is not loaded and the amount of JavaScript downloaded was reduced by 70K. Thanks Bennett! 🙂

Share This (jQuery): a WordPress plugin » Semicolon

FileZilla Portable 3.0.6 Released

Filezilla logoFileZilla Portable 3.0.6 has been released. FileZilla Portable is the popular FileZilla FTP client packaged as a portable app, so you can take your ftp client, server list and settings with you. This new release updates FileZilla to the latest version, works with Notepad++ Portable and other portable editors when moving between PCs, has an improved installer and launcher and assists users with updating their settings from FileZilla 2. It’s packaged in PortableApps.com Format for easy use from any portable device and integration with the PortableApps.com Suite. And it’s open source and completely free.
Read on for more details…

read more

FileZilla Portable 3.0.6 Released
John T. Haller
Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:21:08 GMT

I updated FileZilla yesterday. I was using version 2. I manually fixed my site profiles since it did not import the entries I had for the default local and remote directories. Everything is working and it looks great!

Truecrypt 5.0

We are pleased to announce that TrueCrypt 5.0 has been released. Among the new features are the ability to encrypt a system partition or entire system drive (i.e. a drive where Windows is installed) with pre-boot authentication, pipelined operations increasing read/write speed by up to 100%, Mac OS X version, graphical interface for the Linux version…

Article about Truecrypt 5.0 at msfn.org
More info about Truecrypt can be found at their web site, www.truecrypt.org. 
Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:38:13 GMT

I did not have any problems with the previous version. I has been rock solid for me. One of the new features is the capability to encrypt a system partition/drive (i.e. a partition/drive where Windows is installed) with pre-boot authentication. Like BitLocker that is included with some versions of Vista, this feature can greatly reduce the liability to a business stemming from a lost or stolen computer. This new feature along with some promised speed improvements make this update pretty interesting.

Nimble Method: Garbage Collection is Why Ruby on Rails is Slow: Patches to Improve Performance 5x; Memory Profiling

 

  • The News: Ruby on Rails performance is dominated by garbage collection. We present a set of patches to greatly improve Rails performance and show how to profile memory usage to get further performance gains.

  • What’s at Stake: Rails is slow for many uses and did not lend itself well to optimization. Significant performance gains could only be achieved at application level at large development cost.

  • The Upside:

    • 5x potential performance gains;
    • easy way to identify whether GC is a bottleneck;
    • deterministic process to fix memory bottlenecks;
    • set of canned patches to solve the biggest problems;
    • you can help

Nimble Method: Garbage Collection is Why Ruby on Rails is Slow: Patches to Improve Performance 5x; Memory Profiling
arunthampi
Sat, 02 Feb 2008 05:30:00 GMT

Okay, a couple of weeks ago I installed Ruby so that I could run Metasploit. Installing Ruby was a challenge since I needed to install several dependencies so that I could install RubyGems. Fortunately Simon had the answer. When I cranked up the GUI version of Metasploit, the GUI seemed slow and the console messages showed Ruby to be busier than I thought it should be. I hadn’t asked it do anything yet.  Maybe this will help! Then again maybe if I upgrade to the latest version of Metasploit(3.1) will help.

KeePassX – The Official KeePassX Homepage

KeePassX – The Official KeePassX Homepage

KeePassX saves many different information e.g. user names, passwords, urls, attachmets and comments in one single database.

Yesterday I got around to installing KeePassX on my Centos server. The rpm version worked fine but I had to manually create a menu item. For fun I downloaded the new versions of the KeePassX icon. For a very brief time I thought about compiling KeePassX from source code but it looks like I will have to do a lot of work. It uses the QT library and Qmake. I would prefer if I could set it up in Eclipse but that looks complicated.

KeePassX is a port of KeePass and it read the KeePass database on my USB stick without a problem. It maintains the same look and feel as the original program so that is a big advantage on the learning curve for me. KeePassX has everything I use except for the global auto-type hot key and the plugins.