http://admin.larrythellama.com LtL - geographic photo sharing en-us http://barn1.larrythellama.com/thumbnails/kim/2836.0.jpg http://admin.larrythellama.com 100 100 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/297 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/297 Favorites Introducing LtL's newest feature...Favorites. Frustrated by not being able to keep track of all the great photos posted on LtL by all the herders, I've added a way for people to 'bookmark' other llama users' photos. Now you don't have to figure out what to search for to find that photo of you in that ridiculous costume at the crazy 80's party back in the day. For now, every user just has a favorites page that is ordered by most recently added. I'm open to other ways to present this. For example, it might be nice to combine a photo's favorites count with it's rating and number of views to calculate something called 'Interestingness' like on Flickr. More EXIF PHP's exif_read_data() function can only go so far. It's a bit of a pain in the butt to work with and doesn't report all embedded image data. On the other had, the perl module ExifTool is an exif reader on steroids. It reports everything, maybe too much. But it's easy to use and I thought people who care about this type of stuff might find all that extra info interesting. Just click 'more...' under the Details section on any photos page. Give it a couple seconds to display the data. It's actually looking for the source image on the server and reading the data out before spitting it back to the client in an html table. Ajax rocks. Hits So far Larry's been keeping track of everybody that visits an image or an album, even crawlers. It's finally come to the point where tracking all the crawler hits is just slowing down the site. For example, there are about 10,000 images on the site, yet there are about 250,000 rows in the hits table. 190,000 of those are crawler hits. I admit, it's interesting to see if a search engine has hit your page, but the hits queries have slowed the photos page render time down from 1.5sec to 4.5sec. So, no more crawler tracking. It shouldn't change your page view counts, as these weren't considered in the tally anyway. And remember, we only count hits if they are not your own (when logged in), and only if more than 30 minutes have gone by from the same client. Upcoming downtime The barn's going to move soon. Larry has finally outgrown his little shack and needs a more spacious place. Plus, server market economics dictate that we're just paying too much for our current shack anyway (about $120/mo). So we're probably going to move to a place to costs about $80/mo with nicer Llama themed Ikea furniture from craigslist. Expect some downtime in January, maybe up to a week. I'll give plenty of notice. Small monthly recurring donations appreciated. Llama Herder Site updates Wed, 27 Dec 2006 21:45:45 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/267 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/267 LtL now has a secure login page. Whenever you go to the /login page, the server will redirect you to a https version of the page. This means that your password won't fly around in cleartext at that wifi cafe you're surfing out yet. BUT, in order to use SSL to encrypt and validate pages, I have to get a security certificate. Most companies pay over $100/year for a certificate where you somehow prove to them that you are who you say you are. However, there is a great FREE certificate validator called cacert.org. The only annoying part of using free certificates is that browsers will complain that they do not recognize the certificate authority. When it asks you to accept the certificate, just click 'Accept this certificate permanently', or something like that, and you should not be asked again. Maybe when we get some more donations we'll just fork out the cash and get a certificate that most browsers will not complain about. Llama Herder Site updates Thu, 30 Nov 2006 23:53:55 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/264 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/264 Greeting llamaians, I'm playing around with batch operations on images. On your photos, tags, and album pages, you'll see a new button at the top called 'Batch edit...'. Click that and a panel will drop down with a few bath operations, and checkboxes *should* appear above each thumbnail. I'm using some tricky javascript with the checkboxes and I'd like to get some browser feedback. I've tested on Firefox and Safari on Mac OS X. Also let me know if you can think of other ops that would be useful here besides the delete/addtoalbum/addtag ops that are available now. -Kim Llama Herder Site updates Sun, 26 Nov 2006 23:23:10 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/265 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/265 Greetings llama llovers, I've just wanted to tell you about a couple things in case you find something doesn't work on the site. First, I've finally managed to kick larry in the ass and get LtL into a Subversions revision control tree. If you don't know