Schonhose

Today I have spend a little time working on my photoblog. I fixed a few issues and launched two new features: a “tweet this” button and tutorials. The “Tweet this” button makes it easier to share something you found on my blog with the world using Twitter. As for the tutorials, sometimes people have asked me questions how I did certain things and what better way of sharing it by using tutorials?

So here it is, the first tutorial on my photoblog. It deals with Geocoding images using the GPS on a (WM) smartphone.

The next feature is still undecided, if you have some ideas please leave them in the comments.

In the summer of 2006 I decided to start my own photoblog. I had just bought a new DSLR and was looking for a way to display these images. I found Pixelpost to be the only package meeting my requirements and I started using it. During the development of my photoblog I fixed some issues in Pixelpost and after that I found myself on the development team.

Together with Piotr I fixed a lot of bugs and added a lot of features in the 1.6 release. One of the main features I worked on was alternative language support for templates. I also developed some addons, one of the biggest the Googlemap addon to display images on the map. It is still a nice showcase of the addon power in Pixelpost because it uses a lot of workspaces to plugin its code. If I look at the downloads from my site over this period the absolute number one addon is the Entrypage addon, followed by the Googlemaps addon.

Working with the codebase of Pixelpost made me realize one thing: the code needed a complete overhaul. Jay, Dave and myself started making plans for the new revamped version of Pixelpost, the illustrious version 2.0. Like all good plans it started out real nice and we made some nice progress. In our attempts to make it clean, lean and mean we had to restart a few times from scratch. It took a bit longer than anticipated and we also had other stuff to attend to. All this lead to a stop in the development, ultimately leading to a blogpost on the forum describing the current situation.

Over the last year I came increasingly disgusted with the administration panel of Pixelpost and the lack of features found in other programs these days. Also I found it hard to maintain the self-imposed upload scheme of posting a new image every three days while not taking any new images. And last but not least, I also found I uploaded an image both on my blog and on Flickr. After some reviewing I discovered Flickr had most of the features I implemented on my blog as well. It had the maps, a nice way of organizing images with tags and sets and an easy way to upload images. Next to that it features multiple sizes, something I always wanted to use on my blog.

So I decided to scratch the blogging idea, turn the whole thing into a portfolio and use Flickr as a base. I closed my photoblog (e.g. stopped uploading pictures) and set out on a search to fulfill my requirements. After a couple of weeks programming and figuring out the (wonderful) Flickr API I present you with my revamped portfolio: http://foto.schonhose.nl.

As always there are some minor issues to fix, which will be dealt with in the next few weeks. I managed to retain most of the features of my old blog, although the comments now go through Flickr. Flickr doesn’t allow anonymous comments so that is the only drawback I found. That being said, over the last year I only got 2 legitimate comments, the rest was SPAM. Love to hear your comments on the new site!

After an almost perfect record for more than a year I managed to forget uploading a photo on my photoblog not once, but twice this month. I have been so busy with other things (making photos in Snowworld (an indoor snowboard centre), designing a few websites as a favor, writing some addons) I totally forgot uploading some new photos.

Anyway, I found some room on my desk and I placed a note to remind me to a) keep making photos and b) keep uploading them. Let’s see how long this note will last in the mess I call my desk.

Back in the days when this site used my own custom written CMS I implemented a nice feature to speed up the loading times and to save bandwidth. I compressed the output using GZIP, getting on average about 60-70% compression rate. That means sending less data which boosted the loading times enormously.

Today I remembered that hack as I found out you can actually set that behavior inside a .htaccess file. So I implemented it for my Photoblog, got a nice 70% compression rate on the current page and it does load faster.

To enable GZIP compression add the following line to your .htaccess file:
php_value output_handler ob_gzhandler

You can test your page over at the gzip test tool.

Over the last few months several threads have been posted on the Pixelpost forum regarding SPAM comments. In some of these threads the author boldly claims that Pixelpost isn’t stopping any SPAM. Well, since December 28th, 2006 I have installed a SPAMlog addon on my blog. Basically, what this addon does is keeping track if and why a comment is blocked.

First I think I have to elaborate on my settings, so here they are. I use the <TOKEN> setting from Pixelpost, along with a 30 seconds SPAMflood protection setting and a maximum of three URLS in a comment. Besides that I use the http://BL addon (more info about this addon) and I have installed Defensio addon for Pixelpost.

So now we know the configuration let’s show some stats from the last 743 days shall we?

It seems my photoblog received a total of 31897 comments (43 comments per day). A total of 2457 comments actually made it through the defensive lines of both Pixelpost and the http://BL addon. Defensio managed to catch 2256 comments as SPAM, so this leaves out 201 comments. It turns out that 70 of these comments were SPAM, but these slipped through before the Defensio addon was installed (The Defensio addon was installed a few months after the initialization of the SPAMlog).

These are the numbers, but what happened to the initial 31897 – 2457 = 29440 comments which were blocked by both Pixelpost and the http://BL addon?

Let me break that number down: Pixelpost internal measures took care of 17194 of these comments while the http://BL addon took care of the other 12246 comments. Basically this says that the measures in Pixelpost are capable of catching at least 50% of all SPAM comments.

So what is the internal Pixelpost method that stops most of the SPAM?

• 887 comments contained words listed in ban or moderation list
• 10379 comments used an incorrect token
• 2 commenters waited too long before posting (30 minutes)
• 156 comments were posted to rapidly in succession (SPAM flood)
• 5403 comments contained too many URLs (3)
• 114 comments contained an URL on the blacklist
• 210 comments were not allowed (commenting disabled)
• 41 commenters used an invalid e-mail address

As can be seen the token protection is responsible for 60% of the SPAM stopped by Pixelpost own defensive measures. Feel free to comment on my analysis.