Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Category: How It Is

Making philosophy about the why behind technical things.

  • I Haven’t Got Time For The Pain!

    Carly Simon and you should get the joke here Two months ago (give or take) I mused over photo gallery options for my sites. For Ipstenu, I’m now using WordPress and treating it like a photoblog. For JFO, however, I couldn’t answer it that easily.

    I really do like the Gallery project. I do! I learned a great deal about photography from it, and I’m thankful for it. But. I needed to move on as a user, a developer and a photographer. On that last one, I’m not a profession one, I’m just a goofy girl with a camera who likes to remember where she’s been. As a user, Gallery2 did the job well and without major issues. As a developer, it made me want to cry. Many times. Once I had to log into my friend’s server to fix his install. That just whomps.

    Even the developers admit that Gallery2 suffered from bloat:

    The code base is too complex and over-engineered because it was designed to fix every single thing that was wrong with Gallery 1 (Second System Effect) leaving its scope hazy and broad.

    The whole idea of it was “Your photos, your website.” And personally I love that. I hate having flikr or picasa in charge of MY photos. Let alone FaceBook. I have a blog on my domain for that same reason. But Gallery2 was too much. I never used half of it and it was 16+megs at its slimmest install. That the developers agreed with my feelings delighted me. And the Feature List was also exciting. As soon as G3 popped out, I grabbed a copy and started playing.

    With each version of Gallery3’s beta releases, I would get excited and then disappointed. Excited for the new toys and disappointed for how the overall effect felt. It just felt wrong for me. It wasn’t really Web2.0, even though it was, and the usage felt off. It didn’t make intuitively as much sense as G2, though it was still far better than Coppermine (which frankly I hate, and I know more people who argue with it than anything). At first I thought it was because I was so used to G1 and G2, but then I realized that over the last 10 years, I’ve used so many different systems that I’m fine with subtle differences. I’m savvy, I’m smart, I can code, so why did G3 feel wrong to me?

    It was too hard. Too much was built in and not plugable. Too much was hard coded in itself. Theming was impossible in the first release, and way too hard in the third. Understanding the theme system in G2 was easy, though implementing it was hard. Understanding it in G3 was hard and implementing was horrific. And before someone reminds me, AGAIN, that this isn’t even a beta product but an alpha, quite frankly that’s not an excuse. The basic things you need to be able to do with a first public release (be it beta, alpha or whatever) is to use it: Upload photos, change options, theme. That’s it. Those are the three things at it’s most basic that photo gallery software has to have, or you may as well be using an off-site solution.

    And while I may sound like I’m ranting, I’m not. I’m sad and frustrated and … You know, I really like Gallery! I really do. But it was starting to feel like Movable Type. They made a big shift and suddenly I wanted to know who peed in my coffee. The code felt wrong, it felt klunky, it felt raw. It was like starting over, and I didn’t like where it was going. And I realized the fact was that I was going to say goodbye to an old friend.

    Personally I’m all about the simplest, best, tool for the job. I wanted a way to update news on JFO and, when that was ALL I needed, I used CuteNews. When I realized the site was going to need something more, I weighed my options, tested software, and decided that while WordPress was a bit of overkill, I knew how to support it and customize it to be what I needed. In the end, that proved to be a perfect choice. When I had a forum (the first time around), it was IPB, which I liked, but it always felt too big. Now I use the very basic bbPress and it’s what I need and nothing more.

    If WordPress had PhotoPress, I’d probably have snagged that. Instead, I shopped around. I installed Coppermine, again, to test. I put up G3-alpha3 and then 4. I went to WikiPedia and dug out the compares and ended up in a head to head battle between ZenPhoto and Gallery3.

    ZenPhoto won by feeling better.

    Seriously, it’s asthetics at this point. There are only two features I miss: Being able to re-upload a picture and keep it’s MetaData, and having ‘new’ images show up with a different background color. But I can live without those.

  • Plug It In, Plug It In

    vilcus-plug-it-inI am not a great programmer by any means. I can hack around and muddle my way through with the best of the great net scapegraces. I’m not the genius who invents a brand new way of doing things. That said, I do, eventually, get annoyed with things enough that I force myself to learn how to code.

