Windy Weather » Web Tools

Publishing Photos to Coppermine

Darrell — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 19:04:56 +0000

Coppermine Gallery

As you may know, I’m using Coppermine as my photo gallery.

Since WinXP days, I have been using xp_publish feature of Coppermine to tie into the publishing wizard of windows to upload photos to publish them to albums on Coppermine.

Changes are required for Vista and Windows 7. I’ll cover all the changes you need to allow you to upload your photos using these systems and Coppermine.

Using Windows XP

Just to cover all the history, here’s the way this works under Windows XP.

The instructions for using the feature are found by going to http://yourdomain.com/yourcoppermine/xp_publish.php

and following the instructions. These involve downloading a REG file which is then added to the registry. Notice the registry path in the following example.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\
PublishingWizard\PublishingWizard\Providers\YOUR COPPERMINE Photos]
"displayname"="Your Coppermine Title"
"description"="Your Coppermine Description"
"href"="http://Yourdomain/yourcoppermine/xp_publish.php?cmd=publish"
"icon"="http://yourdomain/favicon.ico"

Publishing in WinXp is pretty easy.

In one of your photo folders, click the Folders button to display the Picture Tasks pane on the left.
Select the photos you would like to publish to Coppermine.
Choose Publish the Selected Items to the Web.
This starts the wizard that allows you to choose your coppermine site from a list of choices and then upload your photos to an existing or newly created album.

Changes for Vista and Windows 7

For Vista and Windows 7, the feature was renamed from Publish to “Order Prints”, and the registry key was changed. Here’s the Vista / Windows 7 version.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\
PublishingWizard\InternetPhotoPrinting\Providers\Your Coppermine Title]
"displayname"="Your coppermine title"
"description"="Your coppermine description"
"href"="http://yourdomain/yourcoppermine/xp_publish.php?cmd=publish"
"icon"="http://yourdomain/favicon.ico"

Notice that the registry key has changed. You will need to manually edit the reg file before you apply it to the system.

It may be that the “Publish to the Web” feature was removed in Vista and this changes your site to a server for “Ordering Prints”.

Publishing in Vista

To publish in Vista, the steps are a little different.

In the file explorer, navigate to your photos, and preview one of the photos.
In the top left of the preview window, choose Go to Gallery.
In the gallery window, select the photos you would like to publish.
In the print menu at the top, choose Order Prints. You will notice the second time you use this that your choice will be brought out into the menu.
This activates the choices again with your choice highlighted and when you click Next.
The Coppermine Publishing wizard starts as before with a login screen.
In Vista, the protocol has apparently changed, but Coppermine has not been updated. At least not for versions 1.4.x.
If you create a new album, then the wizard will create the album and stop. In this case just run the wizard again, and choose the album from the list. It will work this time. Alternatively, you can create the album on the coppermine site and then run the wizard to publish the photos.
If you choose an album that exists from the list, then the wizard will continue and upload the photos.

You probably won’t be able to publish full size photos to your website this way since they will exceed a limit of 2 or 4 MB that you or php may have set for your site. In this case you will need to use Filezilla or another FTP client to upload your photos and then Batch Upload in Coppermine to assign the photos to an album.

Publishing in Windows 7

Windows 7 removed the photo gallery. Searching help on Windows 7 indicates that the album is gone and that you should fine one on your own. Of course, a free, and high quality solution for your system may be to use Windows Live Photo Gallery. You may want to choose which components you install from Windows Live since there are many that you may not want.

After installing the Windows Live Photo Gallery, run it.
Add your photo folder to the gallery by right clicking on the top of the tree at the left and choosing Add Folder to Gallery.
At this point, you can choose which photos you want to order and then choose the Create ribbon where you will find Print and Order Prints, which will activate the Wizard.
I noticed that newly created albums did not appear immediately when the wizard was re-run on Windows 7. You may want to create your albums on Coppermine before running the ordering wizard to avoid this delay.

I will be upgrading to Coppermine 1.5.x soon and will see if there are adjustments to be made to these instructions after I do that.

Cheers, and happy Coppermining.

- Windy

SiteProbeQt – Monitor Your Websites

Darrell — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 21:23:17 +0000

SiteProbeQt is a program to monitor your websites, or other websites, and to log their up/down times.

