trisweb.com

I’m pleased to announce two new additions to the Zenphoto community:

The Zenphoto Wiki (wiki.zenphoto.org)

The Zenphoto Bugtracker (bugs.zenphoto.org)

If you use zenphoto, and especially if you develop themes or plugins, we’d love to have you help out with documentation, support, bug-catching… anything you can find time for. Also, we’ve officially cut our ties with berlios, so you don’t ever need to go back there.

So make some accounts and have fun!

This is just a test of ZenPress, a great new Zenphoto+Wordpress plugin by Alessandro Morandi. If you run both, give it a shot It’s exactly what I had planned to make, but never had the time. So far it’s working great. Read the discussion on the forums if you want more background.

Finally, for the first time Ever (literally), I have a calendar system good enough to use.

Now the only thing left is integration with Gmail, but I’m sure they’ve got that up they’re sleeves.

Seriously though, Google Calendar is a very good application that’s just plain useful. I hate to admit it, but I’m one of the odd lots that’s getting suspicious of Google’s growth, and then great things like this come along and have to convince me again. Perfect use of Javascript, nice clean design, simple and good UI principles. Can’t get much better than this.

I’m pleased to announce the release of zenphoto 1.0.2 beta! This is an important security release, so everyone using zenphoto should upgrade as soon as possible. Head over to zenphoto.org for the download and changelog.

The major changes in this release include:

• Security fixes and improvements


• Rework of the image serving model—now images are redirected straight from cache (to let apache deal with them) rather than being served through PHP. This should eliminate complaints from certain hosts about CPU cycles, and generally makes everything much faster. Images are still created and returned through the URL as before.


• Path bugs are fixed, please let us know if you encounter any problems. However, if you do need to override the paths manually, there’s now a place at the bottom of config.php for it.


• Root installs now work (but are limited to one access path when using mod_rewrite, eg: you can’t access the same gallery from trisweb.com/photos and photos.trisweb.com).

So there are some good security fixes (go upgrade now if you haven’t yet), and lots of improvements. This should be a very stable and generally good release. Enjoy!

For some reason, zenphoto got an honorable mention in this year’s Web 2.0 awards! I was quite surprised to find that email in-between the spam in my Hotmail account.

We got the award for the “Photos & Digital Imaging” category, in the shadows of such greats as Flickr and, well, Flickr. Hopefully people see the value in an open-source self-hosted alternative to the big guy, so we’ll keep working on making it even more than that (seriously, we’re working on it for real now ;-)).

And of course, the best part is that we get to show this:

While we’re still on the subject, we have a release coming tomorrow. Lots of bugfixes and security patches. Make sure to check it out. Update: tomorrow’s release delayed until tomorrow (today). It’s all set, just need to do the site changes and I’m out of time. Thanks for your patience.

Spring break is almost over (sadly) and I’m heading back to Berkeley this afternoon. I’ll just use bullets for this one.

• Yes, we know Zenphoto development has slowed, and we know there’s lots of demand for certain bugfixes and features. I’m planning on releasing the bugfixes first (this week for some critical security issues), then opening the new Wiki and bugtracker, then working on subcategories. Just be patient and understand that unless someone starts paying me a salary to work on this, most everything else comes first.


• Some great pictures over break, especially of the portrait variety. I’ll post them later. I’m really enjoying using my camera and I plan on posting a formal after-months-of-use review soon.


• I’m graduating from UC Berkeley with a BA in Computer Science in May. That’s a big “hint hint” to anyone who wants to hire me.


• Dim Sum rocks.


• Road trip(s) this spring break: Berkeley to Ojai (down 101), Ojai to Folsom (up 5), and Folsom to Berkeley (80). A map gives better perspective of this undertaking.


• Spirograph ROCKS! So do milky gel pens. And Spider Writers. And Legos and model rockets and really great toy stores... sometimes you just need to be a kid again…

What a wonderful week, that’s all I can say. The worst part is getting back to work, but then I guess that’s the point. Can’t relax all the time…