August 18, 2008
And We're Back (and married)
I posted on Twitter a while ago about what I've been up to. The short of it, at least. The medium of it, goes something like this.
On July 13th, 2008, my fiance and I took our vows and were married in an art gallery (The Print Center). It's exhibit during our wedding was the 82nd Annual International Competition: Photography. The wedding could not have gone better and the few photographs we've seen so far from our photographer made us really happy.
The next morning, our plane took off from Philadelphia International Airport at 5:30 am, for San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where we were originally going to get a bus to Copan. However, a few days prior to leaving we decided to instead go straight to Roatan and spend the 3 days originally allotted for Copan at a tiny bed and breakfast, Sante Wellness Center. Our stay there was amazing. We then proceeded to Half Moon Bay/West End on Roatan where we found peace and comfort for the remainder of our trip.
My wife and I both took pictures (mine) (hers).
The trip was lots of fun and when we got back, I got sick. At first I thought it was malaria, and then dengue fever, but I was never diagnosed with either and seemed to the doctor, to be just some random thing I picked up along the way home.
May 27, 2008
Comments? You Mean on Photub?
Ever since the relaunch of Photub in late 2006, I've been a bit hesitant to allow comments for particular posts, despite the fact that my homebrew blogging solution supports them, and they would be valuable.
The reasons for this aren't what you'd expect. It's not just "don't want to get spammed" or anything like that—that can be solved pretty easily. The biggest problem is that, since I use shared hosting and am not using PHP as the language to implement Photub, the blog runs a bit differently than it would if I were using WordPress or some other solution.
Photub uses FastCGI, which basically means that the blog has to sit there waiting for requests whenever someone requests a page, unlike a solution in PHP where the blog would just "startup" when needed. When the relaunch happened, my host kept killing off the process that was waiting for requests, presumably because it was doing lots of work when a request came in. What I ended up doing was building caching into the site, so that each page gets rendered (when requested) once ever 5 minutes.
This works out wonderfully, especially since database servers on shared hosting tend to be a bit slow. The readers get faster response times, everyone on the shared hosting server is happy, and Photub doesn't get killed off and leave you with 500 Internal Error pages.
That is, it all works well except when you try to add comments. See, comments happen between the 5 minute refresh mark, and a discussion can't happen at 5 minute intervals. Discussions need the ability to be real time or they aren't very effective. I could have made an exception and on pages with comments not done caching, but it was easier to just leave comments out of the picture.
Disqus to the rescue. Disqus is a blog comments solution that is hosted off site (the only thing I don't like about it actually), but it's loaded up via JavaScript instead. What this means, is that caching doesn't matter on my end, everything gets loaded dynamically when you request the page! It's actually a great concept and is executed very well. Plus, they deal with spam, support OpenID, and lots of options for following replies. They do a good job with it, so why not use it? Anyway, not every post will enable comments, but there will definitely be some now that I can enable a real time discussion system. (Comments are enabled for this post)
December 03, 2007
Photub Turns One!
The current version of Photub is turning 1 today. It's been a great year, and hopefully the year to come will be even bigger and better. Thanks for subscribing and reading! I always look forward to feedback and suggestions.
October 11, 2007
Latest News RSS URL Change
I've switched the "latest news" RSS feed to point use FeedBurner. This shouldn't cause any problems, but if it does, please update your reader to use the url: http://feeds.feedburner.com/photub/latest-news . No other feeds are affected by this change at this point, but I'll let you know otherwise if there's a change. Thanks!
April 09, 2007
Trip to Belize
After being disconnected from as many electronic devices as possible (aside from my Nikon D70s), on our weeklong trip to Caye Caulker, Belize in Central America, I'd like to share some photos from the trip.
February 02, 2007
Photub Problems
Photub is experiencing some weird problems at the moment. If you receive an error message, just hit refresh. You'll probably see what your looking for. I apologize for the inconvenience, and will sort out this issue as soon as I can.
January 24, 2007
There's a great article about Flickr entitled "What Makes Flickr So Special Anyway".
Sorry for the lack of real updates. Things have been a bit busy for me as of late, but I will resume real posting habits soon.
January 10, 2007
New Photub Updates
As some of you have probably noticed, I've been playing around with the sidebar navigation. I've moved the main navigation obviously to the top of the site, etc... What you probably didn't realize is that a new article was also posted. This article is about How To Put Your Photos on the Web.
December 05, 2006
Woohoo!
Photub Version 2! I've been working hard in the last few days to get this up and running, and I'm very happy so far with the results. If you experience any problems, just refresh your page. If that doesn't fix it up, I'd appreciate it greatly if you let me know. Enjoy!
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