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!

While cleaning my harddrive I found an image I initially wanted to show on this blog. Earlier this year I had some problems with Defensio and this graph does illustrate that.

The horizontal line signifies the period Defensio stopped working and I had to weed out SPAM comments by hand. Interesting enough the number of SPAM comment had increased during this period, as can be seen in the period before and after the outage of the plugin due to a serverconfiguration change. I think the reason for this might be because lots of SPAM comments actually where posted on the blog. With all that exposure spammers might have targeted my blog more frequently than usual (e.g. prior to the outage of Defensio plugin). Defensio has been working great after the last fix, so it makes my life much easier. Thanks for small favours!

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.

Today I managed to get to the root of a problem I have been trying to eliminate for some time now. It all has to do with the “use the EXIF coordinates” feature of the GoogleMap addon for Pixelpost. It seemed when using this feature the location magically shifted a few meters or even more.

When using reverse geocoding for latitude and longitude values Google Maps focuses on nearby (and sometimes not so near by) “points of interest” or the closest address it can find. This behavior can be changed by changing the following Javascript function function showLocationLatLng().

Change the code of that function to:
function showLocationLatLng() {
var latlng = new GLatLng(document.forms['view-latlng'].lat.value,document.forms['view-latlng'].lng.value);
editMap.addOverlay(new GMarker(latlng));
editMap.setCenter(latlng, 16);
}

This will force the addon to use the exact location of the image provided in the EXIF.