    Yesterday I was pissed off at WordPress because of it’s user management tools, and no plugins really did what I wanted. See, I have open registration. It lets me sync my blog and forum and let people post. But where it fails is that I can’t set users as ‘banned’ in WordPress. This is a simple thing, I feel. A user role that has no rights and is just banned from commenting. They can read all they want, but no comment. I’ve tried just about every tool out there, but they never work. In addition to that, spammers sign up to my blog.

    Since creating a ‘bozo’ user role is outside my ability, I decided what I wanted was a plugin to prevent people from registering if they were on my blacklist, similar to how I can prevent them from commenting on my comment blacklist. At first I was using TimesToCome Stop Bot Registration, which (among other things) uses StopForumSpam’s list of spammers as a stop-gap.

    The problem with TTC is that if you register with a bad email (jane132@gmail.com instead of jane123@gmail.com) and then try to register with the RIGHT email, it notes that the IP is the same and bans both emails and the IP. Which caused a couple people no end of problems on my site. It had to go.

    From there, I tried No Disposable Email, which checks against a list of known baddies. That was nice, but it was a text file list that you had to update by hand. But it got me thinking.

    I quickly converted it into Ban Hammer, which allowed me to update and edit the text file from a submenu inside my admin session. But that wasn’t enough. Why did I have to have two places to keep my jerk list? If someone was on my WordPress Comment Blacklist, I didn’t want them to comment. That implies they’re just not welcome at all. So why don’t I make Ban Hammer pull from that list. Which I did.

    I still have things I want to do to the code, like put in an option to use StopForumSpam’s list, and a way to edit the error message. But for now, Ban Hammer sits by my other plugins, Recently Registered (lists the last 25 registrations) and my bbPress plugin Spoiler Bar (adds in spoiler ‘code’ to bbPress) on my Google Code site. It’s not for ‘public’ release, but it’s there so my friends who have been helping me test out my ideas can easily download. What? I have nerd friends!

  • Google’s Blog Search is Irrelevant

    Google is a great search tool to find a website or general information about a topic, but quite frankly I’ve come to despise their blog search engine and I’m seeing serious flaws in their ranking app. In specific, they now search blog links (aka the blogroll) and when you search blogs about a topic, you get unrelated posts.

    If you search for Laurence Fishburne because you saw him on an episode of MAS*H recently as a soldier with a racist CO, Google gives you two hits for IMDb, one for Wikipedia, one about news (GoogleNews that is), and then, finally, his official website. While Google claims they don’t adjust ratings (that is, they don’t give more or less weight to a website on their own) and allow their PageRank algorithm to sort all this out, it seems to me that any official website should be ranked first. Also, IMDb shouldn’t be listed twice. But that depends on what people are looking for and what Google offers.

    We stand alone in our focus on developing the “perfect search engine,” defined by co-founder Larry Page as something that, “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”

    With that in mind, as I look at their tech overview for people who aren’t super geeky, I think that they come to the process a little flawed. PageRank is a great idea, don’t get me wrong. The more pages that link to a site, the higher the site is ranked (in essence). Okay, that’s great! Until you have those damn splogs. You know the ones. Spam blogs that promise you information about a person/place/thing, but is nothing more than a ton of links and 100 popups.

    Why would I search blogs? Easy, a lot of news sites are using blogs these days, and I want to read those too. It’s not rocket surgery, it’s how news is disseminated in 2009, folks. And I, personally, like to search by ‘date’ because I want to know what’s newest.

    Our search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), our technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. We also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.

    This looks like it should take care of spam blogs, but if you’ve ever done a search on blogs about someone (let’s use Mr. Fishburne again), you know it’s a crap-shoot.

    A news search is actually pretty helpful. I get some articles of interest right up front. If I flip the bit and sort by date it’s still pretty useful. When I go to blog search (which is a sidebar link off news), it’s still mostly beneficial.

    But I dare you, I dare you, to make sense of the articles when you click sort by date. Three posts on that first page might actually be something worth reading. Good luck finding them, and I hope they actually are what you want. But at the end of the day, those spam blogs aren’t the problem that makes me hate the blog-search.

