AUTHOR: Eliot Shepard DATE: 11/24/2004 03:15:08 PM ----- BODY: Well, in all honesty, Flickr is what's happened to enfamer right now. Though it's more of a general photo service than a means to set up one's own site, I'm both incredibly impressed by what they're doing, and somewhat cowed by the prospect of competing with it. I'm still working on enfamer, but plans to launch a public service are definitely up in the air. Stay tuned. -------- AUTHOR: Eliot Shepard DATE: 9/1/2004 01:58:02 AM ----- BODY: It's been tough to find time to work on enfamer these past couple weeks, as I've been wrapped up in my own joy and pain, as well as getting on with the tedious business of making a living. So since there's nothing new, I thought I would brag about some shit that I've had working for a while. With some other tools, rebuilding your site can take fucking forever. If you're just fixing a typo in your template or whatever, it's a pain in the keister to wait for the software to march through and build every page. One solution would be to have every page be dynamic, generated anew every time someone requests it. But for most sites, there's really not much need for that. Most pages only need change under certain circumstances – a new comment, when you edit a caption, and so forth. So it's wasteful to call on the database each load, and once you start pushing a lot of traffic, it will come crashing down and your site will suck. So we'd like to stick to nice, static HTML pages, which stick around until they need to change. Enfamer solves both problems – slow builds and scalability. Clicking "build" simply deletes everything, and thus is nearly instantaneous. Each page is then regenerated the first time it is requested, whereupon it's saved, ready for future requests. (Technically, enfamer installs an .htaccess file to direct 404 and 403 errors to a script. When a 403/4 is thrown, the script parses the request URL, builds the requested page, and redirects there.) I'm sure there are other tools out there that do this. In fact, I bet there's some douchebag out there with a patent on the process. But until I hear from them, it's there in enfamer, and it's pretty cool. -------- AUTHOR: Eliot Shepard DATE: 8/19/2004 10:29:45 AM ----- BODY: A convenience feature for authors. I don't write much on slower, but invariably whatever I do is riddled with typographic errors, drunken japes, and borderline libel. Typically I catch these mistakes while browsing the site. Going from there back into the admin console and finding the photo I erred on is a real pain in the ass, so I added an icon (which only I can see) to each entry which links directly to the edit page for that entry. (And of course the entry edit page is protected by enfamer's normal security mechanism.) Inspired by this third-party plugin for Movable Type. -------- AUTHOR: Eliot Shepard DATE: 8/18/2004 09:30:20 PM ----- BODY: Enfamer keeps integrated real-time stats for your site. Here's the default view, which shows from left: today and the past week's daily unique ips and total hits, hits per hour of the day, the day's most viewed entries, and the fifty latest referrers with their landing pages. To come are views by week and by month. Anything in particular you'd like to see in the stats module? -------- AUTHOR: Eliot Shepard DATE: 8/16/2004 01:42:26 AM ----- BODY: A number of you have written in with attaboys, as well as some good questions which I'll try and address this week. Thanks for the time and the thoughts. The so far unspoken question, though, is What in the hell are you doing? Do I really think the world needs more blogging software? Between TypePad and Fotolog and Flickr and Blogger and Wordpress and Textpattern and Bloxsom and so on, aren't the needs of the world's wheee-look-at-me-I'm-on-the-internet contingent pretty well covered? I guess they are. Enfamer is something I happen to want to build (the best platform for photographers' websites), that some other people may want to use. I tend to think that the era of photographers being represented by creaky, ponderous Flash contraptions which a guy named Axel updates for them on a biannual basis is soon to end — because dynamic sites are better at representing what being a photographer is now (or is soon to become). How's that for pretension? -------- AUTHOR: Eliot Shepard DATE: 8/12/2004 01:25:36 AM ----- BODY: Don't look now but that rapscallion Timmy's been round the comments again! Will he never learn? Perhaps he will, now that we can delete his ass: Spic and span! -------- AUTHOR: Eliot Shepard DATE: 8/12/2004 12:45:03 AM ----- BODY: Some stuff from the todo list, which would be as long as my arm, if I had slightly longer arms: Most of this should be in 0.9, not that it matters to you, since you