Site setup
All quiet on the blog front
Jul 23rd
I seem to have lost my blogging mojo of late.
Partly because much of my wit and charm is now unleashed onto the world via Facebook and Twitter, and partly because I’m kind of over this current layout/template and haven’t really found a new one that tickles my fancy in any kind of sustained way.
Oh, and that email photo -> blog post thing I had working, so proudly, is broken.
Violins, I know.
My blog: Causing the recession.
Mar 31st
I sometimes get caught up in the stats that are collected by my web host, the rather inappropriately-named Godaddy.com.
As you can see in the chart of server-requests below, March was the biggest month “since records began”, way back in January 08, in terms of files being requested via my website:
The Y-axis here is the number of individual files that are requested from the server. This approximately translates to (or at least correlates with) ‘visits’ but not quite. Visit numbers recorded as a separate variable, but I don’t have access to historical values. Regardless, I noticed something striking here – this trend is practically the inverse of another source of data I am becoming increasingly obsessed with: the stock market.
To explore this stunning revelation further, I downloaded the weekly Dow Jones closing price from here, and compared it to the weekly number of page requests (not file requests).
Below is the undeniable correlation that exists between the popularity of my blog, and the value of the US stock market:
That’s right America; the more I blog, the poorer you get!
How to: Geotagged photobloging with iPhone 3G & Wordpress
Mar 30th
Non-geeky friends: if you value our friendship, please stop reading now!
After learning that the iPhone 3G embeds GPS location data in the ‘meta-data’ of every photo, I thought it would be cool to use this information to show the location of photos I post on my Wordpress (self-hosted) blog. An example is shown on left.
Once you have things set up, you simply need to take a photo, email it to a certain ’secret’ email address, placing the post title in the subject and post content in the body of the email, and voila – everything else is automatic!
To do this you will need the following:
- iPhone 3G (or other device with GPS, camera and email)
- Wordpress blog & host that allows you to install plugins
- A host that allows you to set up something called a ‘cron job’ – basically a server setting that runs a predefined script every x minutes/hours/days. I use Godaddy and they allow it.
- The ExZO plugin (I’m using version 0.b7.5)
- The Postie plugin, development version
Step 1: More >
Testing postie + exzo wordpress plugin integration
Mar 19th
[exif="/wp-content/wp-photos//20090319-184619-1.jpg"]
A few dutch people might recognise this coffee mug..?
I’m trying to get a couple of Wordpress plugins to play nicely here. One for posting images and text via email (Postie) and one for extracting the exif data (ExZo) from said photo, including GPS coordinates, and creating that little table you see here. As of right now, after some trial and error from the very helpful developer of Postie, it seems to be working!
Currently the link to the tinigeocoder.com API I have there gives the exact street location of the GPS coordinates. This is potentially encouraging bad things to happen, so I might have to rethink that one.
But for the time being – so cool!
Mission statement
Feb 23rd
According to my allegedly-accurate site hit-counter down there, this site had its 100,000th visit a few weeks ago. To commemorate this major life achievement, I decided to mix things up a little and turn the site into more of a photo-blog (or “photog” in web 2.0 parlance).
I’m not sure anyone has noticed the difference, but essentially when you see a post tagged ‘Man About Town’ that means I’ve made the post from my iPhone – usually from somewhere else than my apartment or office. To achieve this, I’m using the Wordpress plugin ‘Postie‘ in conjunction with a cron job (sounds painful) running on my web host.
I am still working on making the mobile posts location-aware, which should be entirely possible as the iPhone includes GPS coordinates in every photo it takes. So far I am stumped with getting that going (automatically) but where there’s a nerd with a will, there’s a google result that will lead the way. Totally just made that up.
From time to time I will probably still post the occasional unhinged rant, snap-shot of my potpourri of self-diagnosed psychological afflictions or riveting random-life-update, so don’t despair too much if that’s what you come here for. After all; my general life-goal of causing as much embarrassment to my family in whatever medium I can, remains firmly intact. Next stop on that train: interpreting my thesis through dance:
You knew it was only a matter of time.
Updates & Changes
Nov 10th
I don’t really know what I’m doing around here lately, feel like a change – but can’t decide on a new theme. So many to chose from, so few working hours to spend comparing and contrasting. C’est la vie!
I wish I’d registered www.rvl.com; so much cooler. I wonder if I could sue the current owners/squatters?
In other lame news, my favourite author died, I snapped my favourite pair of glasses in half trying to adjust the (rimless) frame, I seem to have failed my current biostats subject, I have to spend another $500 to get a stupid crown on my stupid my tooth that I don’t even want AND no-one is coming to visit me for Christmas.
Grrrr….
It’s not all bad though.
Bitching