First, I must confess that I like trying software out. That’s probably how I ended up having some many accounts with so many services and having a Tumblelog AND a Wordpress blog. Since this blog is not running on wordpress.com, it is for me to remember and backup my database and files from time to time in case of a problem with my server. For my Tumblr, it is different. The data is on Tumblr server(s) and there are no features I know of in the admin to download them and store them locally. After a year of publishing a daily list of the movies I watch and books I read, this tumblelog became a Journal of my cultural activities and I grew attached to it. Recently I decided it had to be backedup in case something happened to my tumblr account or whatever. As usual, someone had the idea before me and a tool is available. It is called – appropriately enough – Tumblrbackup. It couldn’t be easier to use, enter your credentials, select the tumblelog to backup and the destination on your computer. A folder is created which contains your posts, images, avatar and even your custom style. A index.html file is generated allowing you to browse your own content on your local hard drive. The index.html doesnt include your custom style so it looks pretty plain but everything you wrote and uploaded is there… Now I just need to remember and rerun the backup from time to time. Cool!

I don’t remember how I’ve heard about Chive, a young alternative to PhpMyAdmin (version 0.3 was released less than a week ago). I believe it was a link on twitter.
There seem to be two policies when it comes to a MySQL browser for web developers: the desktop app or the web app. A lot of people seem to use PHPMyAdmin though I gave it up several years ago. First for the MySQL QueryBrowser, later on for SequelPro (OS X). SequelPro does everything I need, connect via socket, tcp or ssh which is extremly useful. Still, sometimes, to install a PHPMyAdmin (or something similar) on a remote server or a dev server can be handy. So I tried Chive.

The installation couldnt be easier. Just unrar the package, place it in your document root somewhere and it works. Chive runs on the Yii PHP framework and, as far as I can tell, it’s pretty fast. The interface is less cluttered than PHPMyAdmin. Of course, you have to get some work done with a tool like that to judge of its efficiency but it looks like a nice alternative to PHPMyAdmin to me. Actually, the feature list comparaison on the Chive website is impressive (considering the age of the project). I will definitely recommend it to developers I work with because I hate using PHPMyAdmin when pairing with them.

If you have any use for a web based MySQL Browserm check Chive out:

If you ever wonder where your readers are from, if you ever need to adjust your application to the origins of its users; you can determine the geographic location of a connection by using an IP to Country table.

I should start by saying that I do not always like the way websites use this feature. As much as I appreciate, let’s say, Yamaha, to redirect me from www.yamaha.com to fr.yamaha.com based on my location ; I can not stand for Google or Wikipedia to assume that I either speak French or intend to search French speaking contents.

Another thing I absolutely can not stand is of Skype (for example) to prompt me to download the French version of its application just because I am browsing the Web from France. I can not tolerate any French speaking applications to be installed on my computer. Actually, Mac OS X is such a treat on that point because I can have a French bought CD of Snow Leopard and still install my system in English. All the OEM Windows systems I purchased in my country of residence were bound to remain in (poorly-translated) French. I actually would always keep my license number handy but use a pirated English (but otherwise equivalent) version just so that my Start button would actually spell ‘Start’.

Anyway, the IP to Country determination can still come in handy and here’s how I made it work for me (using PHP/MySQL). I am aware that it is possible to do the www.yamaha.com to fr.yamaha.com redirection simply using geolocated aliases. Hosting providers such as OVH usually provide this functionality.

1. Download the IP to Country.csv database (and update it there after) from http://ip-to-country.webhosting.info/
2. Create a table to hold the data
3. Import the data from the csv file into that table

Then, from your PHP code, you can get the country code for example, using the code below

The code above is using Code Igniter to query the database. I suppose it is self explanatory enough to be transposed to any other DAO you might be using.

Subsonic is a web application allowing you to stream or download your music collection over the Internet. It is the newest application of the kind after the famous Ampache and Jinzora. I have recently tried Ampache but was disapointed by the user experience so when Framasoft added a notice about Subsonic, I was immediatly interested.

The installation is pretty simple:

1. Download the standalone version
2. Untar the downloaded archive in the directory of your choice for example /var/subsonic
3. Edit subsonic.sh if you feel you need to change the default settings (port or memory allowed)

You are now ready to launch subsonic by running subsonic.sh

To use Subsonic, connect to http://<your_server>:8080

Connect using the admin:admin account and you should now see the Subsonic main page.

To add music to your collection, browse to Music Folder and add your music collection, for example

Rock    /mnt/data/music/rock

You can now log out, sign in using your user and enjoy your music from anywhere

Subsonic Main page

One nice feature offered by Subsonic is to reencode your music to a lower bitrate to limit the bandwidth usage, to do so, you need Lame. Download the lame archive from the official site, untar it, and rename the generated folder to “lame”. Then, copy this folder to /var/subsonic/transcode. You’re all done. Enjoy

Browse to the settings and immediately change the admin password. You can then create a new user for yourself.

Two
months ago, Derrick and I opened another blog dedicated to my other
main point of interest: Cinema and Video. After a few weeks of writing content for our blog, quite a bit of information has accumulated. Sometimes, we find it necessary to look at our pasts posts in order to get a piece of information. Browsing back in time has become more and more tedious as we have more content archived. On the very same day, Derrick and I both had the idea that we needed to create an Index page allowing instant access to any posts.

I worked on a template page for Wordpress over the weekend in order to display such an index. Our main goal was to simply display a list of posts by date, but as I started to work on this I realized it could be a nice feature to also offer a list grouped by categories and tags. Since the list of posts was bound to grow, I decided to make each section title collapsable while still offering a view all link to display every posts title if so desired.

