My New Photographic Blog

I've decided to start a new blog, dedicated to purely photographic topics. Having thought about it for a while, the balance was finally tipped after BarCamp when I wrote up my tutorials from the presentation I did.

More and more of my photographic (non-geek) friends have been asking about them, and I thought it was easier to separate the content out into a new blog, rather than them having to wade through lots of web geekery here.

So please take a look at http://cazphoto.blogspot.com/ for the new publication!

Some posts from this blog's archives have moved to the new one; other posts are replicated (mainly my BarCamp2 stuff, or those with a few comments attached, which have stayed put here and been copied to the new address).

Henceforth, I shall be putting any photography-related topics on the new blog, so please put the address in your feedreaders if you'd like to keep up with my posts there.

Tagged By Sheila

Sheila The Sheila has tagged me with a little blog ditty, and in the spirit of New Year I thought I would carry it on. The idea is this:

"For those of you going "huh?", I have been blog tagged, a game started by Jeff Pulver which seems to be spreading quite quickly. The object of the game is to reveal 5 things about you, which most readers probably don't know, then nominate 5 friends to do the same."

So, here are my five "surprises":

• I had my first photograph published when I was 8 years old.
  It was taken when I was seven, at Darnholm, on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. I used my father's manual camera (he had set the exposure for me) and managed to pan the shot when the steam train came round a curve under the bridge. Dad regularly submits pictures for publication in preserved railway magazines, and so he sent it along with some of his, and it was published in Modern Railways. So I'm a bit of a closet steam-head as well as nethead.
• I mushed a team of six huskies for a week in the arctic circle.
  We toured northern Sweden and Norway. It was the best trip I've ever done, but totally knackering. We ate for England, but expended so much energy, I'd lost 4lbs by the time I came home. My experiences during that week have taught me that teamwork is invaluable, and that plastic is not as good as polystyrene for making loo seats for use in sub-zero temperatures!
• I started learning to play Bass Guitar in 2002.
  I'd wanted to play bass since I was a teenager. Then one day I woke up and thought, "why don't I just go and buy one, rather than dithering all this time?" Not sure the neighbours were pleased. But my amp doesn't go up to 11! I started out with a cheap 4-string model, but now have a custom 5-string Iceni Funkmeister, with a purple paint job. I guess I'm a late starter when it comes to rebellion and rock-goddess pretentions, ha ha.
• I'm a PAGB-accredited judge, and regularly visit photographic clubs in East Anglia and North London, to judge their competitions. For some reason, they like my opinions and keep inviting me back.
• Danny Grewcock (England and Bath Lock) once signed my rugby shirt. I was still wearing it at the time. 'Nuff said.

And I'm going to tag these good folks to reveal themselves: Litlove, Andy Mitchell, Bobble, Prof. John Flood and his RATS, FakeBob.

Cowboys (Me) And Indians (That'll be Apache)

I'm A PHP Newbie
For some weeks, I've been meaning to try my hand at some PHP development, having done most of my projects to date with .NET. I bought the excellent book Blog Design Solutions in September, and have been gradually reading my way through it in my spare time. It gives advice on installing and tweaking some of the most common blog engines such as Movable Type, ExpressionEngine, WordPress and TextPattern, but the last chapter leads you through building your own blogging solution.

I thought this was a good place to start for a PHP newbie, since there were copious examples and plenty of advice about setting up your test environment, a notorious minefield to tread safely on your own.

Setting Up The Test Environment
Unfortunately, this is where the pain and suffering began... I downloaded the lastest stable Apache release (as adivsed by the book), which was supposedly 2.2.3, as the Win MSI installer. It half loaded up, but would not run as a service on my WinXP Pro machine. The Apache icon appared in my SysTray, but the context menu was blank, and it did not appear in my list of services to start manually! After going round the loop several times, I gave up and went back for the 2.0.59 release instead - which worked first time!

Because I've already got IIS running as my default web server on localhost, I had to tell Apache to use a different port - 8080 is the conventional one for a second web server. Then you can use this in your URL to call on Apache to serve your pages:

http://localhost:8080/blog/index.php

I had already installed MySQL 5.0.22 a while back, along with useful tools such as the accompanying Administrator, Query Browser and Migration Toolkit, but had not really used any of it in anger since.Consequently, it took a few minutes to remember what I'd chosen as the root password for the MySQL Administratior package! Eventually, I set up my database (all very straightfoward with the Admin plugin, you don't have to go messing about with SQL statements to make a new table etc, it's all done from a neat little GUI). I'd also got PHP 5.2.0 installed by now.

Connecting To The Database
The next hurdle came when I tried actually running a PHP page with a database connection. I kept getting an error:

Call to undefined function mysql_connect()

After some reading around in my book Beginning PHP and MySQL 5 book (another one which has been propping up the coffee table of late but came into it's own for this), it turns out that PHP5 does not ship with native MySQL support embedded; you have to download some extra libraries and then go fiddling around with the php.ini file. I found this tutorial page really useful in explaining what was needed. And for all the knocking that Microsoft gets in various quarters, I don't ever remember this much effort being required to set up IIS to run with the .NET framework! Bah, humbug.

Once the environment was properly configured, the actual blog development wasn't too bad. I had a few "moments" of frustration trying to chase down some syntax typos which caused various things to blow up, but you get used to that with hand coding!

Telling The Time
Another tricky thing to get right is date and time formatting. My PHP book gave me info if you want to use PHP to display the current date:

<?php echo "".date("l, jS F, Y"); ?>

Gives you "Wednesday, 6th December 2006".

There are occasions when you want to format the date in the SQL statement, and trying to get your head round a seemingly-arbitrary set of case-sensitive parameters in the format string is difficult. Which is where Dan Winchester's guide to MySQL date_format was also very handy. You might use something like this:

SELECT post_id, title, post
DATE_FORMAT(postdate, '%W, %D %M %Y') AS dateposted, DATE_FORMAT(postdate, '%H:%i') AS timeposted
FROM posts WHERE post_id=$post_id LIMIT 1

dateposted would display "Wednesday, 6th December 2006" as before, and the timeposted variable shows "22:45". I split these in two so the parsed date string could be displayed separately from the time portion - if you made two posts in a day, it's nice not to repeat the day/date element every time. If you wanted to lump them together, just use this instead:

SELECT post_id, title, post
DATE_FORMAT(postdate, '%W, %D %M %Y' at %H:%i) AS dateposted
FROM posts WHERE post_id=$post_id LIMIT 1

This will give "Wednesday, 6th December 2006 at 22:25" as one string.

Future Developments?
So now, I have my own blogging engine running on my localhost using PHP and MySQL. I'm not about to share the new blog with the world, as it largely consists of a personal diary and various rants, but it's been a very worthwhile exercise in dipping my toes in the murky PHP waters.

I may decide to develop the code further, and perhaps use it to host this blog on my own server in due course, but for the moment, it's staying right here at blogger.

Wonky Feeds

Apologies for anyone reading my posts via feedreaders, rather than directly on the blog, who may have been wondering why some of my oldest posts are suddenly appearing.

In addition to the new design, I've also been making use of the blogger beta's "label" feature (aka tagging) and updating old posts with suitable tags. Unlike the old version of blogger, which never seemed to care if you went back and updated a post, the beta version makes updated posts float up to the top of your site feed. Hence some older stuff appearing on the list!

Hopefully, it won't happen again on the same scale, since I'll be tagging each post as I write it. Sorry for any confusion!

I've Had A Facelift!

A virtual one, not a real nip & tuck.

After weeks of dithering, I've finally upgraded my blogs to the blogger beta account (there was no going back, so I wanted to be sure before I jumped!). And while I was at it, I thought I would take the opportunity to choose a new template, more in keeping with the colour scheme of my website, carolinemockett.com

It's taken me a while to get my head round the new blogger template widgets, and when I've had more of a play, there may well be a few more tweaks to the Emperor's New Clothes (or should that be Empress?)

Beta Blockers?

Blogger has a new beta version out and is inviting bloggers to move over from their existing account. This involves signing in with a Google account - either using an existing one, or signing up for a new account.

Using systems in beta can be a "fun" experience - you might be the person to come across that little-known bug which completely ruins your day! Or you might find that all the new features are worth the little rough patches while everything gets ironed out.

I'll admit I'm dithering over whether I should jump ship and go for the beta release. There are certainly some great new features like the ability to restrict read access and add "labels" (tags to you and me) for searching and categorising your blog posts. OK, these two are features which other publishing systems like WordPress have had for some time (and I know of folks who have defected to WordPress from Blogger in the past due to these deficiencies).

One "hidden" benefit is their new dynamic serving of pages. In the past, you had to "Publish" each new entry or the whole blog when you made changes, to give the static HTML pages which made up your blog. If you forgot to republish, the changes weren't seen until the next time you republished. This was pretty tedious and took quite a while if you had large blog. In the new version, changes are made to the database immediately and each page is served dynamically on the fly at each request. No more waiting for the spinning logo to finish its whirling!

My ideal scenario would be to move just one blog (probably the RugbyMad one) and play with it for a bit to see if I have any problems, before moving this blog too. But it's not clear from the support info if I can do this - effectivley, both blogs are linked from one account, and I think it's the account I'm moving and not the blog specifically.

