A little over a year ago I started using Gallery2 on my website to host photos. A few months after the initial adoption I discovered that Gallery2 is most definitely NOT cut out for any serious integration with WordPress. Or at least not with the WPG2 plugin and not while hosted on a standard account with DreamHost. Since the spring I have been working off and on to convert all of the posts using Gallery2 over to the built-in WordPress image management system. This evening I finally finished. I now am free of Gallery2. Forever!
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Tags: dreamhost, Gallery2, Technology
I’ve been slowly porting content over from my old website host to my new website. It’s been a bit of a painful process as I had hand-coded most of the html on the old pages in such a way that it is rather difficult to move directly from one server to the other. Back when I made the pages in question, I didn’t own a domain name and was thus hosting it off of my university’s top-level domain behind a “/~username” setup. To bring them over to my new site, I’ve been replicating the content of the old pages into pages on WordPress. I have also moved the photos from the old site, where they were static, to the new site and a Gallery2 installation that allows more flexibility with some tradoffs that I have discussed in earlier posts.
As I’ve been moving the content over, I’ve been placing it into pages. The way I’ve understood pages and posts is that pages are for static content, such as my old travel photos and writeups, and pages are for dynamic content that rotates through, such as what I am writing here. Pages are organized hierarchically in WordPress while Posts are put into categories and have tags attached.
Looking at my traffic patterns, it seems almost as if the pages that I have put up aren’t registering in search engines. My posts certainly get lots of hits, as is evident by the traffic spike I had for my Sarah Palin Erotica post. Who knew so many people wanted to read about her having eskimo threeways? I didn’t!
Is there a reason that I haven’t been getting very many hits on my pages? Is it because there are no tags assigned to them? Is it from the plugin (Google XML Sitemaps) I use to generate sitemaps? Is it somehow related to the way WPG2 displays images on the pages?
This all leads me to wonder if it would be better to put my old travel photos (and newer ones) into posts rather than pages. Thoughts, anyone?
Tags: Best Practices, Erotica, Gallery2, Sarah Palin, Wordpress
Today I found out that Gallery 2.3 was released about a week ago. It’s been a few years in the making and has some very needed upgrades and bug fixes. I had thought about this before but really realized today just how bloated a Gallery2 installation can be. The English-only installation has well over 2000 files that need to be uploaded to a server. Granted, it could all be done on the server with a tar ball, but it is easier for me to unzip it on my local machine and upload via ftp.
The full installation option (the one that comes will all of the languages pre-loaded) runs somewhere around 10000 files. Quite frankly, that’s a bit absurd. With so many files and so many subdirectories, it becomes unmanageable to even unzip the installation file.
Why does Gallery2 need so many files? I really couldn’t tell you although it looks like the vast majority of them are language files. The KISS principle doesn’t seem to be at play here. I haven’t been able to find out if this was actually created yet, but this language manager tool that was in the works a few years back sure seems like something nifty that could be very useful, especially for those of us who ended up with many large language packs cluttering up our installations. After all, I really don’t need to use the administrative interface in British English.
WordPress so far has managed to stay away from such a large bloating problem. It seems to have better management of how many files it requires on your webserver. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see WordPress have the same fate befall it. Beware, WordPress, and take note Gallery2, it is REALLY annoying having to work with thousands upon thousands of files on my webserver.
Tags: Gallery2, Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS), Technology, Wordpress
Since switching over to Dreamhost a week or two ago, I’ve been working on transferring over all of the static content that I maintained in parallel to my WordPress installation at my old webhost. Finally after much futzing about, I transferred over the first two real pages of photographic content. Behold, minimal content from the very first few days of my time in Tuinsia! There are literally only two of the very first pages completely transferred. It takes significant effort to coroberate between what I have on my old site, what I am putting onto this site, and Gallery2′s structure.
Speaking of Gallery2, it can be a real resource hog. I guess that’s partially my own fault though. Rather than only upload the images that I plan to use in the sizes I want, I uploaded ALL of the original images. At last check, I was pushing close to 11,000 images. Just the battle to get everything uploaded and imported into Gallery2 took a week. And I haven’t even organized but a few galleries worth of photos. The biggest problem comes from the image manipulation packages that Gallery2 uses. They eat resources for breakfast. Trying to resize all of the original massive images to thumbnails of various proportions, several different resized viewable images, and the like on top of watermarking everything can really bog the server down and ocassionally makes it barf out full-size images for no apparent reason. This is especially problematic on the left column of my WordPress theme (Tarski) where I end up with the odd MASSIVE IMAGE OF DOOM. It appears though that the ooccurance of these images might be largely limited to when I am logged in as an administrator to the site. Otherwise, I believe it just returns a blank image box.
A slightly less big problem is trying to perform any operation on the Gallery2 database, which runs through a MySQL backend, that accesses more than a few records. It seems that I must be on a heavily loaded database server with Dreamhost, or Dreamhost has a draconian policy toward MySQL queries and the number of records that can be accessed at any one time, or Gallery2 is particularly resource intensive when working with very large numbers of images. Whatever the case, it makes dealing with the entire image set a bit difficult.