what that means, don't worry about it. Basically, I've changed the way I publish changes to LtL from afar. Hopefully I didn't break anything along the way. If you notice anything phunky, please please let me know. Second, I've tried to plug a few security holes in anticipation of opening LtL up to more people. I'm added some stuff that prevents ppl from entering whatever the heck they want to on the comment forms (basically restricting the html allowed). If you enter what you think are valid comments, I'd like to hear about it. I've been back in the Bay Area for a couple weeks now, working at http://eye.fi, as some of you may or may not know. I haven't had much time yet to get back in touch with ppl. It was pretty much from the plane to work. But it's cool. I get to play around with cameras, servers, and the wifi card we are making. I put the images up on flickr (they come straight from the card to web), and in my ltl journal. That's it for now, Llater, Kim Llama Herder Site updates Sun, 26 Nov 2006 23:25:49 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/223 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/223 New user home page Well it's been a long time coming, but LtL users finally have a new user home page template. I haven't touched the old one since I first hastily designed it over a year ago, concentrating on building up other parts of the site instead. The new page highlights journals, if you have them. It also has a current month calendar for your photos so people can easily see what dates you've taken photos. The recent uploads, recent tags, and albums blocks are all the same as before. The only thing missing are the comments. I can add those in if people think it's useful. The Daily Coffee Break is also back, except this time for every user instead of just for the whole site. Basically, the DCB photos are taken from all the photos you've added to your gallery on a rotating basis by photo date. If you don't have any photos in your gallery this box won't appear. If you want to compare the new user home page to the old, add '?tpl=old' to the end of your home page url. I plan on adding a 'most recent mapped image' box sometime in the future so people can easily see the last photo you took and tagged with GPS on a map. Feedback welcome since home page designs are a matter of personal taste. iPhoto uploader Following Scott Leonard's lead I've written a PHP script to talk to Zach Wily's iPhotoToGallery plugin. Zach wrote this plugin for iPhoto to upload photos directly to the Gallery2 application. Since the data is passed with the Http POST protocol, it was easy to write a wrapper for LtL to pretend that it is Gallery2 to the plugin. See the FAQ for more. Image rotate I've noticed enough people have uploaded images to LtL that are sideways to add an option to rotate images left/right in the 'Photo options...' drop-down menu. Even after rotating an image it might still appear sideways in the browser. Hit Shift-Reload and it should appear rotated. There might be a slicker way to do this without having to reload the page, but that's another day. Trip update Alright, that's the last couple weeks worth or post-diving and airport lounge work. I'm currently diving in Semporna, Sabah, western Malaysia, far from the recent earthquake in Indonesia. I'll hit the 50 dive mark in a couple days. Not bad considering my first dive was on April 25. This weekend it's off to Munich via Kuala Lumpur to start a new project, and catch some of the World Cup in a Bavarian Beer Garten! Then it's back to the States (Boston for the summer) in a few weeks. Llama Herder Site updates Thu, 01 Jun 2006 21:24:39 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/222 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/222 The rain has stopped in Boracay and the sun has come out again. The restaurants are busy, the guitarists playing endless John Mayer and CSN covers are back plucking their strings at the beach restaurants, and the dive boats are back in action. Time to push the latest LtL updates to the server and put the laptop away again. It finally became obvious that the exhibits and favorites pages were, simply, reduntant with albums and gallery pages....so I've done away with them. It all just became too confusing to decide whether something was a favorite or worthy of a gallery pic, so most people did neither. Now that there's just one place to put your best shots, it should be obvious. The gallery has a new template, which I hope to convert to an AJAX based design sometime later. For now it's just cleaned up quite a bit, with minimal meta-data (just the photographer's name). Karsten noticed some strange dithering of the gallery images. It's because I resize images that are less than 550px but bigger than 100px in html with the width="" and height="" attributes for tags. I do this because I only use three thumbnail sizes to save server space: 550px, 100px square, and 50px square. I'm guessing that on CRT screens it doesn't look as nice as on my PowerBook panel. It's a tradeoff of quality vs. storage space. Now that LtL is about 6.5GB (about 6GB of which are just src images), I need to keep an eye on space issues. On the maps page, the panel is back to make it easier to navigate. The albums page has a new template, also making navigation easier. I've updated the About the site page with some wiki links to technologies and open source modules that LtL makes use of. The photos page has a cleaner left column, now with a small map if the photo is gps-tagged. So what's next? Well I've almost finished a long-overdue new user home page template, but I'm taking off tomorrow on a liveaboard dive boat for a few days and I haven't quite finished it off, so I thought I would push what I've finished up first. Have a look at the new template. If you want to see how your home page would look, go to this URL and replace {user} with your username: http://larrythellama.com/home/{user}?tpl=new I welcome any suggestions. The other thing I have pretty much finished is an iPhoto uploader. Well, the uploader has been done. I'm just writing the PHP code on the LtL side so that it reacts much like Gallery2 does so that the iPhoto uploader doesn't notice the difference. Look for this stuff in a week or two. Yes, it rained, a lot. Llama Herder Site updates Fri, 19 May 2006 00:12:46 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/201 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/201 A few more changes from late night guesthouse hacking, this time in the Philippines. These updates have to do with all the time I've been spending with Aperture, Apple's new professional photo management software. Aperture has really nice ways to caption and tag (ie. keyword) images, and then group them accordingly. I figure most photo sharing sites have tags, or keywords, or labels, or badges, or whatever you want to call them, so why not LtL? They're popular and useful. (For example, I pretty much deleted all of my exhibits and tagged the images instead.) Basically the idea is that you tag your images with certain words (or short phrases) that identify them. For example, you could tag a photo you took of a spider on a flower in Death Valley with... animals, spiders, flowers, Death Valley, desert(Note that the words (or phrases) are comma-separated. You can't use commas in tags just yet.) The tags then show up next to the image in the lefthand column. If you click on a tag name, all of your images with that tag appear. You can navigate upwards to view all of your tags, and likewise everyone else's tags. It's a handy way to see all of your related photos, as well as everyone else's related photos. (Font-size is variable according to how many photos share that tag. ie. the more photos with that tag, the larger the font.) Two easy ways to add tags to a group of photos are to type the tags in on the upload page, and to type the tags in for the first photo on the QuickEdit page and click 'Apply to all...' See the faq for more. Another feature of Aperture is that it allows you to write directly into the IPTC field of image files. The IPTC fields contain optional information such as title, caption, and keywords. PHP has a really nice way of reading this field, and so it made sense to read those values, if found, on upload. This especially makes sense for people who caption their photos offline (such as in Picasa). When you upload, the captions are automatically added to the images. If your photo management software supports it, you can add titles and keywords (ie. tags, labels, etc.) as well. The last tweak is basically a technology test. A couple guys released a really nice AJAX interface for PHP, called xajax. AJAX stands for 'Asynchronous Java Apache XML'. It's basically a way to communicate with the database without doing page reloads. Typically data is passed from the client (web browser) to the server (LtL) between page reloads, like when you click 'Submit'. AJAX allows you to bypass the page reload. Google Maps and Google Finance use this technology to redraw maps and stock charts without reloading the page. I figure a good way to test this stuff out was with the comments and ratings blocks. Now, when you add (or delete) comments, the comments are updated without reloading the page. A nice advantage of this is that you don't lose your spot on the page. Of course, just like the maps, this only works with the latest browsers, so if you get annoying warning messages, upgrade. As always, if you notice something strange, just let me know. Llama Herder Site updates Tue, 25 Apr 2006 06:13:48 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/170 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/170 It finally happened...Google Earth, formerly Keyhole, now supports Mac OS X, which kicks ass. (I suppose a Mac version of Picasa is just around the corner?) I used GE briefly on my Windows desktop at SGI last summer, but since it didn't work on my Mac I never really got into it. Plus, it was much more interesting to view the images on a map from anywhere on the web via the Google Maps API. Now it's possible to create feeds for GE and I've been playing around with this a little tonight. There's not much