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Archive for the 'Site Development' Category

April 19, 2007

Shininess Increased

After a really good day in terms of web development work (not so much in terms of revision though), I’ve spent a bit of time tidying up the JavaScript and WordPress plugins to make them a little better in terms of bandwidth and usability.

I decided that I didn’t want the hassle of fiddling with moo.fx every 20 seconds, so I’ve upgraded everything to use mootools; basically the same thing, but more modular and generally quicker to load and render. Unfortunately this meant that the script I use to display my photos, Litebox, wasn’t going to work any longer as it depended upon prototype.lite.

February 27, 2007

On apathy

My apologies for the lack of either photographs or similar word entries. It’s an exceptionally busy time of year; end of term is creeping up extremely quickly, and there are a number of things to get done before Friday of week 10. So, expect a similarly large lack of time before the next couple of posts.

Mainly my apathy has been because of the immense amount of research that I’m doing for the project, which is turning into quite a large beast very quickly. However, it gives me a good idea of what research might be like at the graduate level, and it’s generally interesting. With a bit of luck, when everything is finished off I will post the project report on the blog and people can tear into my code.

Anyway, hopefully you’ll enjoy the snow photo that just got posted. Hopefully I will be back around here soon, and maybe after my project is finished I’ll even have time to finish the site off!

6:00 pm | Posted in Project, Site Development | No Comments »

January 26, 2007

WordPress 2.1 Upgrade

After what might be called ‘fun’, I’ve finally finished the upgrade to WordPress 2.1. Unfortunately along the way, I managed to delete the thumbnail cache for my photoblog software, YAPB. I also managed to break the composer; make sure you delete the additional prototype.js file included with YAPB, otherwise you’ll get lots of JavaScript errors.

In other news, I’ve decided that I’m going to buy a Mac Pro. But not until they release Leopard… so it could be a little while.

10:38 pm | Posted in Site Development | No Comments »

December 22, 2006

Server Move

Well, if you’re reading this (and I really, really hope you are) then the you’re seeing the page from my new server! I decided to take the plunge and purchase the VPSLink-2 scheme, which gave me a bit more room to play around with. In hindsight, that was a very wise choice as 64MB of RAM just isn’t enough for a LAMP stack (as pointed out by Scott Yang in my recent post).

I’m running various services and things to make life easier. Currently it uses about 54MB of RAM idle, although that shoots up a little when loaded. Overall, I’m pretty happy with everything as it currently stands - the speed of the website is much, much better than it used to be with DreamHost and things are going pretty swimmingly.

December 15, 2006

Moving away from DreamHost

Well, over the last few weeks I’ve come to realise that using DreamHost wasn’t a particularly good plan. If I’m honest with you (which hopefully I am most of the time), the cheap price of their hosting and ridiculous amounts of both bandwidth and disk space were too much in terms of temptation. However, there’s been a lot of quite severe downtime and the majority of my patience has been used up.

The major problem is speed. My server is relatively good - the load averages are only around 2.00 to 2.75 on a good day at peak times. But DreamHost do pack an awful lot of people into their hardware, which makes everything insanely slow. Even simple static content load times are pretty shocking. I also find their control panel software to be quite a bit of a pain at the best of times.

December 6, 2006

Photos are go!

Well - finally - I’ve found the sort of software that I’ve been pining for the past two months. Basically, I wanted the ability to post normally, but also post photoblog style images every so often, and I’d pretty much given up all hope of finding anything to suit this.

However, whilst I was browsing the WordPress Codex yesterday, I found a brilliant plugin - Yet Another Photoblog - by Johannes Jarolim. It ties together everything that I want - automatic thumbnail generation, a simple interface, EXIF parsing, and allows me to write a little comment about the photos that I’m taking.

So, last night, with the aid of the amazing A List Apart tutorial on creating CSS drop-shadows, I got the image displaying nicely, and then added Litebox 1.0 to get a nice image display. The next step is to get the EXIF information displaying the way I want it. But for the time being, I’m going to let this go. I hope you all like it - please leave a comment and let me know what you think!

4:09 pm | Posted in Photography, Site Development, XHTML/CSS | No Comments »

December 2, 2006

More on RAW

Well, obviously somebody out there is actually reading these entries, as there’s been a few questions as to how I manage my workflow with RAW photos.

My grand plan outlined in the previous entry never really materialized for reasons of time. However, I do have a fairly stable workflow set up now with my RAW photos, so I thought I’d at least try to document that here, in case anybody else was interested in the slightest.

11:27 pm | Posted in Computing, Photography, Site Development | No Comments »

October 28, 2006

Absent again

I’m pretty hopeless as a blogger. It seems that my entire blogging experience comes down to massive bursts of posts for about three days when I need some form of procrastination, and then nothing for weeks on end.

For once, I actually have quite a lot of stuff to blog about, apart from excruciatingly boring things like mathematics. However, I need to figure out what I’m going to do about hosting some photos properly before that post, so it might take a little while.

However, I’m going out for drinkies later on with a couple of maths friends, so this should be an interesting evening. Huzzah!

September 21, 2006

A distinct lack of activity

I’m sorry for not updating the blog over the past few days, but it’s been rather a busy week so far. I’ve been working on Monday and Tuesday; yesterday was spent meeting some people in the Maths department and finalizing details for some work there. However, today, I’ve found some time as I finished work early (was back at 2:30pm). The downside is, I’m completely knackered since I was up at 6am. Anyway, I plan on doing some updates today with my recently acquired time, so check back later for more.

The trials and tribulations continue with the car insurance. People that know me may know that I’m selling the car, as I’m moving back into campus accommodation and it will therefore be unnecessary. As far as I can see, I’m pretty much locked into paying for the full term, or gritting my teeth and coughing up the extortionate amount of money they want. However, this month is all paid up for, so I’m going to take a few days to sit back and consider things before I move any further. Certain other things have happened which may mean that I have access to a car anyway, so the insurance may not go to waste if I decide to keep it - really, it all depends on the price.

Anyway, enough ranting for now. My updates later will hopefully consist of setting up the gallery software for WordPress and fixing some minor CSS issues. By that point in time I may well be clinically dead from sleep deprivation, so I think I’ll probably end up leaving it at that for the time being.

In other news, being a big fan of Top Gear I was extremely saddened to hear about Richard Hammond’s accident. I really can’t imagine embedding a car into the ground at 250+mph, and frankly, I’m absolutely amazed he survived. Hopefully he’ll be back in time for the next series.

September 14, 2006

AJAX Search is up

Well, after a bit of fiddling, the AJAX search is now fully operational. I think it works pretty well - it’s certainly quite transparent and saves a lot of room. It hasn’t been fully tested yet please let me know if you run into bugs.
IE had some… interesting rendering issues that need fixing in relation to opacity. For some reason, if you don’t set a background colour then font rendering goes completely crazy and everything looks awful. The moral of this story: IE6 doesn’t like opacity unless everything has a background.

Other than that it has been a pretty busy day. I’ve been up and down to Coventry. Most of the time the journey is fine, but today the M6 decided that it was going to hate me. It took me two hours to travel about 25 miles - average speed, 12.5mph. Usually I can do it in half an hour.

The trip did serve a purpose, and hopefully in a few days time I should have a clearer direction of where the project I’m working on is going. However, for the time being I will simply leave you with a lovely formula to show off my LaTeX renderer, as I really must be going to bed.

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