Schonhose

Finally the (long awaited) update for the Defensio addon for Pixelpost is here. As mentioned in this blogpost earlier it contains the fix that slowed down a lot of photoblogs earlier this month.

Thanks to Carl Mercier of the Defensio team I was able to add one more bugfix. Carl was looking at the logs over at Defensio and noticed that sometimes the article-date is not passed to the service. The date is a required parameter and from the very first version I made sure the addon passed it along with the other variables.

This was kind of odd since it was clearly a Pixelpost blog and the date was not passed. I have to say I was stumped on this one, but Carl managed to figure it out. The Defensio addon allows comments to be posted on images that don’t exists yet. Once we (Carl) identified the problem a fix was a matter of a few lines. If the article-date is not in the database, the Defensio addon will throw a nice 404 error.

So there you have it, the best just got better!

Every once in a while I stumble around a real gem, donated generously to the Pixelpost community, by a talented developer/programmer.

We all know the adminpanel of Pixelpost is, uhmmm.. a little outdated. Seriously, it needs a complete overhaul which we as a development team pushed forward to later. Much later since the majority of our development team consists of programmers/designers with the emphasis on writing PHP code. Sometimes we get so wrapped up we forget to style things properly.

Enter Nyssa Brown, a creative artist from Brisbane, Australia. She found the adminpanel so boring (did I mention she’s right about the boring part) she decided to spice things up a little. It has resulted in PPost Refresh – Custom Pixelpost Admin.

It looks really amazing, with 5 color schemes to choose from. I even installed it on my own blog! Let’s hope she will continue to make this even more amazing.

(image courtesy of Nyssa Brown)

After the losses of both the Lakers (NBA Finals) and the Tarheels (NCAA Finals), which I heavily supported, last night the Dutch National soccer team was eliminated by Russia. We lost 1-3, and I must say Russia deserved it. Props to the coach of the Russian team, Guus Hiddink (who is Dutch by the way).

Well, so much for following sport this year. We still have the Olympic games and perhaps we will win some there. But after what happened the last three months, I for one, won’t get my hopes up.

Unfortunately the Lakers could not take the Celtics at Boston. So, congratulations for the Celtics to win this years NBA championship. Somehow it feels a little bit right Kevin, Paul and Ray finally won one. But I’m the first to admit Lamar, Pau and the rest of the Lakers also deserved it. They went on a hell of a run but failed to pull it off.

Ah well, I’m now going to focus on Euro2008 and the Dutch National team. They have been very convincing, winning each of the groupmatches. Next saturday is the quarter final and I got this feeling we’re going a long way.

However, I had the same feelings about UNC and the Lakers……

The thing I feared most happened: Boston took the first two games at their home-court. Last night the series returned to LA with the Lakers down two.

Both Kobe and Sascha stepped up their play, Kobe with 36 points on mostly drives to the hoop while Sascha exploded for 20 points of the bench. The production of both Lamar and Pau was way below average, but nevertheless the Lakers prevailed to make it 2-1.

The last team to win a championship after trailing 0–2 in the series was the Miami Heat in the 2005-2006 season. This was only the third time a team won a championship after trailing. Basically the odds are against the Lakers but you’ll never know.

The Lakeshow will be in town for two more games and playing at home has been definitely a factor throughout the playoffs this year. Let’s hope they will make it 2-3 before returning to Boston for the final games.