there yet...basically just a list of all the gps-tagged photos on LtL sorted by date, most recent first. If you click on an image name in the the 'Places' column on the left of GE a bubble will pop up with a medium sized thumbnail and the caption, with a link to the image on LtL. To give this a test run you should first download and install Google Earth. (Apparently it only works on certain gfx cards, so you may be sol.) Next, add the Ltl feed: You'll probably be asked to either save the file or open with an application...choose GE. It should add the feed in the Places column. Since it's a feed and not a kml file, it *should* refresh regularly with new images, but I have no idea if that actually works or not. Best bet is to just right-click-refresh. The least it should do is update whenever you open GE. Llama Herder Maps Wed, 15 Feb 2006 12:13:21 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/168 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/168 Well, it's been ages since I've posted some site updates. I'm back in Hyderabad now after spending two months in northern India and Thailand. I spent the last week just hanging out with Regina and Rohit and hashing out some new ideas I've come up with over the last few months. One of the main objectives is to create a testing server, and to dump the whole site into CVS , which is a open source version control system. By doing this I can start opening the design up for contribution and review by others. Right now, between the PHP, HTML, and Javascript, the site is about 16000 lines of code, which is a bit too much for one person to chew at once. In order to do this things should be as spic and span as possible...so I've spent a few days removing old files, fixing a bunch of CSS and javascript errors, checking page validation, and adding a few new pages like the My Stuff page, the comments page, a bio page, and the beginnings of a faq. In the meantime I've uncovered a few bugs and probably introduced a few more. By cleaning up the CSS I've probably also broken a few things in Internet Explorer. I only have my Mac here to check things, so please let me know if something doesn't look or work right and I'll check it out. I'll be in Hyderabad for about another week before I head out into the real India again. Before then I'm going to try and add mailing lists and a new user home page design, cause the one now just bites. Ok, that's it. Again, send me email if something doesn't look right in your browser. Please send me the URL, your OS (eg. Windows), and your browser name and version (eg. IE 6.0). Llama Herder Site updates Sat, 11 Feb 2006 06:09:05 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/97 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/97 Ever wonder if anybody is even looking at the photos you just spend two hours touching up and another 20 minutes uploading? Yeah, so have I. I figured it was about time we had a hit counter. While my mom was attending Baha'i classes at the Green Acre Baha'i School, I took photos of fall leaves and hung out in the sun with coffee and wrote a simple hit counter for larrythellama. And yes, it's clean and simple, as with most things on this site. On each album and photo page, there is a new item listing how many times that page has been viewed. If you log in, that line turns into a link that lets you view some stats about your hits for that item, and eventually for all your hits. You should know that even though they are listed on the hits page, hits from search crawlers (eg. spiders, bots) don't count. Hits from logged in owners also do not count (which are not listed at all). The most interesting thing for me has been monitoring the referer column for hits from search engines. For example, I've noticed that I've been getting a lot of hits on my Novara Buzz album. Most of these have been from this google referer, which means that someone did a Google search for the term "Novara Buzz" and ended up on this site. That's cool to know. I think I'd like to make an optimization to the hit counters in the future where multiple hits to the same page from the same IP address within some amount of time, say 60 minutes, don't count. I'm noticing that the album hits are inflated because people go back to view the album thumbnails before going on to the next photo, rather than just going from one photo to the next. I'll comment out the crawlers from the hits page once I have them all identified as well. Let me know if you think of any cool optimizations. Llama Herder Hits Mon, 07 Nov 2005 22:00:26 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/94 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/94 I just had to pass this flash song along... http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/llama.php Llama Herder All things llama Sat, 29 Oct 2005 21:53:08 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/92 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/92 I always thought the idea of an online merchandise store was kind of corny. I mean, all that I really care about are t-shirts, and I can print/iron-on those at home for a few dollars and send them out to friends as gifts myself. But then I saw the thong. I was doing some late-night browsing for travel insurance, and as we are often wont to do, ended up distracted by somebody's travel journal, which links to their photo album, which has a comments section, which contain links to other travel journals.....and eventually you end up somewhere that is completely off-base from what you originally intended on searching for. It's a classic situation. You open your web browser in order to research something specific, and the next thing you know you're on a page looking at deep sea fishing hazards. (Don't forget sunscreen.) And so there I was, on cafepress.com. I started out with the intent of researching travel insurance policies on Lonely Planet's message boards, found an online-only agency called World Nomads, which has a travel journal section with an entry by the prolific traveler Solbeam, which had a comment left by someone who has their own journal on TravelPod, which, voila, has an online merchandise store. I admit, when I went to the store I thought it was pretty cheesy. Nobody ever buys this stuff. It's probably just set up so that the owner of the site doesn't have to print up their own t-shirts for gifts...which is not altogether such a bad idea. Then I saw the thong. And it hit me. Llama thongs. I totally cracked up. It even comes double sided. I just had to make sure that the service was free to set up, which it is, and it was decided. One hour later, after uploading a 300dpi 1800x1800 PSD logo file, choosing a bunch of random merchandise, including the thong, and adding a link to this site to the store, it was all set. Yet another late-night idea that kept me up past the time I should have gone to bed. As for pricing, CafePress makes it pretty easy to set up. You either set your own prices, set a standard markup by dollar amount or percentage, or choose tiered pricing. I just added $1 to everything. Any profits from sales will go towards the server. And remember, even if you don't want a llama thong (who wouldn't?), it can double as a slingshot. Llama Herder Llama wear Fri, 28 Oct 2005 00:08:15 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/91 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/91 I just changed the RSS code so that the feeds are generated dynamically rather than generating static XML files. Some blog systems generate static files in order to avoid heavy database traffic. We don't really care. It's much more stable to have dynamically generated content than static content. Since I removed the rss directory and xml files, I took the opportunity to change the links to more standard links like http://larrythellama.com/rss/kim and http://larrythellama.com/rss/kim?category=Photos. If you, or someone you know, subscribes to the old links, change em. RSS feeds are enabled for useres by default. You can disable them on the account options page. I'm going to add mailing lists for users before I leave for India in a couple weeks. Those, along with RSS, should enable people to keep up to date with your travels...if you wish. Update 10/25: The site updates journal/feed has been moved to admin user from kim. That means that http://larrythellama.com/rss/kim?category=Site+updates will no longer work. Use http://larrythellama.com/rss/admin instead. Llama Herder Feeds Sat, 22 Oct 2005 23:36:50 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/86 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/86 I uploaded some new ratings code that should make it easier to view and assign ratings to photos. Of course, not everyone cares about ratings, so it's set to off by default for now. If you want to play around with it, enable ratings in your account settings menu. I turned mine on. (Btw, you can now 'hide' all of your comments as well...not everyone cares about that either.) I'd love to have some kind of AJAX interface to quickly go through and rate an albums worth of photos, like the way Netflix allows you to quickly rate movies you've seen, but it's kind of a pain...and I'm going to India for christs sakes. I also made a couple tweaks to the comments code so that you can't leave yourself a comment, unless someone else has commented already, and so that you can't rate your own photos. Made sense to me. There's also a nice quickly link under each photo that doesn't have a caption to add one right there without dropping down the menu. I also moved the add album/photo/movie to journal submit button into the drop down album/photo menu to clean the page up a little. Also on the journal front (not that anyone besides myself really uses it yet :) is that if you add a photo to your journal and don't add any text to it, you'll get a bigger photo thumbnail, rather than the tiny one you're used to seeing. The text will just be the caption of the photo. I plan on using it to showcase random day to day photos...make it a real photo journal... One other tweak I made that I don't think anyone will notice that I tried to play around with a little bit was that you can no longer add