    No, the problem, as I see it, are the posts like this:
    splog-1

    That bit I circled for you means that the ‘label’ (tag, category, whatever) for ‘Laurence Fishburne’ has been used 4 times. Go to that post and you will not find a single thing on the page of use. 99.999% of these blogs are blogspot and, while I don’t begrudge them their posts, they’re getting false promotion! And your post that you lovingly crafted about how totally amazing Fishburne is, and how he acted the hell out of that scene last night is now 10th on the list, and bound for page 2 any second now.

    The only official Google respons I can find on the matter is a post by Jeremy Hylton in their google forums (dated November 2008).

    We expected some problems from blogroll matches, but may have
    underestimated the impact on searches using the link: operator or
    where the query matches a blog or blogger’s name. We do expect to fix
    the problem you’re seeing. We’ll use the full page content, but
    exclude the content that isn’t really part of the post. I’m not sure
    if we’ll be able to make the change before the end of the year, but we
    are working on it and are pretty confident that it can be solved.
    We’ll post an update here when we’ve got a solution.

    And no, there is no update to that post.

    The hoopla from other blog sites has died down, but as this is still a prevalent problem on the blog search, I would really like to see it heat up again. Google’s blog search is pretty much dead useless to me if I can’t find information I want. As finding what I want is the whole point of Google (they said it first), they’ve made themselves irrelevant.

  • Caveman Tech Support Redux

    Many moons ago I mentioned how Caveman Tech Support was no different than the stuff I do. This is still the case. I will now caveman up my recent phone call.

    Grog: This fire help. Me Grog
    Lorto: Me Lorto. Help. Firekit wrong.
    Grog: You receive Firekit 2.0?
    Lorto: Ugh.
    Grog: Box include sticks, stone, flint?
    Lorto: Ugh.
    Grog: No broke sticks, stone flint?
    Lorto: Ugh. All here. All good. Firekit wrong.
    Grog: (sigh) If all there, what wrong?
    Lorto: No spark, no fire, me confused. Not like directions.
    Grog: *sigh* You missing items?
    Lorto: I missing nothing.
    Grog: You sure?
    Lorto: Me sure. No missing.
    Grog: You sure?
    Lorto: Me have one thing missing. Box say ‘include flint’ but Lorto no have flint. This not make Lorto no have fire, ugh?

  • Cross Compatible

    One of the things about the net that I love and hate is the development of freedom of expression. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a socialist at heart, and I love the fact that people can say what they want, how the want, in the USA. Well, mostly. Illegality being what it is.

    But I digress!

    The Browser Wars ended with a weird stalemate, and it wasn’t by choice of the users. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and their modifications of what was and was not okay in the Web (yes, there are guidelines to web design) managed to reward early adopters for things like HTML 2 and XHTML. They, without ever enforcing rules, and without ever making a browser of their own, managed to finagle enough ‘power’ such that website developers wanted to proudly display their compatibility. No longer did we create sites like ‘Best viewed on IE’, but we aimed for these standards, and coerced our websites to look ‘Okay’ on IE and Firefox, Windows XP and Mac OS X.
    IE 7 looks pretty good!
    But unless you have three computers with multiple boot sectors and multiple browser versions, either physically or virtually, how do you know what your site looks like?

    My personal website I know is ‘okay’ on most browsers. It looks perfect, just as I want, on OS X in Safari and Firefox. It looks good on Windows in Firefox. And then there’s IE. I hate it. I hate it. It’s not safe, it ignores the W3C, and it just doesn’t do what I think it should. Browse Happy is a site dedicated to reminding people about the alternatives. Like Firefox, yes, which is my Windows XP browser of choice. But I can’t just ignore IE, even if I hate it. Oh, I ignore IE 6 and older, but 7 and 8 I need to pay attention to. So what do I do?

    I hit up sites like BrowserShots, where they will go and snag a screenshot of what my site looks like in a freakishly vast array of browser/OS combinations. It’s not perfect, sometimes it hits weird errors where things I know look fine suddenly don’t. But if you want a quick shot to see what CSS stupidity certain browsers entertain, well, it’s good and free.

  • Pilot Fish Woes

    This is a true story. (more…)