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.
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).
Well, that is the big question today. Not only haven’t I posted much on my blog, I even forgot posting photos on my photoblog (yet again). So what is the reason for this?
I have been working on a new webbased application which hasn’t got a name yet. But what it does is registering basketball statistics. There are quite a few programs on the market and none of those programs are either free or do what I want. What else was there to do other than trying to build my own? So over the last few weeks I did some programming in PHP, a lot of programming in MooTools and managed to get a working concept.
Below you can see a quick snapshot of the program running on the Samsung NC-10 netbook.
A couple of interesting facts:
Was built using HTML, PHP and MooTools 1.2
Uses a SQLite database to store information for each player
Performs AJAX calls to store information in the database
Can register made and missed shots per player
Is able to distinguish shots from behind or inside the arc (based on direction of play)
Keeps track of almost every statistics important in basketball
Features a live-scoreboard for tracking the score and the time played
Doesn’t have an admin interface yet
Leave a note in the comments if you have some ideas about either the program or what it should be called.
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
