Not much has happened recently. Just a minor site update. I added a little gallery to the site. It's powered by (a little hacked version of) Original.
Not many photos right now. More will come.
Posted in: | photo | free_software | on 2008-01-14 14:58:56 by Andrei Moldovan
A few days ago I added a gallery to my website. I did some testing a while ago and I chose Original. Previously, I tested Gallery and it's Wordpress plugins, DAlbum and Singapore.
Gallery is very nice and has a lot of features. Problem with it was that it had way too many features for my needs and my willingness to configure.
DAlbum is also very nice and simple to use. But I didn't really like the general layout of it all - the tree on the left bothered me (maybe it reminded me too much of Windows Explorer...).
Singapore was another choice on the list. It came recommended by a friend. I liked it a lot, except for a few things. I didn't like the fact that thumbnails for galleries and individual image view are generated automatically the first time an image or gallery is view and that can be a little slow, sometimes. Another thing was that it didn't show any of the EXIF information stored in the image.
So, out of these 3 options, I chose the fourth :). Original was a combination of things I wanted from other galleries. Thumbnails, galleries and low quality images are generated by a script that uses convert from the imagemagick package. These are generated upon gallery creation and not when the gallery or image is viewed for the first time. I also liked the way the galleries were sorted and displayed (year, month and date) and that it's done automatically. Another plus was it's ability to display EXIF information.
So, I installed Original. Modified the code a little. Created a small gallery and started adding pictures. Then I started liking it less and less. Every time I added a new picture to a gallery, I had to rebuild it by hand. It's not complicated or time consuming. But the files are sorted alphabetically when galleries are created. That means that if I add a picture that messes with the order, everything gets rewritten (comments for existing images, hits for existing images). So, I removed Original and installed Singapore. I found it a more convenient way to manage photos and learned to live with the slow thumbnail generation. But it was missing one thing: EXIF information. So, by the power vested in me by the GPL (and inspired by the EXIF code in the Original gallery), Singapore can do that too. :)
Well, enough talk. Time to go take some more pictures.
Posted in: | photo | free_software | on 2008-01-18 12:26:00 by Andrei Moldovan
The site has undergone some major changes.
First of all, it's no longer running Wordpress. I finally managed to get Django working on Dreamhost so I immediately started work on a CMS to replace Wordpress. I figured that the best way to make sure that it's going to be finished quickly was to completely remove the old site and leave the domain "naked" :). I figured that this way I'd be forced to finish it fast. I worked, though not completely.
Moving on, the blog is a simple application I've written from scratch and the gallery is powered by Stockphoto, a Django application I've found and which I like a lot. The Stockphoto installation was simple, although I had to install some libraries that were missing. It's been modified a bit (mostly the layout and look).
The general design of the site is called "Deliciously Blue" which I found on OSWD and modified a bit.
All the old post from the Wordpress database have been imported into the new site, I've just been having some trouble importing the comments :(.
All in all, rewriting the site was a great exercise. Learned a lot of interesting and useful things about Django (a thing that I always wanted to do, but following a tutorial doesn't quite teach you enough and just reading the documentation without something to which to apply what you read doesn't help either) and Python.
Posted in: | misc | on 2008-03-03 12:15:43 by Andrei Moldovan
I love programmer humor... :))
A programmer started to cuss
Because getting to sleep was a fuss
As he lay there in bed
Looping 'round in his head
was: while(!asleep()) sheep++;
Posted in: | fun | on 2008-03-04 14:52:58 by Andrei Moldovan
Because of a hasty Django upgrade that went wrong, the site was down a bit. Everything is back to normal now.
Posted in: | misc | on 2008-06-26 16:29:45 by Andrei Moldovan