Here’s the moon one:

So I’ve spent the past 2 days rewriting it – further customising the base script that generates my thumbnails and reads the directories. The functions now output arrays which in a simple for-each loop does all the work the big nasty block of echo statements. The old:

 buildThumbs($gF, $tF, $tW, $tH);
 // call to another function to generate the thumbs

if (file_exists($gF."description.txt")) {
	$file = $gF."description.txt";
	$open = fopen($file, "r");
	$contents = fread($open, filesize($file));
	fclose($open);
	$header = str_replace("_", " ", $_GET['a']);
	$header = ucwords($header);
	echo "
";
 	echo "
".$header."

";
	echo "
".$contents."


";
}
elseif ($_GET["a"] != "") {
echo "
Jamesy, please stop being a lazy twat and make a description.txt for here, thanks.

";
}

And the new:

buildThumbs($gF, $aF, $tF, $tW, $tH);
		// call to another function to generate the thumbs
		$rawheader = $_GET['a'];
		$header = str_replace("_", " ", $_GET['a']);
		$header = ucwords($header);

		if (file_exists($gF.$aF."description.txt"))
		{
			$file = $gF.$aF."description.txt";
			$open = fopen($file, "r");
			$desc = fread($open, filesize($file));
			fclose($open);
		}
		else
		{
			$desc =  "James can you please make a description.txt like... now?";
		}

Which in my mind is both easier to read and means that on the front end I no longer have to go through each function to update style elements – so win win for future proofing!

The biggest change though is the way that it handles the image structure. Before it was only capable of reading one folder full of albums and ouputting like that. I’ve written a new portion that scans a folder of Galleries and then gathers the albums from inside each one. This is best show on the gallery page, for example:  http://photos.shizzlenizzle.biz/the_coast when you refresh it will read each album and select a random thumbnail.

So yup, Photo wise I am sorted now with efficient code and proper organisation .

Else where I have finally got round to fixing Sendmail on this server. I’d been wondering why it was so quiet until I realised the mail server virtualmin had installed for itself just plain wasn’t working. Uninstall, put in Sendmail and everything works lovely – too well infact, my mailbox hasn’t know whats hit it.

Hopefully next weekend can be a bit more weekend-like!

As I said last night, I seem to have a knack for unwittingly taking the colour out of a Photograph – but tonight there was such rich colour that in many of them it just seemed perfect with only a few tweaks.

I have however on some made them black and white, just because I wanted a feeling of either nostalgia or to show the deep contrast between the light and dark in some scenes. So… lets count my own top 3!

This the the one I ended up naming my gallery after. I just love the framing of the street lights that just stretch on seemingly infinitely into the distance along a pedestrianised highstreet. The twinkly netted lights above further help this and to cap it all off at the very end is a person just in shadow, surrounded by so much emptiness. So it is quite literally the lonely mile…

This is one I find just stands out. The colour of the neon is so vibrant with what is a very plain sky and quite harsh surroundings. The wet boardwalk reflects the red and makes almost a pool of blood on the floor. The sign says amusements and the light orange lighting gives it a warm feeling, but the colours stand out so much it really does show the gaudy nature of seaside amusements.

And my overall favourite of the night, is quite plain in comparison to the others I’ve shot but nothing makes me feel like this one. It’s one that really speaks to me, because these style of lights is just timeless. I put it in black and white for that nostalgic feel (somewhat ruined by the CCTV in the background – once again prying into the lives of the public!). In any decade of which there are photos of the seaside towns these lights just appear in it. It’s the little details in life that make up the bigger picture and having always as a child gawped at them and gone “oooh pretty”… infact I still do that, they just feel like old friends, sure LEDs may be more efficient but they have no soul. Here’s to many happy blinks and to many more!

My Good friend's photograph

The other night, and infact today – later on, I have been taking some photos in the night. It’s an interesting experience without the hussle and bussle of people who either get in the way or seem to find the fact you have a camera worthy of spending their time staring at you.

It’s also tricky as I spent the money I was going to use to by a tripod on a game, and an album… and a book and well eventually you end up back at the start. So my photos that look awesome on the little screen are deceptively sharp until I get home.