SiteProbeQt Main Window

Add a list of sites, then click Start Monitoring and minimize the program. Each event is logged

After a long time, you can view the log from the File menu.

View Log Dialog

The log lines are formatted as CSV so that you can process them using spreadsheets.

A Log line is added each time the program is stopped and started.

The program will not restart when the system reboots. Perhaps I’ll investigate this enhancement in the future.

You can find the program here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/siteprobeqt/

A Windows Installer, and the sources are available. The program should be easily portable to the Mac, or Linux since it uses the Qt framework.

Enjoy,

Windy

Modern Website Building

Darrell — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 06:55:47 +0000

The Website Building Problem

As a consultant, I am continually looking for modern tools to help my clients build websites. Recently several web site builders have appeared that combine Hosting and Website construction in a single place and for a single small fee.

In the past few years I have come across more and more clients who have been held hostage to the old way of doing websites. The old way uses off-line tools like FrontPage, DreamWeaver or other tools that run on a desktop computer and then upload the website pages to the hosting service. Clients run into several problems when these tools are used.

These off-line site building tools are expensive [ several hundred dollars], require special training and must be upgraded over time.
Often the clients can’t find the person who built their site, or it costs too much or that person has lost vita information about the site because it has been months or years since they made any changes.
The hosting service may be going out of business or changing it’s terms and so the site expert needs to be contacted to move the site to a new hosting service. The client may not have the credentials or expertise to sign into the site to back it up to migrate to another hosting service.

Modern sites utilize a CMS or Content Management System. There are many out there, but only in the past couple of years have they started to appear that work for the novice user. A CMS separates the “content” of the site from its “Look”. The text and pictures are stored separately from the “Theme” which directs how the page is laid out on the browser page. Also sites using CMS’s are not built on your local computer and then uploaded. Rather they are built on the site itself, using the browser and software running on the site. So there are no expensive and separate tools to buy or learn to use.
The first CMS’s to appear were Forums like phpBB and SMF, and Blogging software like TypePad, and WordPress. These platforms provide simple interfaces to make entry of new content as easy as writing an email. But they are highly structured, fora and blogs in different ways, and so a small business site may not fit their defined structure.

There are more complicated CMS’s available like Joomla, Drupal and phpNuke which have a very flexible structure which would allow them to support a large business or a large community portal site. But these are truly daunting for a novice to administer. If a client requires a very flexible layout with many features and have more than a half dozen contributors to the site then one of these might make sense. They allow log-in and sign-up of members and allow multiple roles to be assigned to members to allow them to only read, or comment, or contribute whole articles and otherwise manage the site.

In the past I have built sites for clients using a free blogging platform called WordPress. While WordPress is a blogging platform, it can easily be adapted to provide a simple website for a small company.

WordPress

My goal for my clients has been to build a site and then leave it in their hands to make changes. WordPress does allow a client to make changes almost as easily as editing an email message. Additional complexity arises when dealing with:

Understanding the different types of content: Pages vs Posts.
Embedding images, videos, or music samples.
Advanced formatting such as multiple columns or tables of any kind.
Adding forms to collect information.
Doing any kind of e-commerce to sell items.
Updating the WordPress software, which is a frequent requirement to plug the all too frequent security issues that are found.

WordPress requires constant management to upgrade it and upgrade the several plugins that you will need to manage your site. Any site requires a few plugins since OOTB [out of the box] WordPress doesn’t do some of the things required to have a site. At a minimum about five or six plugins are required and they go through constant updates.

Future Site Building Requirements

While I still use WordPress for my own site. I will no longer be recommending it for clients. I want to find a single solution with the following qualities:

Hosting and website building combined in one site.
A simple robust and full featured browser interface to create all content and to change the theme of the site.
Customizable themes to allow sites to be “Branded” by my clients for their businesses.
Automatic updates and backups. This means that the client will never need to back up the site or perform updates to fix problems.
Some knowledge of SEO [search engine options] to allow the clients to set up tags etc for the search engines. [ I use Google Site maps plugin for WordPress.]
WYSIWYG editing of the content preferably with styles.

All the features to build a simple business site. These include:

Individual pages like the home page, about, contacts etc.
Knowledge of map pages and other such special pages is nice too.
Blog management.
Photo galleries, or the ability to make them. With pictures and text and the ability to adjust the layout.
Forums for some of the clients, but not most of the clients.
Integration with e-commerce so that clients can sell items from the site.
Forms to take contact information and ask questions via email.

