Hello Everybody,

I'm pleased to announce a very early beta edition of Photographica Mobile. Photographica Mobile is a slimmed down version of Photographica. Let me know how this looks on your phone. I've tested this on my Motorola RAZR with good results.

From your cell phone or iPhone, visit: http://www.photographica.org/mobile

Have fun!

Update [May 16th 8:17am PDT]: I should have mentioned that right now you cannot get to the comments from the mobile page. I'm not sure about how to handle posting comments yet because I have to figure out a good way to let you log in. I dunno about most of you, but unless your cell phone has a full keyboard, entering long passwords isn't easy. I might do what paypal does and have a separate PIN number to log in to the mobile pages.

If any of you have already been browsing Photographica before this mobile page, let me know what works and what doesn't on the "real" site. For example, can you post comments? Post stories? Were you able to vote before I removed it?

Lastly, does your cell phone carrier/mobile web browser "massage" the website before it hits your phone? For example my carrier, AT&T, will shrink all of the images both in file size and in physical size before sending them to my phone.

Two years ago, Photographica began voting on stories for the front page. The decision was made after many people felt that the front page was far too busy and their story was only on the front page for a short while. Voting has succeeded in slowing down the number of stories posted to the front page. In fact, it has worked all to well. Yesterday, despite more than a dozen new stories, only a single story made it to the front page.

After giving it quite a bit of thought, I've come to the conclusion that voting was a mistake and we as a community should come up with a better way to rate stories and photos. Perhaps we do not need such a thing at all and nothing is rated.

As of today, I've turned off voting for Photographica. If your story was under "new", it will now show on the front page. If your story was hidden because it did not recive enough votes, you'll find your story resurected as well.  If your story is a draft, it will remain a draft until you publish it to the front page.

At long last, Photographica has many exciting new features and improvements. So, what is new?

General:

1. A fresh new look!
2. Tags are back! You tag your story while you edit it.
3. Tons of fixes to long standing issues.
4. Private Messages can contain the same kinds of formatting as a story.

Stories:

1. Edit Stories: You can now edit your stories after you post them.
2. Create Drafts: In addition, you can work on a story by saving it as draft and publish it when you are ready.
3. Improved editor: No more HTML or learning or tags. Works like a mini version of word

Bi-Weekly Challenge:

1. Flagged Entries: Stories that are in the challenge will have a flag next to them.
2. Details: Details about the challenge are better presented.

Reactions? Questions, comments, suggestions? Post them all in this story!

 

test test test

But it's too late to talk about it.

Goodnight.

Yes.  Forums are broken. Yes, avatars are too (but if you are super-slick you can disable images and get it to work :-) No, slideshows aren't ready but they are damn close.

But enjoy voting this fresh new story to the front page!

And to be a jerk, I'll show what slideshows are all about, even though non of you can use them... ;-) ... only as a second post ....

Yes, there are bugs.  Why?  Because my shop fails the Joel Test.

1. Do I use source control?  Yes.
   
2. Can I make a build (of photographica) in one step?  No, no and no.  
   
3. Do I make daily builds?  Kind of.
   
4. Do I have a bug database?  Yes.
   
5. Do I fix bugs before adding new features?  Some times.
   
6. Do I have an up to date schedule?  No.
   
7. Do I have a spec?  Yes.
   
8. Do I have quiet working conditions?  Yes, sans cat.
   
9. Do I use the best tools?  Somewhat.
   
10. Do I have testers?  No.
    
11. Do I have canidates .... no.
    
12. Do I do hallway usabity?  Sadly, for a guy who majored in it, no.

My biggest problem?  Lack of automated builds?  That PM bug?  I fixed that you know.  But it didn't get released to smokin' which usually is just an image server.  Why?  I'm human.  Had the build been automated, both servers would have been properly updated.

And that is what I'm working on.  Push button, sit-back-and-drink-cofeee, releases.  You'll never directly see it, but when I'm done, you'll notice a sharp improvement in the quality and functionality of this website.

PS:  I still dont know what is up with ansel.  Haven't made it down yet.

So, what is up?

1. I've "fixed" subscriptions so they actually expire.  The system will also send you a 15 day renewal reminder as well as an email when your subscription actually expires.  I haven't released this change quite yet because:
2. I'm cleaning up the release process I use.  Right now a release consists of me updating the servers, patching the production database by hand and praying.  You might recall last month's four day outage.  Yeah.  This whole process needs to be a single command, especially now that I've got three servers that get updated.
3. I'm doing some contact work.  Gotta pay the bills you know!
4. Once I push out the subscription changes, I am going to make galleries work again.  After that, I'm update the way photographs are uploaded and stored.  I'd like to create a windows app like flickr has to make it really easy to upload images.

After that, I'm going to hunker down and work on my ultimate goal - letting you start your own photographica-like weblog.

You can use the comments to tell me how much of a slacker I am, how horrible of a job I'm doing, or maybe suggest some ideas or a compliment or two.  Something.  Anything.

PS: People have asked me about t-shirts. I'm still sitting on a pile of brown ones, so by all means, order one!.

Today is going to be the second day of slowness.  I'm still running everything on smokin' in the image server.

I suspect I'll be bringing the entire system down today for a good chunk of time. Some little script kiddie hacked into my database / file server by exploiting the horrendously insecure program known as awstats.  They didn't get very far, but they somehow managed to bring down Photographica's primary webserver, Ansel, in the process.  I haven't gone down to the colo facility yet to see what is up, but as it stands, Ansel is deader then a doornail and isn't even on the network.

By the way, don't assume the kid took down the server because he was smart or malicious.  Almost every time I've had a server broken into, things stop working because the dude is incompetent and screws up.  In fact, often it isn't even a real person who breaks in but a script running on another compromised computer that scans the Internet looking for insecure software.  I could go on about script kiddies and their doings, but I've got a server to rebuild!

Note: No personal information or photography was stolen, viewed or even discovered.  For future reference, in most cases the only information personal information stored is your nickname and the email address you used to sign up.  If you become a subscriber or buy a t-shirt, I then store your contact information (name, phone, address) as well.  I do not keep any credit card information on the system.  In the future however, I may store the last four digits of the credit card number for accounting purposes.  Worst case, if somebody broke in to the sytem in the future and stole everything, all they'd get would be any content here and possibly your billing address.  Again, in this case the database wasn't discovered at all (they usually dont care about that stuff anyway).

.... Wish me luck with the rebuild!

Smokin'  

Named after a dog that was on some dog-show I had in the background while setting the machine up, "Smokin'" isn't anything special.  In fact it is rather 0ld Sk00l, a mere PIII 650 with a mere 350mb ram.  But, it will be a perfect image server that should lighten the load on ansel, the main server.  If anybody has a faster PentiumIII lying around that they dont need, let me know. According to intel it should take upto a 1Ghz chip, PGA370.  Likewise, if anybody has some old SDAM they dont need, she could use that too.  The ram specs get tricky, so contact me to see if yours  might work.

Ansel, too, takes a PGA370 PIII, but I dont know how fast it can go.  It's a dell motherboard and they dont give you much info.  Right now, it's a P3 1ghz even though the specs say it only supports a 750mhz.  So, I dont know!

I was quick to get it out the door and into the rack, so the only pic I have is the one taken by the gentleman I bought it from.

Well, is it a lot faster?

You might have noticed a lot of downtime yesterday.  I did some upgrades to the operating system on both the database server and the web server.  Since it is about a 30 minute walk to the colo facility and I don't care for late-night emergencies, I did some pretty extensive testing before I left.  Sorry about the downtime, but I hope some of the changes will speed things up.

I'm eying some old-sk00l servers on craigslist like this one: 1U Rackable Systems Server P3 700 MHz - $100.  I'm gonna see that guy in about an hour - maybe we'll get a new image server by the end of this weekend?

I'd like to get the PowerEdge on the top of this page as it would solve pretty much all photographica's problems for about a year, but right now I lack the cool $1000 to buy it.

The site should be significantly faster.

However, there have been reports of comments getting "hidden", not showing up, or just acting plain old strange.  Given the secret sauce I used for the speedup, I'm actually not surprised.  I pushed out the changes quickly because they had such a huge impact on speed.  The good news is the comments are likely still around, they just aren't showing up.

If you have a comment disappear, post a link to the story / forum it happened in so I can take a peek.   Let me know what you did when it disappeared (editing it?  posting it?  nothing at all?).

