I really wanted to upload a nice Christmas postcard, but unfortunately I couldn’t find the time to do it. So instead please accept my wishes in writing: Dear visitor, Merry Christmas to you and your family. 
Update: I spend most of the day exploring the possibilities of my mobile studio setup. One of the pictures turned out really nice so I decided to upload it.
John Godley over at UrbanGiraffe.com has released the updated DrainHole plugin, which is compatible with WordPress 2.7. This means the downloads are up again! Happy leeching everyone! 
At the end of November I blogged about my idea of taking 40 of the highest rated images and turning it into a book. In the post I have described a method for selecting the highest rated images but there were some flaws in my reasoning.
So I took another approach, which is much easier. Let’s assume everyone who has visited my photoblog has voted, but (and this is it) people who didn’t vote actually voted zero stars. In other words, they didn’t found the picture worth at least 1 star. When we assume this, the selection of the images becomes easier because now we only have to select the pictures with the highest total. But to narrow the selection a bit down I have included another rule: an image must have at least 5 votes to participate. Perhaps you’re wondering why I enforce this rule? The reason is quite simple. This way I know at least 5 people found the image good enough to give a rating between 1 – 5 stars.
Furthermore, whenever there is a situation in which two or more images have the same total rating the image with the least votes will be given the highest ranking.
For those of you wondering what the SQL looks like (you do need to have the AjaxRatings addon installed and I assume the prefix of the tables is “pixelpost_“) I have it included below. As can be seen I also let the statement I used earlier (weighted ratings) in the SQL for comparison:
SELECT
`pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`img_id`, `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_value`,
`pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_votes`,`pixelpost_pixelpost`.`headline`,
`pixelpost_pixelpost`.`body`, `pixelpost_pixelpost`.`image`,
((`total_rate`/5)*`total_votes`) as weighedRating
FROM `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`,`pixelpost_pixelpost`
WHERE `pixelpost_pixelpost`.`id` = `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`img_id`
ORDER BY `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_value` DESC, `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_votes` ASC
LIMIT 0,41
So, how does this look compared to my earlier approach? Well, the top 30 of my images stayed the same, some images shifted a bit but there were no real surprises. At the bottom of the list there were some small changes which has surprised me a bit. For instance: on number 37 (at the time of this post) was the Mosaic image I created containing the 200 images I had on my blog at that time. I’m not sure if I have a high resolution of the image lying around somewhere. In case I don’t I have chosen to omit this file.
Anyway, have a peek at the current output of the script.
It seems the Drain Hole plugin used on this blog to manage the downloads of the Pixelpost addons is not compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
The author of the plugin has been notified of the problem and is currently working on a fix. I expect to have the downloads up and running pretty soon again. In the meantime, please be patient and keep your eye on this space to see if the issues have been resolved.
Thanks to everyone who bothered to notify me of this problem and once again my sincere apologies for the inconvenience.
Pretty silently I have been testing WordPress 2.7 on this blog since the end of November. Today the release version of WordPress 2.7, codename “Coltrane” has arrived. Needless to say I was happy to update this blog to the final version and I have to say the admin interface is much better now.
Anyway, read more about the latest release in the announcement.
In 2000 the guys from Budweiser made quite a name for themselves with the “Whassup” commercial. Eight years later the boys are back, so let see how they have been. The next videoclip from Youtube will show the boys in 2000 and in 2008.
All I got to say is “True, true”. 