Some advanced features include:

Import pages or information from other sites. SquareSpace can import some blogs for example. So far I have not seen a site builder that will import a normal website.
Export pages to allow the content to be moved to another site. It would be good to not be trapped on a site builder with no easy way to take the site elsewhere should the company go out of business or their terms become unreasonable for a client.
The ability to embed other more complex services in the site such as databases.

There is a list of many of the website hosting / building companies on this page. It looks like this fellow used Yola to build his site.

SquareSpace

I’ve heard much about SquareSpace and I took a look at it. But while they say that you can have a site for $12/mo, such a site only has 10 pages, which is too small for any of my clients. To have a reasonable site with Squarespace requires $20 / mo. This is pretty steep for many clients. As a comparison, the cost for a hosting site from many of the hosting suppliers is about $5 / mo and any of the various CMSs such as WordPress, Coppermine [photo gallery] and SMF [forum] are all free.

But SquareSpace has the right idea. The site is backed up, and updated automatically and they have all the features above. For clients that are not scared off by the $20/mo price, it looks like it will work for them. But their free trial is limited so it is harder to evaluate it in depth.

LunarPages Quicksite

LunarPages hosting, which I recommend as an excellent, high performance and affordable hosting service, has a service called QuickSite. At $12.95 / mo it is reasonable. There is a demo, but without a full trial time I was not really able to evaluate the service.

Using the demo I was able to see that the page builder is not fully WYSIWYG. Also Quicksite does not appear to have templates for blogs and photo-galleries, so all the pages will have to be built manually.

Virb
I’ll be taking a look at Virb too. They seem like they have the right idea, but they don’t make it that easy to get going because their free trial has a time limit.

Yola
Now I’m looking at Yola and it appears to have all the features above as well with only a few little glitches so far. I’ll post my detailed thoughts about Yola in another post. This unlimited trial site is just what I need to make sure that it will work for my clients. You can find my test site at Yola here.

After an afternoon building a site, Yola to be a robust and functional service. At $49.95 / year it is very affordable.

The Yola builder is almost completely WYSIWYG, so building pages is much more intuitive. There is a blog template which makes it easy to have a blog on the site along with the other pages. Since the Publish function is controlled by the user, a number of pages can be changed before any of them are published. When linking to pages in the site, you select the pages by page name rather than using http style addresses. I’ll do a more in depth report of Yola in a separate post.

I will be studying how to build themes for Yola to customize sites for my clients.

Other Types of Sites

There are two other types of site organizations that we have not discussed. These site formats are not suitable for a general small business site, but they may have their uses for some clients.

Forum

A forum is a discussion site which work well for discussions where an archive of previous discussions and organization. There are several different sites out there that allow you to build fora. One that I have looked at is Lefora.

Wikis

A wiki is a community site similar to a forum, but rather than discussions, a wiki is designed to capture information created by a community of users. The best example of a wiki is the wikipedia that we all use almost every day.

Wikis are easy to manage, but their community contributor nature makes them unsuitable for a personal or business website, unless you want everyone who stops by to potentially make changes to your site.

Recently I built a simple wiki here to understand how wikis operate and the content creation process to build and maintain a wiki.

Summary

There are a few new companies that are combining website building and hosting into a single service. These services are not yet mature, but a few of them are useful enough to work for some clients. I will continue to evaluate new sites to suggest to my clients.

- windy

Google Docs – Spreadsheet Charts

Darrell — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 08:12:33 +0000

Here’s a chart created with Google Docs. This is real data for my 2004 Xterra by the way.

Google Spreadsheet Test

Darrell — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 05:52:11 +0000

Here’s a test of a Google Spreadsheet posted here to this page.

Starting with an Open Office 3.0 spreadsheet Import failed. Then after converting the sheet to XLS it failed. Finally converting to CSV worked.

Google_Spreadsheet_test

Notice that the Frozen Row 1 of the above sheet is not frozen.

I’ll try this again for publishing complex data to my websites. Since I can add formulae, it should be interesting.

- windy

Tutorial: Creating an Article in WordPress

Darrell — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 00:35:56 +0000

This tutorial is a movie made with Wink shows how to create an article with formatting and images in WordPress. The movie requires a flash plug-in with your browser and has an audio track.

