I was perusing a recent copy of Linux Format and encounter a feature describing a self-hosted alternative to the likes of Flickr: Gallery. From my quick look, it looks fully featured, offering themes and even shopping cart facilities for those who want to sell their wares. The screenshots on the the open source project’s website look promising but, for a fuller appraisal, I would need to spend some time trying to bend it to my will. Before anyone mentions it, I am aware that WordPress can be used for photoblogging but this tool seems to take things a bit further. It’s the sort of thing about which I might have wondered given the pervasiveness of content management systems these days. My own custom built photo gallery is devoid of a slick back end, hence why Gallery caught my eye, but I’ll continue with it and may even get to adding the needful myself.
Archive for July, 2009
Some oddness with table cell display in Opera resolved
Blog sidebar displayed in Opera before fix was applied
A while back, I reported a baffling problem with Opera managing to miss out an entry in the calendar widget on my hillwalking blog. After a bit of fiddling, I managed to track down the problem: setting position:relative in the CSS for hyperlink tags on my theme. Commenting out CSS declarations may seem a low technology way of finding problems like this but it still retains its place as this little episode proves. Changing it to position:static for the hyperlinked numbers in the table fixed the issue while I left the defaults as they were in case they had an adverse impact elsewhere. If all of this sounds rather too empirical in its approach, then I can only agree with you but a fix is a fix nonetheless. However, display:block is also set for the table entries so that may have a part to play too. Regardless of the trial and error feel to the solution, I could not find the problem documented anywhere so I am sharing it here to help any others who encounter the same sort of weirdness.
A restoration of order
This weekend, I finally put my home computing displacement behind me. My laptop had become my main PC with a combination of external hard drives and an Octigen external hard drive enclosure keeping me motoring in laptop limbo. Having had no joy in the realm of PC building, I decided to go down the partially built route and order a bare bones system from Novatech. That gave me a Foxconn case and motherboard loaded up with an AMD 7850 dual core CPU and 2 GB of RAM. With the motherboard offering onboard sound and video capability, all that was needed was to add drives. I added no floppy drive but instead installed a SATA DVD Writer (not sure that it was a successful purchase, though, but that can be resolved at my leisure) and the hard drives from the old behemoth that had been serving me until its demise. A session of work on the kitchen table and some toing and froing ensued as I inched my way towards a working system.
Once I had set all of the expected hard disks into place, Ubuntu was capable of being summoned to life with the only impediment being an insistence of scanning the 1 TB Western Digital and getting stuck along the way. Not having the patience, I skipped this at start up and later unmounted the drive to let fsck to its thing while I got on with other tasks; the hold up had been the presence of VirtualBox disk images on the drive. Speaking of VirtualBox, I needed to scale back the capabilities of Compiz so things would work as they should. Otherwise, it was a matter of updating various directories with files that had appeared on external drives without making it into their usual storage areas. Windows would never have been so tolerant and, as if to prove the point, I needed to repair an XP installation in one of my virtual machines.
In the instructions that came with the new box, Novatech stated that time was a vital ingredient for a build and they weren’t wrong. The delivery arrived at 09:30 and I later got a shock when I saw the time to be 15:15! However, it was time well spent and I noticed the speed increase when putting ImageMagick through its paces with a Perl script. In time, I might get brave and be tempted to add more memory to get up to 4 GB; the motherboard may only have two slots but that’s not such a problem with my planning on sticking with 32-bit Linux for a while to come. My brief brush with its 64-bit counterpart revealed some roughness that ward me off for a little while longer. For now, I’ll leave well alone and allow things to settle down again. Lessons for the future remain and I may even mull over them in another post…
Bumping newly edited older articles in Textpattern
Whether this is intended or not, you can put a pre-existing article to the top of your website’s Atom or RSS feed by saving it as draft while it is being modified before restoring its status to live again. This is handy when you have got permanent articles that you are enhancing over the course of time and you want to give your visitors a reason to return and maybe even prompt search engines too. New articles will achieve this always but it’s nice to see that older articles don’t get lost in space either. This may be a hack but I am using Textpattern for permanent postings rather than blogging and am very happy to see the availability of the feature.
SYLK: File format is not valid
You can see the above message on attempting to open a CSV file in Microsft Excel. The cause is having “ID” as the very first characters in the file (case is important) because that causes a file type misidentification and CSV does not fit the application’s expectations for an SYLK format, an early spreadsheet file type used by Microsoft. More can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323626.