Stig's Musings

I'll post some sketches now and then as promised. This is a partial sketch as part of a form+colour study for a potential later picture of the garden.

and the little "studio" where stuff is made

Boblycat updates has been on hold till everyone got a fair chance to try out the Flickr-bridge. Seems Knut got it working too and people seem happy about Flickr as solution, so the migration path looks candysweet. So say your teary-eyed goodbyes to the gallery. Let me know if yall need a zip of the old pictures.

As for my own work, I must admit that every little piece I do these days take a lot longer than it used to and it will probably take years till we get anywhere fun. Might try to post some coal/crayon/acrylics sketches one of them days. Mostly exploring form, plasticity and colour these days, in addition to reading.

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, ...

Reprocessing a late evening coastal shot from august 2008, now that I finally have the photoshop-fu needed.

[300D + 100mm + Photoshop + custom Oil filter + brush tool]

Self-timer and me

W.I.P

Border Collie - These highly energetic dogs are often considered the world's best sheep herding dogs. [Wikipedia]. When they lack sheep to herd, they will frequently herd people with sheepish looks.

One down, some to go.