Last month I looked at my site stats and was all starry-eyed about the traffic I was getting. But a closer look at the numbers revealed the vast majority of it is just spammers and bots (spammers trying to flood my comment form, and search bots indexing my site). Instead of the 68,000 monthly visits listed in my site stats, the number of visits by actual humans is about 6,000 a month (not counting my visits, if you want to assume I’m human). That’s still a very nice number though 
. My most popular posts are ones about programming, travel in Japan, and pho. Time to write more pho reviews!
I just changed my permalinks to use the blog post titles rather than the post ID numbers in the URL, as I’ve learned that Google very heavily weights the words in the URL. AdSense does this too - my “technobabble” category, where I mainly discuss programming, keeps showing ads for DJ gear, presumably because of the word “techno” in the URL. I may drop the ads - I’m earning only about $1/month, which is a joke. I figured I’d keep them if they at least covered my monthly hosting fee, but it’s not even close.
I was nice and put in 301 redirects for my popular posts, and spiffed up my 404 page for anyone who gets lost. The very funny 404 Error Pages: Reloaded collection inspired me to create my own 404 page, giving a new purpose to a great drawing by my brother John.
I’ve been battling with the spammers using various techniques over the years, and I’ve finally settled on reCAPTCHA. I’d resisted using a captcha (as I don’t think non-spammers should have to bear the burden of my spam problem), but reCAPTCHA is nice because it’s actually productive work: the results of the captcha are used to help digitize books.
Shashin 1.0 is now available. New features include an options menu (so you don’t have to touch the code to change settings), improved random image and thumbnail display features, the ability to show the latest uploads to your albums, and UTF-8 support. Thanks to everyone who helped with the beta testing (the beta version was downloaded exactly 100 times).
Shashin is available at the WordPress plugin repository now, so you can get it there as well. The plugin repository requires a readme.txt file with an FAQ section. To avoid maintaining two sets of documentation, I rewrote my Shashin page to also follow the FAQ format.
If you’re crazy for code, you can read the PHPDoc documentation.
[tags]WordPress, Wordpress plugin, Picasa[/tags]
My new design is close enough to done for me to make it live. There are still some problems - my blogroll dropdown is a mess, I need to add “Recent Posts” to the navigation, I’m discovering the dropdown menus don’t handle nested lists very well, and I have to fix the comments template - but I can fix them all… later. Right now it’s past my bedtime 
If you notice any other problems, or have any suggestions, please let me know.
New design, with drop down menus
If you do a Google search for “CSS drop down menu”, you’ll find a number of examples that have been provided by well meaning folks. I wasted a lot of time with them. With only one exception, they were either:
- Poorly modularized, in that if I included their stylesheet and javascript files, and then dropped their menu markup inside a div in my design, my page would explode into a million pieces, or
- They relied on 100+ lines of javascript, which seems really unnecessary in the age of CSS (except for IE’s lack of CSS support for hovering with anything other than an anchor tag), or
- If I scrolled through the submenu items, the hover color on the top menu item would disappear, resulting in a goofy menu display (that’s a problem most don’t know how to solve without javascript though, including me).
The one exception was the CSS Express Drop Down Menu, which was the seventh or eighth one I tried. It has only one small javascript function (to patch the IE hover problem), the xhtml and css aren’t unnecessarily complicated, and the css is very well documented. It even includes special handling for the notorious IE5 for Mac. After dropping in the code, I just had to spend about 20 minutes tweaking the css for fonts, colors, and padding to fit my design, and now I’m good to go. If you’re looking for a good CSS drop down menu, this is the one to use!
[tags]CSS, javascript, drop down menu[/tags]
My Picasa plugin for WordPress is now available. I’ve been working on it for months now and I’m pleased to have it in good enough shape for others to try out. Please keep in mind I’m the only one who’s used it so far, so if you encounter any problems, please let me know, and I’ll fix it. You can get it at my Shashin page, where you’ll also find detailed instructions.
I had intended to make it available exclusively at the WordPress.org plugins site, as that’s where it would reach the widest audience. But I filled in their “add a plugin” form almost a week ago and haven’t heard anything back yet, so at least for now I’m making it available here.
I’m turning off comments on this post, as I’d like discussion to take place on the Shashin page.
The new design I’m working on for toppa.com
I’ve been busy working on a new design for toppa.com - this is a screenshot of it. My site is cluttered with a ton of links that really are more distraction than anything else. My design is inspired by the simple and clean open source “Cash” design. As you can see, I want to go even simpler (the CSS for Cash is also needlessly complicated, so I simplified that too). I’ve been using a lot more photographs in my posts over the past year, so I want to maximize the available width for pictures, but still be friendly to low-res monitors. Put all that together, and it means the sidebar has to go.
One part I still have to work on is rollover menus for the top navigation. The header area can be overlaid with a tag cloud, blogroll, etc. if someone wants to look at them. Otherwise, they’re neatly hidden away. After that I need to convert it into a WordPress theme, but I think that part will be easy.
