digital:pardoe

Flickr BBCode

phpBB is one of the most widely used forum systems on the internet and Flickr is one of the most popular photo sharing websites, unfortunately there is still no concrete way to integrate the two of them. As a temporary solution I came up with the following piece of BBCode to allow for the easy display of Flickr images in phpBB forums.

First, you will need to navigate to the “Admin Control Panel” of phpBB then to the “Posting” section. From here navigate to the screen that allows you to add custom BBCode.

In the “Usage” section paste the following code (‘\’s denote a continuation of the current line, don’t include them);

In the “HTML” section paste;

Then in the “Help” section paste:

And that’s it, you can use the tag by navigating to one of your photo’s Flickr “All Sizes → Medium” page (e.g. http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalpardoe/2900618617/sizes/m/), copying the code in the “1. Copy and paste this HTML into your webpage:” box. And inserting it after the “=” in the Flickr BBCode tag, e.g;

Check back soon.

Updates, Updates, Updates

Again, it has been quite a while since my last post (almost a month in fact) and quite a lot has happened since then. Any regular visitors to the website will have noticed the new theme, the website maintains the new layout released a couple of months ago but the colour scheme has changed to something a bit more minimal. Along with the new theme I have re-introduced some small adverts to the bottom of pages and modified the URL of the blog feed to allow tracking through FeedBurner.

The other main updates to the website are the introduction of My Book Icons 0.8 and My Passport Icons 0.3. The My Book Icons update includes a new icon for the Western Digital My Book Studio II drive. Both of the icon sets now include icons in Windows ICO format and Linux PNG format. On the Mac side of the icon sets, after popular demand, I have added copy & pasteable icons to allow setting of icons using the “Get Info” window in Finder.

You can download My Book Icons here and My Passport Icons here

That’s all for now, check back soon.

My Passport Icons

By popular demand, but a little late, I have released a set of icons to represent the Western Digital My Passport range of external hard drives, this release was driven primarily by requests that I have received and the fact that I have just purchased a WD My Passport drive myself.

For now the release contains only two icons, they are for the red and black “Essential” variants of the My Passport drive. I will be releasing icons for the remaining drives shortly so if you don’t have one of the two drives included keep checking the website.

You can download the icons here.

I will be writing a post shortly to explain why my presence has been lacking recently and why releases are so slow in coming too, so, check back soon.

Just A Few Updates

It’s been almost a month since my last post and a lot has happened since then so I thought I’d bring any readers of my blog up to date.

If you are a frequent visitor to the website you may have noticed the new layout (implemented about 20 days ago now). The layout is much simplified over the old layout. It makes use of a single column layout with items from the old sidebar in the top corners. For now the advertising and Last.fm widgets have been removed whilst I decide if they should make an appearance in the new website. The visual changes comes with a fairly comprehensive code re-write that should drastically improve the performance and security of the website, the changes come thanks to a series of Rails podcasts I have discovered, you can find them here.

A quick list of the main changes to the website are as follows; the removal of all AJAX & AJAX-like functionality (other than Lightbox), everything now works statically for increased accessibility, the blog can now be browsed by category. More user feedback has been introduced. The appearance of forms has been improved and the website now makes sole us of PNG and JPEG images for transparency and quality.

The secondary reason for this post is to officially announce the availability of iSyncIt 1.5, you can download it here. This release, whilst not been too far detached visually from version 1.3.1 comes with a boat load of code improvements. The main changes are as follows; a new preferences system, doesn’t look any different but it’s easier for me to manage. The move to Leopard only. A fix for the problems that were caused in version 1.3 by Growl notifications. You can now enable & disable the login item from within the application. Updates to Sparkle & Growl. Menus now update properly. Scheduling now functions better and the control of bluetooth is improved.

Finally, an unfortunate side-effect of the iSyncIt re-write is the loss of German localization. I will be getting in touch with my friendly volunteer translator shortly to see if he will be willing to re-localize the application for me.

That’s all for now, check back soon.

Caching Your Photographs

If you have at some point followed my now fairly ancient rFlickr tutorial you may have noticed that your photo page loads quite slowly, and that my photo page loads fairly quickly. To get my page to load as quickly as it does required a small custom caching method and a willingness on my part to sacrifice some bandwidth. Here’s how I did it.

This tutorial assumes that you have already worked through the previously mentioned rFlickr tutorial and have something similar to it set up. It also assumes that you have some knowledge of Rails, not that my knowledge was particularly wide ranging at the point I wrote this caching method.

First of all, you will need a table in your database to store the information about your photographs, I suggest the structure illustrated in the migration below;

Once you have created this table you will need to create some folders to store the cached images, I created the following folders and will be using them throughout this tutorial;

Then generate the model for this photos table;

Your view from the first tutorial can remain almost the same (details at the end of the post), however, to see the greatest speed improvement I suggest caching it, i.e;

Then modify your view method in your photography controller to read something like;

The above code will make sure that a cached photography page doesn’t already exist, if it doesn’t, then and only then will it check that the photograph cache is up to date and query the database.

We have not yet created a ‘check_cache’ method, this method is the core method to make the photography page load much, much faster, even when the photography page’s cache does not exist. The method should be placed as the last method in your photography controller, the code is as follows;

The following code will only run if you are in production mode (and probably test mode too). It will then load the necessary information from Flickr using the methods outlined in the rFlickr tutorial post. The method then iterates through the collection of photos from Flickr in reverse, so they appear in the same order in the database as the order they appear on Flickr.

It will then check if the photo already exists in the database, if it does not it will store a copy of the photograph’s information in the database and download previews of the images from Flickr to your server, previews of images can then be loaded from your server rather than Flickr’s slow servers .

To take advantage of the cache you will also need to modify your view to access the thumbnails from your newly created local repository rather than from Flickr’s servers, i.e;

Hope this goes some way to helping you improve the speed of your website.

Check back soon.

Update: As I have just been reminded in the comments, I forgot a piece of code to make this tutorial work correctly. You should put the line;

Either in the bottom of you ‘environment.rb’ file or just under the ‘class’ line in the controller that is responsible for your photography page.

Update (3rd May 09): The code in the ‘check_cache’ method has been updated slightly, it now makes less round trips to the database, should speed things up if your DB server is in a different location to your application server. Also, any redirection problems you may have faced before should be solved by the new rFlickr ruby gem that has support for ‘farm’ URLs built in.