The tutorial is about 11MB, so be patient while it loads.

Posting an Article in WordPress

enjoy,
d

Apache mod_rewrite solved

Darrell — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 18:00:15 +0000

I found out some of the great mystery of mod_rewrite. Here’s an example that works. Turns out there are errors in the documentation, of course, and this article may help avoid the pitfalls that I have discovered.

Here’s an .htaccess file that works for the example that is included here:
# Turn the re-write engine on so it rewrites URLs RewriteEngine On # not needed since we are sending URLs back to this same directory #RewriteBase /test-rewrite/ # if the URL does not point to a file RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f #and if the URL does not point to a subfolder RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d # be tolerant of trailing slashes or not RewriteRule ^products$ products/ [NC] # and if there is no product specified, list them all RewriteRule ^products/$ /content.php?action=product_list [NC] #products can have a code and a subcode RewriteRule ^products/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)$ products/$1/$2/ [NC] RewriteRule ^products/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/$ /content.php?code=$1&subcode=$2 [NC] #or if we specify the code only, then forget the subcodes and list all the products in that code RewriteRule ^products/([0-9]+)$ products/$1/ [NC] RewriteRule ^products/([0-9]+)/$ /content.php?code=$1 [NC]

I discovered a bunch of rules that are not stated explicitly:

In RewriteRule, no slashes in patters after the ^
Slash at the beginning of the target after the pattern.
In a RewriteRule to make slashes optional, do not use [R] as the doc says. It doesn’t work.

The example that’s included here does work. It’s been tested. Unlike most of the rest of the examples out there. Sigh…

Apache Mod_Rewrite Example

Google Sitemaps for Coppermine

Darrell — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 17:21:06 +0000

Google has help and services for Webmasters. Among the things they provide and encourage are sitemaps. However, it’s not as complex as it all seems. WordPress and coppermine, and many other CMSs have scripts that generate these sitemaps. There are tools that run from your computer too, but these can’t know the internal structure of the site database, and so they are inefficient or don’t work for dynamic sites like WordPress and Coppermine.

With over 2000 images in my photo site, it seemed useful to generate a Google Sitemap for the Coppermine gallery. After some searching a plug-in turned up in the Coppermine Forums.

This plug-in is fairly primitive and when I tried it, it failed with an error on Google. Google produced an error about the first URI produced by the script. Also, the entire sitemap was produced as one single line, so error messages or looking at the sitemap with an editor were not user friendly.

I have repaired the script and you can find the new version by the link below. It is advertised to work for CPG 1.2.x, 1.3.x and 1.4.x. For more information, read the forum post above.

To use the script, unzip and upload it to the base coppermine directory on your site and then activate it from the browser with a URL like: http://www.yourdomain.com/cpg144/sitemap.php

Then visit the Google Webmasters Site,

create an account, or log in with your google email account,
add your site, using the Coppermine base directory, and
then verify your site using one of the methods provided and finally
point to your sitemap to tell google about it.

Here is the fixed script.

Sitemaps for better searching with Google

Darrell — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 03:52:46 +0000

Sitemaps tell google about the content of sites that have dynamic content. You can find out more about services for Webmasters at google. You will need to log into an account to see these pages, but accounts are free.

You will want to look at this page to find plugins or programs to build sitemaps for your site. For example, there is a plugin for WordPress to build sitemaps – WordPress Sitemap Plug-in.

There is also a php file to build sitemaps for Coppermine.

Protected: Disk Maintence Utility

Darrell — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 20:25:40 +0000

Web Calendar Public Access

Darrell — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 23:53:28 +0000

Here are the settings that are working for me to allow public access to my webcalendar for some events. WebCalendar 1.0.4.

I’m still having problems with both public entries being duplicated when both Darrell and Public are participants. This does not occur on a test site that I have, but the live site shows this. Currently I can get around this by only having one participant [public access] for public items. Not sure why the test site shows only one entry and the live site shows two.

Display of multiple events is fixed. Settings > Public Access > Public Access Visible by Default (NO).

Public access works with the following settings. You can control which items show up as public by adding the Public Access participant to entries you want to be public. The rest are private with these settings.

Here are the way it looks to add an entry:

Here are the participants: Select more than one using CTRL / click.

Here are the settings: