blogs

escape, originally uploaded by pebaline.

On the streets of Soho, London in April 2009.

We are experiencing technical problems with Boblycat and slowdowns, which we need to address in the coming weeks. However, we have a number of ideas on how to handle these problems, where the possible solution in most cases will lead to an improved site.

The major issue we have is memory-use for each request, which in many cases cause the server to kill off random processes. This is a bad thing. Currently we are using a fairly memory-intense setup consisting of drupal and gallery2. Changing drupal to something else is not going to be easy in the short-term and will require a lot of work. The most likely candidate for optimising is gallery2 which currently serves as image server with convenient blog functionality. Some of our users are using Flickr and have the same functionality there, but (imo) with better tools. An added benefit is that the image-serving is done by Flickr which will use their bandwidth and allow Boblycat to be faster.

So one option we have is to terminate gallery2, install some migration-code to map existing (photo) blog-posts to retrieve the images currently in our gallery from Flickr instead, and any new blog-posts will have to be done from Flickr. This will solve a number of problems and will probably not be too much work (mostly restricted to the migration script).

However, Flickr is Flickr, and not everything we (may) want to do is possible via Flickr. The features that in general make Flickr useful is that it is the "cloud" (and will handle imagehosting and bandwidth) and it allows easy blogging from the image. Flickr is not alone providing image-"cloud" features for inclusion in a (photo)blog. Several others exist, e.g Picasa Web Albums, FreeImageHosting, and a bunch mentioned here. Most of these allow you to copy a link to an image and then paste it into your blog, but most have no simple way to directly blog to boblycat. Some of these are also meant for individual images and not generic sharing of albums/collections/slideshows. If people have any favourites of these that should be supported, please let me know.

However, imo the most serious contender for practical use to Flickr seems to be Picasa Web Albums. It has most of the features we need (as I see it now). The thing it lacks is the simple "blog this" button which is at Flickr, but it has a public API which allows us to integrate the images from picasa web albums in whatever way we want. Integration with rich client Picasa is also surprisingly good. But this will require some more work to integrate which might not be needed if everyone is happy about Flickr.

Solving the technical issues that plague us is priority number one, and in the weeks ahead we might be more unstable as we test various approaches. If you have other ideas or input, please let me know via comment, twitter, irc, mail, ...

drink stairs man woman, originally uploaded by pebaline.

I've broken my Olympus Pen-EE half frame camera couple weeks ago, but this is what it was able to capture in its better days. From Charing Cross, london in March 2009. Shot on Kodak TMAX 400.

hands, originally uploaded by pebaline.

There's a lot of nice stuff going on relating to hands in this one. :) London, March 2009.

shade, originally uploaded by pebaline.

From my short trip to Nice, South of France in October 2005 actually. Shot with Holga on Ilford Delta 400 film.

snow parliament, originally uploaded by pebaline.

February 2009 saw London covered in heaps of snow for a few days and as a result people's creativity was peaked. I happened on the man putting this replica of the Houses of Parliament together by chance just when he was finishing it. He took all of 15 minutes to make this with the aid of his Oyster card. It was a good day. :)