Category Archives: Meta

Photolog Fixed

Asides, Photolog

To the (literally) hundreds of you who wrote in about the broken photos the past few weeks, I’m happy to say that the photolog is back online. It broke because while 95% of Gallery works fine with register_globals off, apparently some bit of code somewhere doesn’t. If you haven’t been to the photolog in a while there are some fun pictures from Dallas, Seattle, and New York.

New Interview on Digital Web

Meta

There’s a new interview with me up on Digital Web that covers a lot of ground. The questions come from the lovely Meryl. As it tends to work in these things, most of the answers are actually a few months old, for instance it’s all from before I announced I’d be working at CNET. This is mostly my fault because I got so swamped after the move I didn’t have a chance to sync up with Meryl again. I’m willing to try something a little different though, something along the lines of the old Under the Iron model. If you have any questions you’d like to ask just leave them in the comments section for the article and I’ll do my best to answer everything there. Blogging is all about empowerment, right?

Random Photo Returns

Meta, Photolog

The random photos are back. I wrote a quick hack to loop over every photo in every album and read its relevant info into a MySQL table. Now instead of taking a few seconds to get a random photo using the Gallery data stores, it uses a single query and takes a millisecond. Long-time visitors to the site remember that the random image in the corner has always been one of my favorite things about this site, but as the photolog grew to a thousand, two thousand, and then nine thousand images it slowed down more and more. I had to start caching it so it would change once every 15 seconds, then every minute, then every 5 minutes, and then I just manually rotated it for a while. Finally I put the random image out of its misery.

Now it’s fully dynamic, every page you view is completely unique, just like you.

(There goes my bandwidth.)

Well That Was Fun

Meta

I said I would take it down, I never said for how long. Thank you to everyone for taking a little time out with me in celebration of the big day. I was as surprised as everyone else, and watching the reactions come in was pretty interesting. The emails ranged from shocked to congratulatory to incredulous to angry. Thank you to everyone who wrote in. Many people linked to the site being down which should help solidify the #1 position in the eyes of the fickle mistress Google. Thank you all as well.

You’d think it would be cooler here in Houston, with hell freezing over and all, but it is as hot as ever. At the same time I’m told in San Francisco I need to dress in “layers.” I packed all my layers up months ago! Might have some <div>s around though…

I was able to get some of the work I was planning to do on the site done, mostly tweaks to the look and layout of things. I wouldn’t call it a redesign, more like a summer variation on a theme. Many of the changes are very subtle, but in my eyes important. The most obvious change, the sun in the corner, looks nothing like I want it to, so I’m not sure what will happen to that. (If you have any ideas, send them in.) Many other things still need attention, so expect to see occasional breakage and constant tweaking over the next week. I finally closed the comments on the mosaic. So it will stand at 1,017 comments,. The page is still huge, so I’m going to move the comments to a separate page just for that entry. The jazz quotes need some cleaning up, and I’d like to add a little information about each player to each page, including at least a picture. The photolog is being overhauled, and the long-promised classics section is almost done. Finally I promise that photo will be random again, any day now.

It was just a little over a day, but it feels good to be back. Let’s not do that again though. I really missed writing here.

I’m going to be in San Francisco next week, so if you are too I’d love to meet up. Drop me a line.