If only there were a way to perform tasks such as creating resized images and thumbnails, optimizing the database, and other maintianence tasks on my own machine rather than on the server… That way I could actually get them to complete correctly AND not drain the resources on my shared hosting plan.
In other news, my masters thesis is slowly coming together. There are so many sources that I am still trying to digest! I read through a 300ish page textbook yesterday evening and skimmed the majority of the important sources. Each new book or paper I encounter holds a roughly 25% chance of being something quite valuable that demands a day or two of attention. While processing all of these sources, I am also trying to write bits and pieces of the acutal thesis. Hopefully in another few days, I’ll be able to start writing in ernest. First though, I have to clear two 1000+ page tomes and about 40 articles related to those monsterous works.
Tags: dreamhost, feature request, Gallery2, Masters Thesis, MySQL, Tarski, Tunisia, Wordpress
I had a few hiccups today with uploading photos to my Gallery2 installation. Documentation of what happened is on the Gallery2 forums. There still are some annoyances that I run into while using Gallery2. For instance:
- Not being able to batch rotate photos based on EXIF data after they are uploaded and inserted into an album. Seriously. That shouldn’t be so hard to implement!
- Not being able to add more than about 50 photos at a time without the program barfing (this might be a Dreamhost limitation but really should be addressed in the Gallery2 core since I imagine many people use a similar shared hosting setup).
- Not having support for AVI movies in FireFox. To play them, people using FireFox either have to wade through support FAQ’s for Gallery2 to find some obscure FireFox plugin (that didn’t work for me, by the way), or they have to edit something in their quicktime plugin installs, or just use Internet Explorer. That is not a very good solution if you ask me.
- To be able to watch a movie, the permissions on it must be set to “view all” for the Everyone group. I like to keep my original-sized images to myself and want to just be able to set all of the permissions for all of the albums once.
- Watermark issues! It seems that my albums like to have their watermarks vanish periodically. This is a bit troubling as I want to be able to protect all of my content at least to the extent where people might awknowledge the source of the photos. I think this might be due to Dreamhost issues with regards to php_memory limits.
All in all, it’s very powerful software. I just wish they’d change and/or fix these few things.
Samantha and I went for a short hike on the Old Growth Trail in the McDonald-Dunn Forest the other day. An okay map of the forest is available from the College of Forestry website.
The trees are quite beautiful although the grove is rather small in comparison with others I’ve visited. We found a beer bottle quite a distance off the trail which we picked up and disposed of in a recycling bin back in Corvallis.
I should also note that this is the first time that I am using Gallery2 in a post that is being crossposted to Livejournal. If for some reason, the thumbnails don’t come across correctly, please view the original post at my website for the photos.
Tags: Gallery2, Hiking, Lewisburg Saddle, Livejournal, McDonald-Dunn Forest, Old Growth Trees, Photography, Samantha
I was forced to bite the bullet and choose a webhost yesterday. Technical support in my college sent me an email stating that they had found I was over disk space limit by about 25 gigs. Back in 2004 when I was in Tunisia, I had to get the College of Engineering to supply me with expanded storage for all of the photos I was taking and uploading to my website. Flash forward to four whole years later. Someone finally does an audit of disk space usage and discovers that I’m using way more than the current max allocation for the extended storage. Luckily, the support person, Leanne, who works (I think) exclusively with my school (School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering) was nice enough to give me some time to get my usage under control and move all of my content to another website.
Thus, I purchased hosting at Dreamhost. There were some initial hickups trying to port my WordPress installation over. Initially, I tried to use the one-click Dreamhost installation but it kept giving me problems when I ran the WordPress import procedures. Finally, I completely nuked the Dreamhost-provided WordPress installation and installed it myself manually. That coupled with not importing attachments directly seems to have cured the problem. All of my database-driven content is now ported.
That still leaves the issue of the massive amount of static content that I wrote for my site back in the old days of WordPress before it turned into the wonderful pseudo CMS system it is today. Also, I have 20-25 gigs of photos that I need to bring over to my new hosting service. To aid in that process, I chose to install Gallery2 which now seems to be at a more mature state (although still with problems, such as not being able to watch AVI videos from Gallery2 in Firefox without installing obscure plugins!). Sure, there are things I don’t like, but it has some of the features that are most important to me. One day, I have no doubt, that WordPress will catch up and either match or surpass Gallery2 in its usefulness. Hopefully someone will think to make an import tool for those of us on Gallery2.
Slowly over the next few weeks, I will load content from my old site onto my new site. I am aiming to have everything transitioned over by the 1st of October.
In related news, I am also now using a plugin to cross-post to Livejournal and am now importing my site feed into Facebook. It remains to be seen how well the content will show up in these other locations. Click through on the link provided if you want to see the original item. Especially for posts with photos and maps, this will most likely be necessary to display content correctly.
Tags: CMS, dreamhost, Facebook, Firefox, Gallery2, Livejournal
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