Nov
09
2006

Photobox Updates

(Add / View Comments) (0)Thursday, November 9, 2006 - 01:42:56 am
(Posted Under: Web Development)
Tonight I updated my live version of Photobox with the recent development I've done (actually spanning a couple of months).

This was somewhat premature, hence I made it a release candidate. Tonight I had gotten things to a place where I felt I could start to think about marking it as a release. Not that I don't have plenty of development still in mind and pending, but a place where I could mark a release, and then bump the revision number and keep going. So I fired up the current release installed on my server, to do some side by side comparisons. It only took a few seconds before Winamp stopped playing what it was playing (off my server), and the whole server starting to creator!

So the whole side by side comparison thing went out the window. While I could have done some stuff to make things cope, I decided that this was more than enough sign that I needed to get the latest code online.

Over the past 2 or so weeks I've made some significant performance tweaks, which have become apparent since June...well, the performance issues have become apparent - in two parts, no doubt. The first would be being snap happy in Arizona and Mexico and going from albums with around 500 photos to albums with over 5000. The second would be the code changes that I made in April (before the trip) to facilitate editing photo pages through a web interface. This week I also came across a ridiculous server side caching bug, which may have also contributed. (If cached thumbnail is dirty, regenerate, but only write to the cache if there isn't a cached file already. Okay, but the fact that the cache file is dirty means there is. So effectively, never cache if we get into this scenario - nice! [smile] I love bugs!)

I knew that I'd done good with the performance tweaks of late, getting page load times down from 47 seconds (for a large page in an album) to 8 seconds. But even so, it took loading the old software version (after using the newer code a fair bit of late, through development and testing) to hit home what a significant change I've made to the performance over the last week.

In addition to this, the new version has got a lot of new features, which are cool to have online. Particularly the reading EXIF information out of photos, which is a cool ass feature to have, as well as putting more effort into navigation of photos, and new fancy icons. That being said, of course, the reason for rushing this release is in an effort to stop my server crashing under the load of the v2.0.1 code.
Nov
09
2006

Spotted In Mexico

(Add / View Comments) (0)Thursday, November 9, 2006 - 01:27:22 am
(Posted Under: Travel)
A few days ago I was surfing around some photo sites, looking for design inspiration for Photobox. The easiest (and most fun) way to do this was looking at people's Circus Mexicus May 2006 photos.

I can't say I found too much design inspiration, or any that I ended up applying to Photobox, but it was pretty sweet coming across someone's Mexico photos with me in them. [smile]

http://ckjohn.com/g2/main.php?g2_itemId=6304. Right down the other end of Senor Shrimp.

Speaking of which, I really could do with having a Señor Shrimp chicken Fajita and Tecate with lime again!

Switch Styles

About Style Switching.

!Weblog Index

Oct November 2006 Dec
SU MO TU WE TH FR SA
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31

Categories

RSS FeedRSS Feed