Anyway, if you're interested in what new features are in the beta release, here are a few links for you to digest:

• What's new in Blogger beta?
• Known Issues for Blogger in beta
• Blogger Buzz - general comments and news
• Switch Me Over to the new account

Gender Is Irrelevent

I'm a regular reader of Roger Kondrat's blog, Technological Winter. Today, he posted about a recent conference called BlogHer '06, organised by the BlogHer community - their website's byeline is apprently "Where the women bloggers are".

I was very interested in Roger's comment "Blogher was interesting for me.. ..I mean as someone that doesn’t think male or female, I just read what I read". And I think you've hit the nail on the head there, Roger. Why should the blogger's gender matter? I believe exactly the same. I read what I read and that's that. Sometimes you can't event tell the gender of the blogger, (it's one of the upsides of web anonymity, if you wish to be so). And I was wondering what makes a woman sign up for a blog precisely because it's hosted by/for women?

I've always worked in very male-dominated industries. My first job was a broadcast engineer for the BBC, where around 10% of the workforce was female. I never felt I was treated differently as a women, and certainly didn't find any prejudices in evidence. If you were good at your job, no one cared if you were a woman, you still got the respect you deserved. And I would never have wanted to be cut any breaks on the basis of my sex - don't get me started on "positive discrimination".

Now I'm still in a male-dominated profession - web design and development. At least, the design part is populated by quite a few more women, even if they aren't so much in evidence on the development side of things (at least, that's my experience). I reckon it's about 20% women where I currently work. But again, if you're any good, you could be a small, furry creature from Alpha Centauri and nobody would bat an eyelid.

Robert Scoble attended the conference, and his write-up suggests that perhaps women are using BlogHer because the tools are easier to pick up. But I have to ask, how hard is it to use Blogger, WordPress etc?

I have a very dear friend, who is a self-confessed technophobe. We've known each other since we were 11. At school, I was always the techie one, she the arty one. She majored in English & French Literature and went on to complete her PhD in that area, and now teaaches at one of the UK's top universities. She hates computers with a passion - only using them when she has to (for writing, that is probably rather more than she would like). Which is why, when I visited her a few months ago, I was absolutely astounded to learn she has a blog of her own, LitLove. And a very fine one it is too. In a few short weeks she has engaged in tremendous debates with other like-minded folk. And she has got to grips with the WordPress publishing system with great success. So obviously, it can't be that difficult to get a blog going, if you're passioiniate enough about your subject.

So what am I really trying to say here? Probably, that ultimately, it's all about the content of your blog that really matters. Not where it's hosted, or what gender you happen to be. Personally, I'd much rather infiltrate the "male domain" that is the mainstream blogsphere than find myself in what is little better than a female ghetto! I am glad I was educated in a co-ed environment, and never wanted to go to an all-girls school - they can get pretty catty at times ;-)

Thick Squared

Following on from my post on RugbyMad about how thick can you get (travel agents' feedback from customers), I see The Register is running a poll for readers to decide who handled the most stupid help-desk call. There are some crackers there, but I think my favourite has to be my rabbit's dead :-D

I'm till having aggro with Technorati, as posted yesterday.

Without me doing very much, recent posts on RugbyMad seem to be indexed (I've not tagged any posts on that blog yet) but further back than a couple of weeks and there's nothing found when searching. Meanwhile, the scoped search for this blog still seems to do five parts of naff all. Hopefully they will sort it soon.

On a more positive note, I'd like to thank Roger Kondrat for giving this blog a plug over at Technological Winter, and his help with aiding this relative blogging-newbie overcome the trials and tribulations of the technology :-)

Tonight I'm off to the London Geeks' Dinner to hear Chris Anderson speak on the The Long Tail as a sales model, which I hope will be interesting. I'll post my thoughts soon.

Troubles With Technorati

I'm having some trouble with Technorati, and it seems I'm not the only one.

I claimed my blogs (this one, plus my Rugby Mad one), set the blogger settings to ping Technorati (as advised in their support faq) and have added Technorati tags to all posts in this blog (have yet to get around to it for the rugby one, but hey).

Now if I search for something on Technorati, (either directly at their site or with the plugin for this blog at the top right of the page), which I know is definitely here, it claims not to find anything! It also claims that my most up to date post was six days ago, when it fact it was just yesterday.

I've logged a call with Technorati's help people, who have acknowledged receipt, but so far I haven't heard anything else. I know I've only just started blogging, and so my ranking is pretty lowly, but I thought technorati would be an excellent place to generate some passing traffic and help to build up my online profile. I hope they are not operating some sort of elist policy along the lines of "well her ranking is down with the amoeba, so we don't need to keep her search as up to date as some"...

I'll keep you posted on developments.

Add half an hour later: Actually, it gets odder. Scoping a search at Technorati on Rugby Mad or Just Mad will turn up results for some things, such as "churchill" but not others, like "handbags" (which appears in this post and here). I'm even more confused now!