Photos. Galleries.

It’s been quite awhile, so I updated the gallery to the latest version of ZenPhoto. It’s supposed to work well with WordPress via some plugins. At the moment, it’s only a few photos, but I’ve got a ton more photos to process and add. Plus, there will also be some 3d stuff, graphic design, and so on.

I recently got a flatbed scanner that also does film and slides, so the plan is to convert old photos, slides, and maybe negatives, into digital form. Even if they don’t end up being posted (to protect the innocent ô_o), it will be nice to get them scanned in.

Hopefully this will also give me incentive to come up with another theme to unify the look of WordPress and ZenPhoto. At the very least, the thumbnails can be pulled into WordPress like this. It’s a start.

Toil and trouble

So I stayed awake most of the night, creating the finest hand-crafted code for the ZenPhoto gallery. Toiling away at CSS to make the gallery emulate the look and feel of the WordPress theme. It was going fairly well. Usually, I would make a few changes to the CSS or a PHP file, then upload the changed files and refresh the browser to see how they work. I got the stylesheet about 85% of where I wanted it, then I started getting errors while uploading.

It was telling me I was out of disk space, which I thought was ridiculous. I login to the control panel for my web host and see that I was only using about 70 MB out of 1 GB available for my account, so I had a long way to go to run out of disk space. I SSH’d in to my account and checked around. I’d never used SSH in any signifcant amounts before, so mostly I was seeing what could be done. Basically it’s like a modern version of telnet, though the best way to describe it is a command line interface to a remote computer. If you are comfortable with the command line, it’s a pretty nice tool. When I was logged in with SSH, I tried another command that was new to me – df. In *nix, df is a very basic program that tells how much disk space is being used and how much is available. In this case it was very useful because it showed the main hard drive for the server was full.

I typed ps -A to take a look at the processes running, and it came up with a slew of multiple instances of similar daemons running – httpd, mysqld, and qmail were the most common. This shouldn’t be unusual since it is a webhost and the server hosts multiple domains, but I think the number of instances was a bit excessive. In SSH, I was able to look around the server and see the other domains the server hosted. I couldn’t access them due to *nix user space issues, but I could see the names. It looked like there were maybe a dozen or so websites listed, though there were around a hundred “user” directories. The number of redundant processes seemed excessive when compared to this.

I tried various things over the next few hours, with no luck. I couldn’t do anything but wait. If it happened during “normal” hours, I would have gone and done laundry, but since it was the wee hours of the morning, I didn’t want to wake the neighbors. I ended up taking a nap. When I woke up, the site at least seemed to be working though there were still some database issues. After another hour or so, that went away. I was able to upload without any errors, and I am able to write this post.

Updating

I’m kind of a slacker when it comes to updating the website. I updated it to WordPress 2.0.5 today, then when I logged in to the Admin panel, I saw they released 2.0.6 earlier today. It must have been a few hours after I downloaded 2.0.5.

I’m also testing out a new – customized – theme for the website, so I’m using this blockquote section to see what that will look like.

I also have a new gallery, though it only has a couple of images in it at the moment. I’m using ZenPhoto since it’s clean, lean, and is supposed to integrate well with WordPress.

If you want to check out the theme I’m working on, select Coffee Candy from the Theme Switcher. Once I have the theme the way I want it, I will probably make it the default.

Cruftiness

Cruft, for the non-geeks out there is a semi-technical term used to descibe added features of dubious utility. The term is usually applied to software. For a long time many people in the computer industry looked at GUIs as cruft. A more modern example of cruft might be all those features of office suites (software) that you never use. I’ve never used a macro. I rarely use mail merge. In the modern, net-connected world, I think websites can be some website can be thought of as crufty. If it’s hard to navigate, that usually a good sign of cruftiness. On this site, I try to keep the cruft down with varying degrees of success.

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