Blair's Blog

Well, that hurt!

After a week of monkeying around with a server upgrade (thanks Mom & Dad), a WordPress upgrade and an inadequately thought out (in hindsight) decision to move the blog URL, this blog is back running! I’m positive that you’d be deeply impressed by the quantity of geekish knowledge that I’ve gained in the past few days. Next time I’ll maybe try to to do just one thing at at time – or not…

Thanks for your patience, now I need to get busy and do up the annual Christmas letter which will, of course, be a blog post (with pictures)!

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This is the webmin view of memory and disk allocation for my webserver:

Not too encouraging. Particularly since when I grabbed the image, there really wasn’t that much going on with the webserver. The machine is an old and tired (c. 2000 – who’d have thought that a computer from the dawn of the new millennium would be described this way?) PIII-550 with only 256 MB of memory and a 10 GB hard drive. It used to have an astonishing 384 MB of memory but one stick went bad and caused a host of wonky errors when I tried to rebuild the box with ubuntu. Things were OK (mostly) while the blog was mainly text based, but all of the messing about with extra plugins and the photo galleries is starting to put some strain on things. Most of the memory use is the mysql database, so things don’t get much better than what the image above shows, only worse. Last night I tried to upload and open a 4.3MB zip file and ran out of free memory. Not too good.

So now I need to think about how to retire this box and get something with a little more oomph. The first thing that comes to mind is to get a nice shiny new powerful box for Brenda and I; then I can shuffle all the old hardware in the fleet down one notch in the food chain. Sadly that means 4 rebuilds – I’m already tired out, just thinking about it. But wait, in the spirit of never raining without pouring, my Dad called earlier this evening and his computer is kind of dead … 5 rebuilds.

I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend…

ps. 27 December 2007 – On the weekend of 15/16 Dec, I upgraded to a AMD 1700 with 512 MB of RAM and an 80 GB drive. This is the new webmin view of things:

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Well here goes with a test of NextGen…

I’ve spent all evening thrashing about with trying to get a working photo gallery. Of course, I let this all slide for about 3 weeks while life happened, so I spent a lot of my time tonight relearning all the things that I’d done before. Eventually I stumbled across a reference to NextGen gallery and gave it a try – what a difference. This actually works, and works well with only a minor amount of setup. Have a look:

Test Gallery 1

3 Photos

Test Gallery 2

8 Photos

There is also a test page; see the “Newpaige China” link in the header at the top right.

I’ve got a few things to work out, like getting the thumbnail alignment sorted out in the fireworks gallery, but I’m pretty happy with this so far!

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One of my goals for this blog is to see if I can set things up to make it easy to post sets (galleries) of photos. I tried to get Gallery2 up and running because there is a WordPress plugin called WPG2 that allows for “easy” integration with WordPress. Sadly, I never found out if the integration works because Gallery2 wouldn’t even install. It drops its install files outside of the apache document root and if you just copy them over, stuff breaks. So I abandoned that approach.

I am already using a program called webimage which works fairly well, but it is dated and limited ease of use. It is pretty powerful if you spend enough time in the weeds of the php code. I’ve used it for web galleries for www.newpaige.ca as well as for some family photos last Christmas. The trouble with webimage is that it doesn’t integrate seamlessly into the blog and would still require a lot of manual html/php manipulation, which I’d like to avoid.

So what else is there? WordPress recommends yapb in their online docs as “the easiest way to get started with photoblogging on WordPress”. It’s just a simple plugin, no messing around with installs on ubuntu, or configuring another database in mysql (still don’t really know how I got the WordPress database to work!). The only downside that I can see to this is that yapb is not a gallery, it’s philosophy is “One post, one image, one description”, so it doesn’t completely meet my goal of posting photo sets.

There you go – this post is a post with a photo using yapb. The picture is one of me hiking in Steve’s Canyon, near Exshaw, Alberta in September 2006.

Useful links:

Main yapb website and some installation instructions

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