Posts tagged ‘wordpress’

Lucy in the cloud with tags

Tags, you’ve gotta love them.

Finally I have started tagging my blog and photos. which gives me the ability to offer better searches and display nice tagclouds.

For the blog I have used the plugin Simple Tags which offers a huge range of features.

I found that the things I like most is

1. Auto tagging

The blog already had a lot of articles, well more than I wanted to go through and tag one by one. So Simple Tags‘s auto tagging, was crucial. It will look at the contents of an article and select tags that seems to fit, from your current list of tags. It seems like it has done a good job, I didn’t find any tags that seemed out of order.

2. Suggest tags

Simple tags has a feature where it will suggest tags from yahoo and tag the net based on the content of the article. This is a huge help to get som useful tags. And having a nice collection of tags fits nicely with the auto tagging feature.

3. Meta keywords

Most people find their way  to this blog using a search engine, so why not give them a helping hand? simple tags will generate meta keywords from the tags.

The tagcloud that simple tags generates is more pleasing to the eye than the standard WordPress tagcloud. It varies the color as well as the size. Furthermore it is possible to customize it.

I have toyed a bit with the ability to only display tags from a specific category. This can be seen on the category pages ( ie weird ), where I display the tags for a category.I really would have liked to somehow use that to further specify what to look at. For example I want everything from the category “weird” tagged with “fun”. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to figure out to go about that. I really don’t want to get my hands dirty fiddling with to much WordPress php, but it seems that it somehow has to be the only way to go?

Another of Simple Tags features can be seen below, the related posts is generated based on the tags. Just as auto tagging, it seems to work quite nicely.

Spring is in the air

I’ve been out for a walk taking pictures of the emerging spring.

I really like the contrast between the decaying plants from the last season and the new growth. Since the the sun is hanging low, but shining brightly, there also is some very nice shadows.

The growth is still in its infancy, but in a couple of weeks everything will explode in green.

[zenphotopress sort=random number=5 album=2]

In order to show the images I installed Zenphoto and zenphotopress. It seems cleaner than coppermine, both to look at and to work with. And at the same time I changed the theme for the blog, and added a widget to show random images from the gallery.

Some of the images are high-dynamic-range(HDR) images.

mossrooms

I use a point and shoot camera, so I’m limited in the range and do not have access to raw images. But this is how i do it

Use autobracket
This takes 3 images. One with the default settings, two with respectively +/- 1 ev
Use a tripod and self-timer
This makes sure that the images are aligned in the best possible way.
Combine images
I use Qtpfsgui and i finally managed to compile and use hugins align_image_stack. Its necessary to align the images even though i use the tripod, as just a slight vibration will move the images a couple of pixels, and this results in fuzzy images. The align_image_stack is quite powerful, so handheld images is a possibility
Tonemap
I usually use the Mantiuk algorithm, but i tweak it so the colors become more vivid/surreal.

New server

The time has come and I’m moving to a new server.

Its a virtual private server, which mean root access via ssh, and a lot more managing. At the moment I’m fiddling with testing and moving data. Though very soon I will be moving, which probably will give some weirdness here, until everything is settled.

I am looking forward to be able to do all the fun stuff on the new server, ie jsp. In the meantime its just annoying to configure DNS, take backup’s, fixing stuff.

Lessons learned so far :

Its kool to be able to ssh in to the new server and just move everything with ftp and not download and upload.

iconv is a nifty unix command for converting: iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 file > newFile

DNS is a nightmare at least for me so far.

Its easy to move wordpress: Export everything, install a new wordpress and import the file. (which incidental also means upgrading).

pmwiki is also easy to move.

I have a mediawiki, that I don’t use any more and i couldn’t find an easy way to convert it to static html, so i think ill just have to live without it. Which is a bit annoying since I wikisquatted at it to show of some povray stuff and that will be lost.

I have a lot of old junk files from various experiments.