Anigozanthos

I'm just not reviewing those wikis, am I?

This post is just a quickie. A fellow by the name of Homer emailed me and mentioned a database-less CMS that I hadn't seen before: SkyBlueCanvas.

This one feels pretty good at the moment. I can see the elegance of their design, and that it basically works rather well. Each page is able to specify its own template. There are plugins/extensions - seemingly all sorts of ways to customize it and add functionality. It appears to support an infinite hierarchy of pages. The problem is that the menu system by default is very clunky and does not allow any of that hierarchy to be shown. The support forums mention some customisation, but I couldn't figure out how it worked.

IMO, there should be much better built-in support to show a breadcrumb trail, sibling and child pages. That information is already in the system, so it should be better supported.

The built-in page editor is WYMeditor, not truly WYSIWYG, but pretty close. It automatically handles links to internal pages and images, which is very nice. Edit: As Scott has pointed out in his comment below, SkyBlueCanvas supports the WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE, but even better, it is included in the default install! The TinyMCE integration could do with some polish - the list of internal page links is a bunch of nameless pid numbers, effectively unusable. The image selector is better - at least you can see the image folder and filenames!

This one might be worth spending some time on. If I can put together some way to automate generation navigation links based on the internal information, then I think this would be good for simple as well as more complex sites.

I have always had a fascination with maps. I would regularly just open the street directory and flick through the pages. When playing computer games I would spend ages drawing maps so I could see where I had been. Years ago I had a pirate copy of Ultima 4 for my Apple 2. I produced my own world map using 2mm graph paper. It must have been about 40x40cm, each tiny square coloured in according to the terrain type. Cities, towns and dungeon entrances all marked accordingly.

More recently, I've bought the Natmap Raster 250K, which consists of 250K scale digitized topographic maps for all of Australia. It includes 1M, 5M and 20M scale maps too. So I could have them on my phone (using PathAway software), I spent hours exporting hundreds (500+) of individual map tiles, converting them to PathAway format, then calibrating their extents. I've also grabbed the Perth Bike Maps and converted them to PathAway.

So how come I've only just now found OpenStreetMap? Cool! An outlet for my map fascination that might be useful to other people.

For my city, Perth, they naturally seem to have the streets in quite well. Bicycle paths much less so. What I might start with is some GPS tracks of cycleways I logged last year and see how hard it is to get that into the map. Then I might think about plotting some bus stop locations on the map. I could use my new camera with geo-tagged photos of each stop and see what happens

With my new Ricoh Caplio 500SE being able to tag GPS coordinates with my photos, I've been re-visiting how I organise and store my digital photos.

Currently, all my photos are barely organised. My Casio software grouped photos by day and generated a browsable HTML index page. Sort-of OK, but now that I have a new camera I need a new system. Something much simpler.

The ideal system, IMO, is to embed all meta-data inside the photo itself. i.e. use EXIF, IPTC, or whatever tags. No separate indexes, no extra files, no third-party databases or special management software. EXIF and IPTC and common, well-known standards that can be read by lots of software packages. I can just email the JPEG to someone, and the comments, description and other data can be read out again fairly easily.

The problem is getting the description and other meta-data into the JPEG. For some reason, good EXIF editors are hard to find. For a while I had Exifer. This is no longer being developed, but is still an awesome tool for editing EXIF meta-data. The author of Exifer has moved on to my new tool of choice: GeoSetter.

GeoSetter does not have the same EXIF editing capabilities as Exifer. In fact, it's EXIF editing facilities are really rather limited. It's big feature is being able to set the GPS EXIF tags - set the precise location where the photo was taken. It will even take a recorded GPS track and automatically estimate where a photo was taken based on the time. You can also directly edit IPTC meta-data, such as the caption.