photos and albums created by others into your own. This feature wasn't really used by many besides myself and could be potentially really buggy. I think a better (and easier, considering it's pretty much all there already) way to do this is to create 'pools', a la flickr. (I'd rather call it something else if you have any ideas...) My original idea was that it would be cool for people who all go on a trip together to be able to put all of their photos in one place so you could all view them together in one big mixed up slideshow...sort of like this album from Mexico 2004. (click 'view all photos' to get what I'm talking about) I still really like the idea, so it'll come back in the form of another name and a slightly different interface where those albums/pools have a moderator and go in place separate from albums. And one more thing. I started using Shutterfly's 'Order prints' buttons and there's a 'my cart' button on the top right of the screen now too. I'd like to promote prints a little more on the site. It's one way that we could become sustainable in the future, by taking a small cut... Llama Herder Ratings Fri, 21 Oct 2005 00:33:50 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/77 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/77 The Red Sox are getting creamed by the Yankees this morning. Might as well write some php. Doesn't everyone think like that? Added a new way to view albums. On the top right of the album page is a drop down menu to select either 'compact' or 'detailed' views. In 'detailed' the thumbnails are listed along with captions and comments (albums with headlines) so it's easier to get a quick view of an album. For example... Llama Herder Albums Sat, 01 Oct 2005 12:08:28 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/76 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/76 Aria found a bug today. I made a typo during a cut and paste in one of the functions that handles comment deletion. Therefore, she gets a llama tshirt. Yes, that's right, spot a bug, get a tshirt. I think there are about eight of them out there now, including the ones from the original llama party. Btw, check out her pics from Russia from last year. Foreign language teachers are cute. Llama Herder Llama wear Fri, 30 Sep 2005 12:17:06 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/72 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/72 Frustrated by browsing around Google's slooooowwww map interface, Karsten had the idea of adding a 'fly to...' box to the map page. And voila... Now warp around the world by simply selecting a location. See the new drop-down box on the top-right of the maps page. If you have ideas for other locations, send them to me in this form... ( North America, 13, 39.63953756436671, -95.4492187 ) Where the values are ( string, zoom, lat, long ). You can get these values by clicking on 'Link to this page' and copying the values from the browser url bar. Llama Herder Maps Fri, 16 Sep 2005 15:52:02 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/70 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/70 Some of you may have noticed that the image thumbnail navigation box looks a little different. While I try not to borrow too much from them, I really like the way that flickr handles their navigation. For example, I put this photo in three different albums. (If it's in an exhibit, it's colored slightly differently.) Now it should be easier to navigate between different albums and it should encourage people to come up with interesting exhibits. I expand/collapse the boxes with a little bit of javascript trickery that also involves redrawing borders with the same color as the background to make it appear like it's actually wrapping around the album name box. If it doesn't work quite right in the browser that you are using, let me know. Llama Herder Photos Tue, 13 Sep 2005 00:19:42 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/69 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/69 Taking a page from flickr, there's now a 'photos' page. It's an easy way to view all the latest albums that have been created and the photos that have been uploaded. They're not sorted by actual album/photo date, but rather by when they were created in the database. This makes it easy to see what the new additions are. This also works for viewing everyone's photos at once, not just for a particular user. For example, see my photos, then see the ltl community's photos. One fun thing to do is to go to the community's photos page, and just click on random page numbers to see what comes up. Llama Herder Photos Thu, 08 Sep 2005 03:19:42 -0500 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/68 http://larrythellama.com/journal/admin/68 Some of you have noticed the new ltl in the top left corner of the page. Alisa Lowden has graciously lent her Illustrator expertise to the site to create a vector graphic from the original larry the llama photo. I'm going to redo the main page with a bigger version of the graphic with a simple 'smart' search box. Llama Herder Design Tue, 06 Sep 2005 20:12:01 -0500