kag's tech blog

Since the first version, kPicasa Gallery has gained a lot of stability and maturity. I want to thank every one of you who submitted feedback, I could have never done all this without your help.

As it is still not perfect, I get feature requests by email and in post comments. Here’s a list of what has been asked:

• Display the latest photos in the sidebar/footer/etc. After searching some more, it seems that Picasa provides a RSS feed with the latest additions. I’ll see how I can fit this in.
• Select the size of the thumbnails. David has already done the work for this, won’t be a problem.
• Resolve incompatibilities with other plugins. Although I try my best to make kPicasa play nice with other plugins, it seems that there are plugins out there that can’t co-exist with kPicasa (Google Analytics for example). I tried to contact the author to get some help figuring out if it’s my plugin or their plugin that’s not being nice to the other.
• Tableless design. This has been asked a few times, but I was never able to make it work as good as with tables. I’m not great with CSS so unless someone wants to help, I’m afraid it’s not going to happen, sorry!
• Display the date in a different format. Won’t be a problem.
• Choosing what fields to display. Decide if you want to display the title, location, date, description, etc. Pretty much anything that’s available in the RSS feed that Picasa provides. Won’t be a problem either.
• Support visitors who don’t use Javascript. I though <noscript> had been deprecated, but no! I’ll add this to the next release.

My girlfriend is going on a 6-week trip in early May, I’m pretty sure I won’t have time to touch kPicasa before then. So keep an eye for a new release in about a month from now.

I’ve had two or three people emailing me about kPicasa not working at all. My first suggestion is to turn off all your plugins and only enable kPicasa Gallery. If it works, it means there’s a conflict with another plugin. Enable them one by one and *please* let me know the one that’s causing problems.

Some other people contacted me because kPicasa didn’t work either. They gave me the link to their page and everything worked fine. It seems that there was some sort of caching on their site and that was the source of the problem. kPicasa tries to use the built-in caching engine and I’m not 100% sure how it works under the hood. Could be that engine, could be kPicasa.

One other user gave me access to his files because kPicasa wasn’t loading. It turned out that his particular PHP configuration changed the way include() looked for files to include. Fortunately I was able to patch his installation and I think it’s worth including this change in the next release.

Last but not least, a lot of people have asked why sometimes, there’s a download prompt instead of the Lightbox thing. The problem lies with Lightbox – it only activate itself when all the thumbnails are loaded. So when someone clicks on a thumbnail really early the page load, Lightbox isn’t on yet. Guillaume Petitclerc has posted a workaround in the comments, I’ll check it out and put it in kPicasa if it’s a good solution.

One last thing, I still haven’t tried WordPress 2.5. I don’t think there should be any problem since kPicasa only uses really basic WordPress functions, but I would like to hear from people running WP2.5.

For those who are interested in kPicasa but are still running PHP4, you can check out kPicasa Gallery PHP4MOD. It’s a PHP4 port of the regular kPicasa, made by David Trattnig.

Great work David!

I released a new version for those who reported connection errors since 0.1.0. The routine handling the connection to the Picasa server wasn’t as smart as it should have been. If you didn’t have any problem, there’s no need to update.

Someone emailed me saying that he didn’t see the kPicasa Gallery menu in the Admin / Options page. Is there anyone else experimenting this problem?

With this new version, I’ve virtually implemented every single request that I received. Those that I left off will never be included. Here are the new features:

• Improved error messages. Now the error message really explains what happened;
• Easier to visually customize via a CSS file, instead of inline styling;
• Ability to display galleries from more than one Picasa account, each in a different page/post (this is for an advanced usage, and will not really be documented);
• New options to change the number of albums to display per line, and the number of pictures per line;
• Now displays the album description if it exists;
• It is now possible to not use any engine to display the full-sized picture. This is, for example, for those who already have Lightbox installed via another plugin.

Get it from WordPress.com

As usual, I don’t have access to many different platforms to test so keep me informed if you find any bug!!!

If you are like me, you probably have a few gigabytes of pictures and a some important documents lying around on your computer. And you probably have a whole bunch of stuff that you know you will never use again, but you just can’t get rid of them.

Back in the day, I used to backup my stuff on a CD-R. But like everyone else, I didn’t do it really often. Then as my data grew larger and larger, I changed the media for a DVD. But now with multi megapixel cameras, it’s not unsual to shoot a gigabyte of photos in a few days.

So today I bought myself an external hard drive enclosure. Since I have a few hard disks laying around, I simply needed the enclosure and not the drive itself. They are really cheap now — I paid mine $21. I plugged a 80GB drive in and it worked right out of the box as expected. The drive is formatted in EXT3, so I guess sometime I’ll have to reformat it in FAT32 if I want to use it on a Windows machine.

The reason why I never did frequent backups was because it was too much trouble to find out which files were updated, so I always ended up backing up everything from scratch. It would just require too much time to do it all over each time. So I wrote a simple rsync script so now I only have to plug the drive in, double-click on my script file, and everything is going to be synchronised with the hard drive. Easy as 1-2-3, quick and I don’t have to do anything!

At the price they sell these drives now, I think it’s worth getting one. I know my photos are worth more than $21!

A few days ago, my girlfriend and I planned to go on a small trip to Montréal. I had only been there a few times, and only had to drive there twice. I’ve never had a chance to play with a GPS, so I thought it would be cool to create myself a need (!) and ask my boss if I could borrow his. The next day, I had his Garmin StreetPilot c550 on my desk.

It’s a little big compared to the new units, but it’s been out for a while now. It has a very nice touch screen display and was perfectly readable in the sun, which impressed me. I just read in the specs that it is supposed to speak street names, but it never did while I used it.

I plugged it in my car on the way home and I found myself laughing all alone in my car just hearing that little machine talking to me and telling me where to turn. It found my address without any problem, but it gave me the directions of the shortest road, not the quickest one. As soon as it noticed I was not taking the suggested road, it recalculated another path based on my new location and direction. It recalculated a new path a few times since I kept driving on my favorite road. I was afraid it would just say “alright, if you don’t want to listen to me, I’ll just shut down”, but fortunately it didn’t.

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This is my first WordPress plugin. I was tired of always having to manually edit, resize, upload and label my pictures to my online gallery. I then discovered Picasa. It works like a charm and lets you retouch your pictures and upload your pictures easily to the Picasa Web Albums site, along with all the labels you’ve created.

So I wrote this plugin to replace Coppermine as my online gallery. I didn’t need anything advanced like Coppermine has to offer. I simply needed a place to upload pictures in albums, with my own captions.

It uses the Lightbox library to display the pictures, but I might switch to Highslide, it looks awesome and it feels much quicker.

Check out the demo
Get it from WordPress.com

Please vote for my plugin on the WordPress page above. Whether you like it or not!