Let me know what you think. If there’s any interest I’ll be happy to make a downloadable version - just leave me a comment.
[tags]open source web design, WordPress theme[/tags]
I haven’t posted recently, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on my blog.
I’ve completed a first-cut version of a plugin for displaying Picasa photos in Wordpress. I just tested it with my post earlier this month on Lew’s wedding if you want to see. I named it Shashin (pronounced sha-sheen), which is Japanese for photograph. I started working on it while I was in Japan, so I thought it deserved a Japanese name, and shashin sounds cool.
The mPicasaIntegration plugin I’ve been using so far has some real drawbacks. One is that it copies down the pictures from Picasa to your web server, so you’re eating up disk space (to be fair, the author did this because he was concerned at the time about what was allowed under the Picasa user agreement, but it’s pretty clear now Google is happy to let folks re-display their Picasa images). You also can’t adjust the size - every image is 640×480. In contrast, my plugin displays the images directly from Picasa, which means once I move all my pictures from my old Coppermine installation to Picasa, I can get an account for my site with a lower disk quota, and a smaller monthly bill ;-). Also, Shashin can display images in any of the 17 sizes supported by the Picasa API. Picasa’s on the fly scaling is pretty good - much better than the browser scaling I had to use with mPicasaIntegration.
I’ve also given it some nice display options - you can choose to have the photo link to the Picasa image, and optionally display the photo description as a caption (I eventually gave up on finding the “correct” way to caption an image in xhtml and just went with a div set to block display). Getting the xhtml to work the way I want has been driving me crazy though, due to WordPress’ autoformatting. For example, Wordpress sticks a line feed and a break tag between nested divs, even if there’s no line break in my code. I set the priority of my content filter to the maximum level, to try overriding the autoformatter, which helped with some problems, but not all of them.
I’m not quite ready to share it yet, mainly because I don’t have an admin page done yet for the photo table (I’m parsing the Picasa RSS feed on demand and then syncing it to local tables). I’d also like to offer some options beyond just displaying single images…I hope to be able to invite folks to beta test in a couple weeks.
I spent a fair amount of time on the architecture of the code. It’s all OO, and I went a bit over the top with the abstraction. That made the setup time longer but is now paying off, as I can add features without having to do a whole lot more coding. I also now have a good foundation of generic functionality for building other plugins (I have another in the works for managing real estate listings, for my dad).
[tags]Wordpress, plugin, Picasa[/tags]
mPicasaIntegration is no longer available for download on my site. Björn Teichmann now has it, and you can download it from his site. Björn started with my fixed version, and has added some new features. He plans to continue working on it. As I mentioned before, I made some fixes to it after its original author stopped working on it. I decided not to do any further work on it though, as its design is not something I want to stick with (It downloads the images from Picasa and stores them on your server. I’d rather just point to the images on Picasa, which lets me scale the images arbitrarily, and then I don’t have to worry about going over my disk quota either.) Since then I’ve started working on my own plugin, but I probably won’t finish it until sometime after I return to the US (i.e. sometime this summer).
[tags]WordPress, WordPress plugin, Picasa[/tags]
I’ve finished my emergency surgery on Markus Steinhauer’s mPicasaIntegration plugin, so it can now read the new Picasa RSS feed. I’ve created a page for it, with more information and a download link (there’s a link for it on the sidebar as well). It’s still 95% Markus’ code - most of my changes are in the RSS parsing, and I added some code to get the image dimensions and update the database, since that information is no longer in the RSS feed.
I’m disabling comments on this post, as I’d like any feedback to be on the page.
[tags]Wordpress, Wordpress plugin, Picasa[/tags]
In my previous post, I experimented with putting my photos on Picasa. I’ve been posting my photos to my own site until now, but it’s a real chore. Also, I severely hacked my Coppermine installation to make it do some things I wanted, which has made it hard enough for me to upgrade that I haven’t done so. For a long time I was thinking about writing my own photo management application, but never had the time. Picasa’s come along and it does about 80% of the things I’ve been wanting, so I want to start putting my photos there. The trick is getting it to integrate with Wordpress.
I looked for a plugin, and found folks discussing the mPicasaIntegration plugin. It’s a plugin that reads the Picasa RSS feed and stores data from it in custom tables, and then caches images as it needs them from Picasa. The only problem is that the plugin’s author and his website vanished from the web a few months ago, and I couldn’t find the code. So I was emailing people who I found were using it, and a kind person sent me a copy. He also informed me that it no longer worked. Google had significantly changed the Picasa RSS feed, which broke the plugin.
The time I normally set aside for blogging has been consumed the past few days by trying to fix it. I have it reading the RSS feed correctly again, but unfortunately some of the data the plugin relied on is no longer in the feed, so some of its features will need to be re-thought. In a few days I should have it working well enough so that at least some of the key features are working. Then I’ll post the code, as I know there are others who have been trying to track down this plugin as well (the author released it under a GNU license, so I don’t think he’ll mind).
[tags]Wordpress plugin, Picasa[/tags]
