The Laws of Simplicity
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I would really like to lay out every book I have every read and give a review, but by now that is mostly impossible. I can start from now on, so here we go. I’m going to try and post about every book I read from now on. I may even try to hit some of my favorites as I remember them.
I heard about John Meada on a blog I follow. I don’t remember exactly which one. I put it on my library hold list and it took a while to come available so I must be somewhat popular. There were some very profound ideas and I would recommend reading it. It sticks with the simplicity theme in length so you could storm through it quickly. On of the nice quotes I liked:
Emotional intelligence is now considered an important facet of leaders today, and the expression of emotion is no longer considered a weakness but a desirable human trait to which everyone can immediately relate.
In one section he details the idea of Omakase an idea that the sushi shef knows better than you do what you’ll enjoy. I’ve done this before at a restaurant I trust where there is some interaction with the chef. An interesting way to simplify.
The most profound part of the last half of the book [I read the first half a while back :( ] was that of the “power of undo”. He poses an interesting idea that I’ve expanded on a bit of gift recipients, ctrl+z, tattoo removal, quick diets. etc. Where does that lead us in society, in our relationships with others and in life as a whole? An interesting thought, when life is so easy to call a redo, in so many things, are we tempted to do the same when redo is not and option, or shouldn’t be. Are those lines blurring?
Good easy read! Fun and thought provoking.
Wordpress Uploading Images
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This is the first half of part 1 of the Uploading section of My WordPress Image Process.
First off, you need place to store your images. I tried the host your own website under the table style without paying the extra to my ISP and just updating the IP address when it changed every month or so. That was more hassle than it was worth. I’m a horrible IT manager. I’m now hosting a bunch of sites on a virtual server and have fantastic paid tech support (MillcreeekSys). This works out because I have a website that brings in come offsetting revenue, so I’m not going it the hole every month. The problem with image hosting there is that there is only 10 GB. With all that i have on my virtual server I had to remove all my originals and re-upload pre-scaled-down version to fit all my images. This way is not a long term solution. Then I heard about S3, Amazon’s Simple Storage Service. There is a flat storage fee and a bandwidth use fee. So for every image you store you’re charged and for every image that is viewed, downloaded or uploaded, you get charged. Sounds expensive!!! Well actually is is amazingly cheap. If you bought a hard drive and kept you photos on it, you’d still end up on the loosing side. Redundancy, unlimited storage, and cheap rates make S3 a great service.
Enough with the hard sale. None of this is any good, unless you have a way to use it with WordPress. Luckily there is a plugin that meshes with the normal uploading that is native to WP. Tan Tan has given us the WordPress S3 plugin. With this plugin you can add images to S# and they will act exactly as they do if they were stored on your personal server or hosted elsewhere. If you need bulk upload. There are a few options but the one that I like the best is a Firefox plugin called S3Fox. Plug it in and bulk upload to S3.
There you have it step one. A place to put your pixels. Next up… Adding on to the basic upload of WordPress. Yes it even works with S3.
My Wordpress Image Process
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I think I finally have the image process for WordPress figured out. It’s been a long time in the making. I’ve been running WordPress since March of ‘04. I’m no blog expert and have very limited PHP and CSS, but I’m apt to try, and try I’ve done. I’ve had 5 or 6 themes that I’ve massaged into doing what I’ve wanted and I’ve been fretting about the images all along. On the latest blog that I’ve done I think it has all gelled. That means it’s time to get it all down so in 6 months when I get around to doing it on my site I’ll still be able to remember what I’ve done and how to do it again.
What I’m trying to accomplish…
Uploading - I want to be able to upload images in bulk or one at a time. If I load them up one at a time I would expect to have the thumbnails made and the image sized. For bulk uploads I would do thumbnails and sizing that before hand.
Storing - I need a way to store my images in all the various sizes that I desire without breaking the bank and breaking into a new tier on my virtual server plan. I want my image storage to act as a supplemental backup for my images as well as serving the sized and thumbnail versions.
Displaying - I want to be able to easily place images in my post where and when I want them. I want these images to be pre styled to float (top right or left), and or contain the correct titles, alternate text, description, etc. I would also like the pre style to allow for lightbox and simple gallery displays. Oh yeah, all of these need to work together.
I use the following tools to get all this done and wanted this to be an all-in-one post, but I doubt that I could ever be so brief, especially with the many plugins and tools that I use. This will have to be done in parts. Here are my tools.
GIMP, Phatch, Flexible Upload, S3, WordPressS3, Iimage Gallery, Random Image, Lightbox 2