Before going ahead with the code, I did a quick Google search to see if anyone had worked on this before. What I found was an impressive graphical view of a blog past developped by Vladimir Prevolac based on the default archive page of Tumblr calledSnazzy Archives. I really liked Vladimir’s work and decided to integrate that option as well  in my Index page.

As I started working on this, I decided that I would make my work more valuable by making it generic enough to be used by other people. To do so, I knew that I had to make sure of the following:

1. Use Wordpress core functions
2. Not rely on the pre existence of the Snazzy Archives plugin as not everyone would want to use i
3. Test my index page with at least three different Wordpress installations

It was the first time I tried to extend Wordpress, and after a quick Google search I found this function reference page on theWordpress Codex. The documentation, though still being worked on by the community, is easy to read and understand and makes it quite enjoyable to work with the Wordpress code. In the end, the only function I had to write was the one returning me the list of months during which at least one blog post had been written. Still, I found the code I needed within Wordpress, I just had to adapt it to what I was doing.

Like I said, I really liked Snazzy and wanted to add it to our blog but my Index Template Page couldn’t rely on it to be installed as it might be temporarely disabled or some other user might not want to show it. I simply tested the existance of the plugin before placing the link to the Snazzy Archives in the page.

In order to test, I tried my template on three installations of Wordpress. Two running Wordpress 2.6 and one running 2.7. I also ran some tests enabling or not the permalinks options as it changes the url handling quite a bit. Regarding this question of URL, I decided not to use Ajax as Wordpress front-end doesn’t use it, I decied to make my Index page match the rest of the blog engine on that aspect as well.

All in all, after a few hours of coding and experimenting with Wordpress, I had completed my own template page. So far it has worked fine for us, but feel free to report any bug or share your comments with us on this page.

Live demo:

You can see the result in action by visiting our archive page on World Wide Angle.
You can also see it running on my this very blog.

Download:

You can download the template here.

Installation process:

1. Download the template
2. Upload the template archives.php to your theme directory (i.e. <wordpress>/wp-content/themes/<theme_name>
3. Make sure your script file can be read
4. Adapt the page structure of the template to match your blog theme structure (i.e. copy the beginning and th end of your blog theme index.php page like the content div and sidebar declaration)
5. Enter your wordpress administration and write a new page
6. Enter the title you wish to see in your menu (be carefull, “index” might generate problems, choose another name)
7. Do not enter any content
8. Find the page template menu and select “Index Page”
9. Publish this new page
10. You’re  done, go to your blog and test it

If you wish to use Snazzy Archives as well, you also need to:

1. Download SnazzyArchives and upload it to your plugin directory
2. Go to your administration page and enable the plugin
3. Refresh your blog archive page, the link to snazzy archives should appear

We hope you like it!

I am not much of a Facebook user but decided to log in today to see what was new and try and give my profile page an update. As soon as I logged in, I was impressed by a “new” feature (it might not be that new but like I said, i do not connect often). Facebook immediately suggested me to set my profile photo, and not only did it suggest me a number of photos that my friends have uploaded and tagged has featuring me, Facebook was even able to suggest which part of the picture I should select and crop.
As you can see below, the interface is very intuitive, all I have to do is either accept this picture as a profile image or use the arrows to browse through the suggestions. I’ve added a sample below to show how good facebook was at the “where’s Waldo” game.

This profile photo suggestion feature is clever and useful and I can easily understand how it works – codewise. But how does Facebook know which part of the photo features me ? Does anyone know ? Did my friends actually highlight each person on the picture when they uploaded them ? So far, the only information I’ve found on the subject comes from the facebook blog. It suggests that, when tagging a picture, one highlights the person. I guess i’m going to have to upload a picture to see how it works . Of course, the other option I immediately thought about was that there was a picture analysis algorithm able to define, given several pictures, who was the person that appeared on all of them and then highlight that person on each photos. Now, that sounds a bit too much. After trying out the photo upload myself, it confirms the first option : Facebook stores the location of each tagged person in the image. Smart !

Anyway, congratulations to Facebook on that one, it becomes very easy for the user to create a profile photo and, by doing so, will probably bring a lot of people (like me) to actually define one and maybe become a better facebook user.

I’ve just installed the twitter updater plugin on this blog so, if everything works fine, any post on this blog will automatically be announced on my twiiter. Testing this out with this post… See you on twitter !

L’accès à ce blog se fait depuis mon site perso en cliquant sur le lien blog et malheuresement l’url était alors http://samanthahalfon.net/wordpress. Je viens de corriger cela en migrant wordpress dans le repertoire worldgoneweb. Il restait cependant un probleme, si quelqu’un avait sauvegardé un lien vers un ancien post, il ne pourrait plus y accéder. Du coup, j’ai rajouté dans l’ancien répertoire un fichier .htaccess contenant la directive suivante :

La documentation d’Apache offre davantage d’informations sur Redirect et Alais.

Linkedin est très bien référencé par Google et il n’est pas rare de tomber sur un profil Linkedin en faisant une recherche sur quelqu’un dans Google. La page que l’on voit est alors le profil basic de Linkedin (très sommaire) ; mais il est possible de personnaliser cette page… Pour cela :

• Se connecter sur Linkedin
• Aller dans “my profile”
• cliquer sur “show my full profile”

Cette option permet à la fois d’éditer le profil que l’on autorise Linkedin à dévoiler aux internautes (enregistrés ou non sur Linkedin) et de personnaliser l’URL de son profil personnel qui sera du type : http://www.linkedin.com/in/what_you_want_here (par exemple, http://www.linkedin.com/in/samhalfon).

Il est également intéressant d’indiquer sur cette page les liens de son site personnel, de son blog ou de sa compagnie sur cette page et ainsi de faire profiter ces sites du page rank élevé des profils Linkedin (le nombre de liens affichés est limité à trois).

N’hésitez pas à me contacter par email pour établir une connexion Linkedin.