Schonhose

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!

It has been a while since my last post and like always I managed to find a good excuse for not posting anything. The last month (!) I have been busy trying to solve a riddle which involved the Defensio addon. As you have probably read on this blog or somewhere else on the web, Defensio is used to protect a blog against comment spam. A few months back I was very excited about the version 2 release of the api and I modified the plugin for the photoblogging software Pixelpost for this new version.

About a month ago I noticed that huge amounts of spam were actually published in my websites. Pretty strange, considering Defensio was active to prevent this behavior. It took some long nights to discover that my hostingcompany had disabled the fsockopen functionality, something that is extensively used by Defensio. So we had to switch to Curl, although that wasn’t completely operational just yet. The guys at Defensio put in some extra hours and provided me with a working test version. After some modifications Defensio was yet again stopping spam in my photoblog.

However, I also have a WordPress blog (you’re reading it) and that also attracts tons of spam. So much in fact I updated some core files of the WP addon with the newly programmed files and a fresh copy from GitHub to enable Defensio again. To bad it didn’t work. Over 100 spam comments a day where published on my blog and had to be removed manually. It took me and Camilo from Defensio about three nights debugging to catch the offending line of code and finally the plugin (which stopped working at March 21, 2010( is fully operational again since last night.

Finally all spam is getting caught again which frees me up to do some more bug hunting in some code I wrote instead.

This week the guys and girls from Defensio have released the 2.0 version of their API. Not only a SPAM filter, but Defensio can now eliminate malware and other unwanted or risky content from your blog. The best part is Pixelpost supports the latest API version through a new release of the Defensio addon for Pixelpost.

A major difference is the way content is evaluated. The old version depended on an instant results after querying Defensio, sometimes resulting in comments not being processed when the service was hammered with request. Therefore the content is now evaluated asynchronous, sending the content to Defensio which will provide a callback when the processing is done.

Initially all comments for Pixelpost make it into the Defensio Quarantine. These comments can basically have two statuses: FAIL and PENDING. The later means that the results through the callback are not in yet (you can issue a query to fetch them right away). The status FAIL means that for some reason Defensio could not be contacted (either the service is down or the API key is invalid or..). In that case you can send these comments to Defensio for an evaluation.

The major drawback of the 1.0 version of the addon was that each comment that had failed had to be rechecked manually. This issue has been resolved with the addition of a new button that processes every comment with a status of FAIL or PENDING for the last two weeks. Obviously the buttons to send either HAM or SPAM to Defensio remain in full effect.

For more information about the new Defensio checkout the “What’s new with Defensio 2.0?” or the video below. You can also download the latest plugin for Pixelpost.

The site hasn’t seen much updates lately, but as usual there is a good reason for that. I’ve been busy working on several projects. Inquisitive readers might ask what those projects are. Well, let me reveal at least some of them.

One of the projects I’m working on is the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Export Plugin,, initially developed by my buddy Jay. As not only the author but also user of both the Googlemap addon and the FTP security addon I needed to modify the Lightroom Export plugin to facilitate both GPS coordinates and the automatic opening and closing of both the image and the thumbnail folders. Currently we have a working copy which I use extensively in testing right now. Did I mention we also managed to squash some bugs while producing cleaner code?

The other project I’m working on is the aforementioned Googlemap addon. Since I began working writing code in a more OOP manner I could see how this approach could seriously limit the duplicate code currently found in the addon. I found a nice Googlemap API Class for PHP and intend to use that as a base to rewrite the addon yet again. All features of the (unpublished) third version will be retained, but it will be lean and fast thanks to the use of OOP practices.

Last but not least I’m also working on the new version of Pixelpost. Recently we added two more plugins dealing with both tags and categories. While testing and writing new things resumes we’re building the next-generation photoblog with a solid codebase.

One of the things I really wanted to add to my basketball statistics program was the possibility to export statistics for a game to a PDF file. After the initial thought a long search on the internet was needed to find a good class that can generate PDF files.

Nearly every class I have tried have some severe or minor flaws in the generated file. After much searching and trail & error I decided to stick with mPDF,based on FPDF, HTML2FPDF, and UFPDF, with a number of enhancements.

Although several CSS tweaks, for example the use of background images in tables, aren’t supported yet, this was the only class that actually made something readable from the HTML output I presented it with. If you’re interested in seeing an example of the output, you can find it here (700kB).