won't be seeing 0.9. My roadmap has me going to 0.16 or something, after which everyone just throws up their hands and goes back to using Microsoft Frontpage. I also haven't dealt with my sizeable "Internals" todo in a while. That's where I keep track of all the spots where I have found code that I wrote while drunk, or on the Fung Wah or something. Actually, I did most of the search stuff while riding shotgun through Wyoming in a Toyota Sienna last week, so that probably needs a looking over as well. The goddamned nav system in that thing had a real sexy voice. -------- AUTHOR: Eliot Shepard DATE: 8/11/2004 05:54:12 PM ----- BODY: One of the latest major features added is search. You can look for photos in your archive based on the contents of their caption or filename, by date range, or by attached keywords. Here's an example of a search for all "jpg" files on slower from 2004, tagged with the keyword "Brooklyn". The photo search form: And the (topmost) results: Still to come is pagination of the results pages. Generalized pagination helper functions are on the todo list. Also to come is figuring out how to expose search on the front-end, for site viewers to use. -------- AUTHOR: Eliot Shepard DATE: 8/11/2004 05:07:11 PM ----- BODY: The photo upload page: The book edit page: -------- AUTHOR: Eliot Shepard DATE: 8/11/2004 04:49:11 PM ----- BODY: This blog is a temporary clearinghouse for information on enfamer, a hosted platform for photography websites. It is currently in development. I hope enfamer will be available for beta testing before the end of 2004. Enfamer is analogous to something like Blogger or TypePad, but geared toward photographers. I use it to manage my site, slower.net. It supports a variety of things, like keyword tagging, semantic grouping ("books"), stats reporting, thumbnail generation, syndicated output, on-demand page generation, and search. I'll have more to say about enfamer's features over the next bit. Most of what it can do is on display at slower. Some of what it can do is not. The rest of what it can do, it can't do yet. "Enfamer" is pronounced en-FAME-ur. It is not French. You may have a problem with the name. What can I say. If you'd like to register your interest in keeping up, please leave a comment here, or send a note to enfamer@slower.net. Thanks. -------- AUTHOR: Eliot Shepard DATE: 8/11/2004 04:42:32 PM ----- BODY: For the record, here's the version history to this point. 0.8.0 + comment delete + security: removed password from $dbh->dsn + search + don't popup sized build windows + fix action header (enfamer) 0.7.2 + menu: trimmed tabs, moved logout + name change: enfamer! + excised "xphoto" + set up for app/site at different base URLs + eliminated xphoto_person + bug: fix generator with split site/admin urls! + books: in list, make editing options look nicer + books: add confirms ondelete anything + books: delete + books: rename 0.7.1 - did not exist 0.7.0 + multiple upload + tag "book_name" + bug: send a real flog object to page factory + bug: sometimes template save returns garbage + bug: sometimes bad tag replacement, eg. image_year in copyright + bug: check that filesize of uploaded tmpfile != 0 + publish purges books too + changed XPHOTO_BASE_URL to APP_BASE_URL + chown/chgrp all created php, images, thumbs + added css class to thumbnail grid 0.6.2 + books: add/delete + books: add photo + books: list + changed "Build" to "Publish" + made tempate save return to same template + better status message formatting 0.6.1 + settings: templates + bug: off-by-one in edit page 1, page 0 works + bug: get_keyword_photos gets deleted photos 0.6.0 + l/r nav by imagemap + selective comments on 0.5.8 + widget colors + truncate long filenames in "last 14" display 0.5.7 + widget! + widget stats + rss 0.5.6 + optimized entry generation + stats: establish initial schema if missing + stats: cache day hit/ip counts when day is done + edit: moved nav to top 0.5.5 + tag system + added tag="collection" + added auto "http://" to comment form 0.5.4 + add index build only + add send pings + archive pages: add original filename alt tags + bug: permalink order 0.5.3 + optimize build + edit: next/previous + edit: back to select + edit: make thumb link to entry + fix build speed + fix auto-generator + fix bogus js events on main image 0.5 + use PEAR DB + autogenerate thumbs + reorganize pages + better paging in photo select + break up flog.class + use internal filenames + same form for photo add/edit + stats: convert to sqlite, PEAR DB + stats: add referrer entry point + get photosynthesis stuff out of shared/person.class + get photosynthesis stuff out of all lib/xphoto + rename .inc and .class to .php + global.(append|prepend).inc.php + move actions to action dir + 2-level menu --------