Thanks for your patience on this!

Here is some un-edited pics from my camping trip.  These were taken from a nearby hill we scrambled to the top of.  Since these are all taken in the daytime, none of them are really that great.
Mt. Ranier While you can't see it, our camp is almost smack in the middle in some trees below. Little Twin Sisters Lake

The blurry picture of your truely.  Taken by Shannon, sans tripod (you pack that up!)

Update [2006-7-7 15:23:7 by coryking]: Let me know if that fixed it!

Now is the time to post your story.  It should work in theory.

A bird for your consideration
Known Issues:

• "weird" behaviour when viewing the challenge or any tags
• Private Messages dont sent
• Stories dont post
• Can't view profiles
• the "new" marker on stories dont go away
• read messages not getting marked as read
• slowness
• cant start new threads in forum - can't reproduce!
• titles dont change right
• various and sundy comment issues such as no titles or subscribers, no comments showing, and other odd behaviour
• stories show the time, not the date
• Everybody gets a heart, even if they aren't a subscriber

Greetings ladies and gentleman,

I have got quite the suprise for your tommorow.  I'm not going to divulge any more info, but it is gonna be pretty exciting.  ... Well, a hint.  We've done it before.

How are things?  Things are busy!  While nothing has changed here on the website, I've been spending 14 to 18 hour days, seven days a week working on this website and what will be a nice home for you to park your photography, artwork, and writings.

It has been and will be a lot of work.

... Good Times.

See ya tommorow!

...To give me money. Several generous souls have reported having issues subscribing. If you tried, and got a nasty "Internal Server Error", I've since fixed the issue. Try, try again!

And yes, I am folding and packing t-shirts too :-) This will be the last time I have to do batches like this as I am now keeping a inventory of shirts on hand. Your next (or first) order will be shipped out in a few days, not several weeks as before.

Have fun!

First, the migration went as smoothly as I had hoped.  The only major hickup was assuming the servers would install the newest version of the database platform; they didn't and it took several more hours to put the right version on.  There were also some interesting skeletons in the database I had to clean out and fix.  All in all, yesterday consisted of me walking up, starting work at 11am and finishing off with performance tuning at about 2am.  I dreamed in SQL last night; seriously,  it is scary.

Thanks to those who pointed out some... interesting... new issues with photographica.  Seriously, I never would have caught them.

Here is what I've got so far:

1. FIXED - SaxGuy keenly noticed that random picks all say they were from some jerk named "nick" (note: if you are nick, I am kidding)
2. FIXED - MRQUACKERS pointed out that when you log in, the username is now case sensitive
3. Our fine editor codepoit saw that all the comments are new in the forums
4. FIXED - Several have point out that can't go to the next page of stories on the main page
5. artClick doesn't show up on the right.
6. As we all know, the "Internal Server Error" still exists.  I knew this wouldn't get fixed; it is something more fundimental to the site.

Surely there is more.  Keep em comming in your comments below.

Update [2006-4-17 15:55:44 by coryking]: Fixed random images, fixed the login problems you might have had
Update [2006-4-17 20:29:32 by coryking]: Fixed it so you can visit the next page of stories.

First, Happy Easter to all.

Second, today is the day I plan to take the site down for a major backend update. For those who care, for a number of reasons, Photographica and artClick are migrating from MySQL to Postgres . If all goes well, I will have it back up just in time for your morning coffee tomorrow (though it will hopefully not take more then about six hours).

I've been getting a lot of reports of "internal server errors", and sadly I dont think this update will solve that particular issue.  In fact, this update will probably generate new, crazier errors as there is probably a few as-of-yet undiscovered compatibility issues between the older database system and the new one I am installing today.  Believe me though, fixing the internal server error is next on my list of things to fix; it is very irritating!

Unfortunately (fortunately?), I get to play shipping department on monday in Tuesday so I will probably not get any time to see what is the root of these pesky and annoying errors.

So here is the deal.  Once the website comes back online - if you get any errors, or things are not acting like they did before, please, please send me a private message.  Make sure to mention what you were doing, what time you were doing it at (with a time zone), copy and paste in the URL you were at, and include any error messages you got.

Dont worry about bugging me; I need to know these things.  This update touches every single thing that happens on the website, and I will no doubt miss things.

