photocrati wordpress themes

I’m happy to announce that the people at photocrati create some really great WordPress Themes for photographer with the full integration of NextGEN Gallery.  Visit here :  http://www.photocrati.com/

Snipi

A new tools for Firefox called Snipi is now available. You can drag and drop products, photos and videos from virtually anywhere and organize, share and compare. They also write a new plugin for WordPress. See it here in action :

Any thoughts about such a tool ?

All by your lonesome…

Starting from Monday I have have no more connection to the world, no Internet , no telephone … AHH ! For more than two weeks, due to the fact that T-Com don’t rush if you are a customer from a competitor… And I’m loosing my 100MBit VDSL2 😦 and must downgrade to 18MBit ADSL2.  Is the Web2.0 still working with only a 18Mbit connection ? Cannot believe it…

The real NextGEN project is one year

What a great time… what a great project 🙂

Error 500

If you encounter a Error 500 with the Flash uploader for NextGEN Gallery, it could be caused by the Mod_security addon for the Apache server. Thanks to the great response in the wordpress.org forums , there exists an easy work around for it. Add to your .htaccess file the follow exclude option :

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

Thanks to John Blackbourn for the hat tip !

1 & 1 – Read the FAQ

In response to my article 1&1 = 3.

Marc found this interesting note in the FAQ section of 1 & 1 :

Can the memory usage limit be increased on shared hosting with a php.ini file?

Due to resource limits on our Shared Hosting machines, it is not possible to allocate more than 20M of memory to PHP, although phpinfo() may report a higher number. You will be unable to increase the memory usage limit with a php.ini file.

Very cool note 🙂 Especially when you are check the memory limit via your PHP script. Time to change the hoster…

Understand GD Library

In the forums I received very often the question :

I got the failure “Fatal error: Out of memory ” or “Error : Exceed Memory limit. Require : xx.xx MByte”, but my image has only the size of 1 MB ?

After I answered this question now 1000 times , I hope this post will clarify this point. Let’s create a white image with the size of 640 x 480 (It’s the VGA resolution) and open this with a image viewer like IrfanView.

Let’s have a look at the bottom line :

The image requires a disk space (the file size) of 5.30 KB and a memory size of 900.04 KB

Now increase the resolution to 1024 x 768 :

The image requires still the file size of 5.30 KB but a memory size of 2.25 MB

Now look for a 4 Megapixel image (Resolution 2304 x 1728) :

The required memory size increases to 11.39 MB

And a 7.1 MP camera picture :

We need now 20.25 MB memory , but the file size is still 5.30 KB.

What do we learn from this test ? JPG, PNG (and other compression format’s) reduces the file size, but for image manipulation we need for each pixel a lot of memory space:

File size is not equal to the required memory space.

Inside the most web server the common image manipulation library for PHP is called GD and this library doesn’t work different then programs like Photoshop, Paintshop or others. A very rough calculation for the memory need under GD library is :

Width x Height x 8 (bits) x 3(channels) / 8 x 1.65

NextGEN Gallery shows you the current memory usage of WordPress and all loaded plugins inside the server settings :

Now have a look at your Memory Limit in the server settings and you can calculate the maximum resolution for your images, which you can manipulate (create thumbnails) with the GD library. It’s possible to change the memory limit, but there exist various way’s and not all of them are allowed at your web server. At the best contact your web hoster, if you want to increase this limit. A good and useful value for images is a limit of 64 MB.

This weekend…

no development, no wordpress, no computer, why ?

Enjoy it…

We need Media RSS !

PicLens is one of the best and hottest addon for Firefox (and also for IE7). To enable this for NextGEN Gallery, I need to add the Media RSS format…

you can be sure this is my next task !

UPDATE : Shack Dougall did already a first update of the WordPress Plugin WP-Plugins for NextGEN Gallery. You can download the plugin here : http://liferain.com/downloads/wp-piclens-plus/

Thanks for this quick addon!

Beta 2 is available

You can download now the first second beta release of NextGEN Gallery Version 0.80. If you know what beta means and if you are interested to be a beta tester, you can now download this version from my GoogleCode project below.

I will write up in the next days more about this version, if you interested in the new custom fields option for individual settings , please read this : http://nextgen.boelinger.com/custom-fields/

I’m during the weekend not available, so backup, backup, backup what every you have in your live :

Download NextGEN Gallery V0.80
Release version