The lack of EXIF user comment support was a little disappointing, but easily worked around. The workaround solved another problem I had with embedded meta-data: some of the tools I was using read the EXIF user comment, others looked at the JPEG comment and still others looked at the IPTC caption. What I really needed was some way of setting all those fields at the same time to the same data. Before GeoSetter I had no way of doing that, and so hadn't bothered with tagging my images at all.

GeoSetter uses ExifTool (which are command-line, but GeoSetter handles all that behind the scenes, so you don't need to worry about that), and allows you to add extra ExifTool commands. The following command, set in the GeoSetter GUI to execute after the GeoSetter commands, copies the IPTC caption entered in the GeoSetter GUI to the EXIF user comment and JPEG comment fields:

-execute -Comment<$IPTC:Caption-Abstract -UserComment<$IPTC:Caption-Abstract

That's exactly what I had been looking for. GeoSetter doesn't stop there, though. It also has the ability to collate all the details of all the photos stored under a folder, including sub-folders, and filter and search on numerous criteria.

So, this is how I'm planning on organising my photos. Photos are going to be grouped by day into folders with a YYYYMMDD naming convention. The Casio and Ricoh software does that automatically. I'll be deleting the old Casio web-based index files and relying on the embedded meta-data. If I have somehow managed to lose the meta-data, I might use Exifer to transcribe it from the Casio web files, but I'll have to be in a good mood to bother with that! Photos will be left named as they pop out of the camera. For the Casio that's MMDDNNNN, for the Ricoh that's RIMGNNNN. If any photos need rotating, I'll use the rotating tool built into Windows Explorer. If you haven't already noticed, that preserves all meta-data and performs a lossless rotation when the JPEG is an exact multiple of 8 pixels in both dimensions. Panoramas will be stitched together using Autostitch (I suspect I'll be buying one of the commercial versions of it soonish) and given NNNN-NNNN names based on their source photo's names.

And that's basically it. File management doesn't get any simpler. The only hassle is going back through my several years of photos tagging and describing everything as best I can remember. I think it will be worth it, though.

Gosh! Has it been eight months! I still haven't gotten around to looking at those flat-file wikis!

"Soon".

I promise!

This post is more a failure report than anything else. I'd recently been pointed in the direction of CMS Made Simple. This is NOT a flat-file CMS - it needs a database. Nevertheless, I gave it's online demo a whirl and came away very impressed. I want one!

However, I still need flat file support. Hmmmm ... CMSms has ADOdb Lite support. Lanius uses Gladius as its database - and Gladius has an ADOdb Lite driver! Maybe that will work!

Of course not! That would be too easy. I've just spent two days fiddling with Gladius and CMSms trying to get the two to talk to each other. It's close, but not close enough.

Technically, Gladius has two "showstoppers" that I'm aware of and can't (easily) work around:

1. Key fields must be numeric - string fields are not supported.
   
2. Aggregate functions (min, max, etc) are not working, but used to.
   

I've submitted everything as either feature requests or bugs.

Aggregate functions used to work in 0.7.0, so surely fixing 0.8.1 can't be a huge task? Support of non-numeric key fields sounds like a more fundamental problem, however. Fingers-crossed the Gladius developers can do something - I really like CMSms!

Opera just keeps on adding all sorts of useful features to their browser. The latest feature is Opera Turbo.

The idea is that Opera runs a bunch of proxy servers that compress the web pages you're surfing. The result is faster surfing, and less traffic. I will especially welcome this when using my relatively expensive wireless broadband connection on my laptop. The slower speed and cost per megabyte will both be relieved a bit by Opera Turbo.

Economics isn't the only reason, though. Here in Australia, our nanny government is trialling Internet filtering. Innocent citizens must be protected from the dark side of the Internet! Whether they want that protection or not. Whether they want their content blocked or not. Whether they want their Internet connection slowed down or not.

It would be very interesting to see if Opera Turbo's proxy technology could bypass the filtering? By appearing to route all your traffic through innocuous proxy servers in Sweden, I imagine it would work quite well. It's a shame my ISP isn't one of the six selected for the pilot.