In fact, never worry about bugging me; you will probably be the first person letting me know about an issue.  If something seems amiss or doesn't quite work the way you'd expect, dont hesitate to send me a private message.

So, wish me luck!  So far my practice runs at home have been going better then I'd expected.  I am hoping this will be easy and pain free.  If all goes well, the site should look and behave exactly the way it does right now; which is the goal.

T-shirts
Good news! The long wait is over!  The t-shirts have arrived!

I'm gonna give an estimated ship date of Tuesday.  I'll keep y'all posted.  Sorry about the delay for all this.  The really good news is I ordered enough this time around to keep an inventory.  Your next order will probably ship within one or two days rather than 3-4 weeks.

Downtime for upgrades
After nearly four years in operation, I'm gonna ditch the peice of crap database that is mysql and migrate Photographica and artClick to Postgresql. This is going to be a substaintial migration and will probably bring the site down for an entire day. Depending on various factors, I might do it tommorow or monday. I will give you an advanced sorry, but in the end it will give me the right tool to make this website a much better, more reliable place.

After three years in service, I am closing the Photographica Store and Photo Finishing service for much needed repairs.  Later today, any links into either of these services will be redirected to "down for service".

Do not be alarmed if you notice any changes to the page you upload your photography.

This change will happen later today.

Thanks!

Bleh.  I'm beat.  I've been doing the nasty kind of coding that puts a strain on your eyes and back.  I can't see very straight right now, nor can I type very well.  Excuse the typos.

I've got a couple things in the works:

1. I've been working on letting you terminate your own account in a maner that suits your taste.  Since I really, really, really don't like deleting images, stories and comments, I'm working on letting you either delete them, or just disown them so they will show up as a product of our friend "Anonymous Hero".
2. As a byproduct, I think I can finally allow limited deleting of individual images and stories without pestering us editor / admin types.

This deletion stuff sounds simple on the surface, but it is actually a heck of a lot more complex then you'd realize.  Those images, stories and comments get linked to all numbers of things like tags, sales functions, other stories, etc.  Everything needs to be accounted for or all hell breaks loose.  Some things cannot be deleted at all.  For example, if you put an image up for sale we can't delete it or disown it, ever.  The best we can do is hide it.

What about tshirts?

Well, the order got botched and didn't seem to get scheduled by the printers.  They now have the order scheduled and hopefully I can get them out soon.

Oh yeah, and I'm gonna be out of commission from this friday until next sometime next week.  I doubt I'll be of much use tommorow either.

I've just ordered 512mb more ram for the photographica's webserver which will bump it to a whopping 1gig.  In theory, it should work out of the box.  In.  Theory.  It's a bit older of a machine (in fact, it was made in 1998) so there is question as to if it will work at all.

For the chronic refreshers, that is why the server was down for 30 minutes.  I had to pull it from its cozy little rack and see exactly what was inside.

For those that care, here is what is inside:

ansel.xlan.org: aka Photographica/Artclick Webserver

• 1u Dell Poweredge 350
  
• P3 750mhz /w 440bx intel chipset
  
• 512mb ecc/registered PC100 ram
  
• Two old ghetto 70 gig IDE hard drives on a (software) RAID1 array.
  
• SuSE 9.2 Linux
  
• Apache 1.3.7 /w mod_perl & mod_ssl
  
• Photographica's codebase (2.8 megs of pure perl code)
  
• Memcached

strider.xlan.org: aka Photographica Database Server

• 4u, whitebox, old school case (arg)
  
• p4 2ghz
  
• 512mb ram
  
• two 120gig IDE drives on a raid1 array (also software)
  
• SuSE 9.2 Linux
  
• mySQL 5
  
• Also running subversion for version control and FogBugz for issue tracking.

Facility

• colo'd with my hosting company, XLAN, which is nestled into a half rack in Colo Centers on the 18th floor of the Westin Building in Downtown Seattle.
  
• 100mbit internet connection (about 100 times faster then your typical high speed internet such as DSL)
  
• All the bells & whistles that come with colo: generator, battery, AC, beefy guys with shotguns (they really aren't that beefy though)

Someday I might take pictures, but I suspect that such an act might be frowned upon for security purposes.