Schonhose

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

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

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.

I received some mail and comments today that my downloads were giving a dreadful 404 Not Found error. This has led to a wild goose hunt for several hours trying to determine the source of the problem. Finally I was able to track things down. For some mysterious reason a .htaccess file has been removed, leading to some unexpected results. After restoring the very basic version of the file the downloads started working again.

Sorry for the inconvenience everyone!