It’s interesting how my fellow photography cohorts and I style our photos once we get to the editing stage. My good friend Josh has edited his Photograph to be colourful and bright. I tend to be a lot more bleak in my style, choosing to focus on the loneliness of the place or the harshness of the environment. Which is probably why I enjoy the coast so much, as you can see over at my gallery.

Call it a reflection on my personality if you will, and you would probably be right that I tend to focus on the negative far too much. That being said I don’t think my photographs portray loneliness after the trip into the city centre the other night. I feel they show a sense of the strange and beautiful world of the urban night, while being gritty and dirty at the same time. My particular favourite is the rusted gate below which has a story to tell – though you may not want to hear it! You can view the rest here: http://photos.shizzlenizzle.biz/Norwich

A vandalised gate, an interesting photo or a deathwish for the mad photographer walking these dark alleys?

]]> http://shizzlenizzle.biz/2010/02/the-night/feed/ 0 http://shizzlenizzle.biz/2010/02/uploads-is-back/ http://shizzlenizzle.biz/2010/02/uploads-is-back/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:01:50 +0000 Jamesy http://shizzlenizzle.biz/?p=55 Yes, my cheverato installation is gone and I finally have something to show for myself instead of a filler page.

Currently it’s at version 0.5 which means use at your own risk – the account part at least since I know the uploading part works… or should.

So, lets run through the features!

1. Index: of course this is where all the front end interface is. Simple upload box, slider of the last 25 images you’ve uploaded bish bash bosh.
2. Gallery: this displays every image in a nice thumbnail view. You can search the gallery and if you are an admin flagged images will be highlighted red.
3. Detailed View: this gives you the various links, and some information about the image as well as a larger preview which links directly to the image.
4. Flag Image: you can report images that are not so innocent using the [!] button on the blue header bar. You’ll be given this form and simple pick one of the options.
5. Admin Index: this is where various statistics are displayed, such as how much space you are taking up and how many users etc etc.
6. Reported Images: this is a list of all the images that have been reported. Not so elegant as the gallery but it’s just their as a tool so not that important.
7. Reported Detail: same as before just with two big buttons “Delete” and “Clear”
8. Cleared: looks like this image wasn’t too bad after all

So yeah, trying to keep a unified theme as well as a light footprint other than the bandwidth of the images themselves.

Link:  http://uploads.shizzlenizzle.biz/

Edit:

Just spotted on my bandwidth statistics the impact of my day of mindlessly browsing through the gallery. Dear lord…

One thing that we lost during the upgrade to vBulletin 4.0 was a range of plugins and products for vB that were very useful to playstuff. We don’t tend to install things willy nilly just because we feel like it, only those that provide a specific purpose or suit our ethos which meant losing one, meant losing a significant proportion of our site’s functionality.

The biggest casualty being our game server status page, which displayed the current map, players, online/offline and other intricacies which made it clear what we were about. Take this post in the feedback sectionI like the look of your site playstuff.

I read many interesting posts.
I would however comment that it is ironic how hard it is to actually play stuff there – i couldn’t even find out if you had servers….

So this raised an important point, the previous addon we used was a phgstats/ vBulletin bridge: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=118347 but this is for 3.5 and so we were very fortunate it survived right up to the very end, vB 3.8.4.

Being the pragmatic chap I am, I took it upon myself to take a crash course in vBulletin plugin making and ended up with a successful merge of GAMEQ and vBulletin which gives exactly the same functions as the old one.

When it’s in a usable state it will of course be freely released, here, maybe at vbulletin.org but the big boys there scare me somewhat. For now, here are some screenshots:

Admin view of Playstuff servers from an early build.

Here is a normal view:

Pretty view of playstuff servers page. What the end user will see

And you can see it live here:

http://playstuff.net/servers.php

There’s a lot still to do, but while it works and looks good as it does now – I’m fine to leave it as is until I can catch up on the rest of the work I need to do… like schoolwork.

I also figured it was time to get organised in the way I store files. My haphazard method of just making any random directory and uploading to it is just plain silly, so I made a new sub-server. Which brings me to the splash pages, I just wanted something simple but with more than just a plain background. Ended up writing this little function which takes a total value which I know to be 1024MB per virtualhost on here, and outputting the free space, the total and a percentage in an array which can be plugged into very simple CSS in order to create a graph.

function free_space_graph() {
	$path = getcwd();
	$free = exec("du -c -a $path");
	$total = 1048576;
	$percentage = $free * 100 / $total;
	$details = array("free" => $free, "total" => $total, "percentage" => $percentage);
		return $details;
}

The CSS is simply

#graph {
width:400px;
margin: 10px auto;
height:25px;
position:absolute;
bottom:6px;
left:56px;
background:url(/graph-bg.png);
overflow:hidden;
}

#percentage {
height:25px;
background:url(/progress-bar.png);
}

#graph-text {
color:#fff;
width:400px;
height:25px;

line-height:25px;
text-align:center;
position:absolute;
bottom:17px;
left:56px;
z-index:2;
}

Easily plugged into:

$percentage = free_space_graph();
$width = round($percentage['percentage'], 0);
$total = $percentage['total'] / 1024;


    	Using: % out of MB
    

So yeah, you can see it in action at: http://uploads.shizzlenizzle.biz/ and http://files.shizzlenizzle.biz/

*Note, the CSS is a bit specific to my pages but should be simple enough to work out. All you need is the main #graph div to be around the inner #percentage div.

Link to original:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/anatoliy_zenkov/4271592658/

Download Links:

Mac – http://dl.dropbox.com/u/684632/mousepath.jar

Windows –  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/684632/mousepath.exe.zip

I think it’s a good new direction, I took quite a large deal of inspiration from the simplicity of a friend’s site: http://blog.artlukm.com/ and it’s always been an area I struggle with. Particularly when designing a website for myself, I am not sure what it is but it’s always easier to do it for someone else.

Another thing I was keen on was some fancy javascript tit-bits I’d seen elsewhere. Particularly for the movable sidebar boxes which I feel give a little bit of user interaction, the calendar style date also gives it a bit of flair while sticking to K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) as it doesn’t use any images, just pure CSS/ XHTML.

Finally, a solution I thought was neat was the drop down panel for the social links. It’s always difficult to keep the amount of sub-information around the post as little as possible while retaining the same level of functionality. I am a big fan of icons in this scenario but sticking loads of icons everywhere wouldn’t have suited this style at all.

So that’s pretty much it, all thats left is the image uploading website, a few bits and pieces for Playstuff and as per the norm a mountain of homework stacked neatly* to my right.

* all over the floor

One of my pet projects taking up my time is improving my rudimentary knowledge of PHP by re-writing my image host from scratch, rather than adding database functionality to Cheverato. I suppose it would have been easier if the comments and variable names were not all in Spanish.

So far I’d put it at about version 0.0.1, seeing as it has basic user -> database functionality and most of the front-end functions are working (image flagging, paginated gallery, registration and search with paginated results) but they are not implemented in an interface that is usable by the public. I’ve not formatted the data past just spewing out the raw Mysql data, nor have I implemented user access levels. But it’s getting there, chipping away at it piece at a time.

One thing I found interesting about when I started is that I approached it in much the same way as I would designing a wordpress theme, forum layout or any other stylistic work I do. Scribbling down a rough sketch and then plowing through it. Strangely this haphazard manner of planning didn’t cut it for a project that requires more than images and code, but a structure. Once I’d scribbled down a plan it became much easier to see what to script into it, and where it should go.

Another job which is important is the preparation of vB4 skins. At present playstuff has the Orange skin set up and collecting a lovely group of bug threads and issues – quite a few being something inherited from the stock theme which means us Administrators ending up having to fix a product that was paid for – thus my scathing review below this post. But it has, since its creation, had a blue skin in tandem with it (because mainly I like blue, and it’s nice to have a bit of choice). I’m holding that off until the maintenance updates later on this month.

I also have various finishing touches to another forum I had to convert its skins to vBulletin 4. Mainly profile fields on postbits and the like, less than exciting but needed.

My final task will be to redesign this website. Glassy is a theme that’s sat on my desktop for about 6 months and like anything you code six months ago, it looks awful when compared to what you know now. It’s pretty incomplete but it was the best thing at the time to put on here.

Will no doubt take me months.