Category: Technology

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On the evils of software bloat

Today I found out that Gallery 2.3 was released about a week ago. It’s been a few years in the making and has some very needed upgrades and bug fixes. I had thought about this before but really realized today just how bloated a Gallery2 installation can be. The English-only installation has well over 2000 files that need to be uploaded to a server. Granted, it could all be done on the server with a tar ball, but it is easier for me to unzip it on my local machine and upload via ftp.

The full installation option (the one that comes will all of the languages pre-loaded) runs somewhere around 10000 files. Quite frankly, that’s a bit absurd. With so many files and so many subdirectories, it becomes unmanageable to even unzip the installation file.

Why does Gallery2 need so many files? I really couldn’t tell you although it looks like the vast majority of them are language files. The KISS principle doesn’t seem to be at play here. I haven’t been able to find out if this was actually created yet, but this language manager tool that was in the works a few years back sure seems like something nifty that could be very useful, especially for those of us who ended up with many large language packs cluttering up our installations. After all, I really don’t need to use the administrative interface in British English.

WordPress so far has managed to stay away from such a large bloating problem. It seems to have better management of how many files it requires on your webserver. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see WordPress have the same fate befall it. Beware, WordPress, and take note Gallery2, it is REALLY annoying having to work with thousands upon thousands of files on my webserver.

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Gallery2 hiccups, barfs, and then recovers

I had a few hiccups today with uploading photos to my Gallery2 installation. Documentation of what happened is on the Gallery2 forums. There still are some annoyances that I run into while using Gallery2. For instance:

  • Not being able to batch rotate photos based on EXIF data after they are uploaded and inserted into an album. Seriously. That shouldn’t be so hard to implement!
  • Not being able to add more than about 50 photos at a time without the program barfing (this might be a Dreamhost limitation but really should be addressed in the Gallery2 core since I imagine many people use a similar shared hosting setup).
  • Not having support for AVI movies in FireFox.  To play them, people using FireFox either have to wade through support FAQ’s for Gallery2 to find some obscure FireFox plugin (that didn’t work for me, by the way), or they have to edit something in their quicktime plugin installs, or just use Internet Explorer.  That is not a very good solution if you ask me.
  • To be able to watch a movie, the permissions on it must be set to “view all” for the Everyone group.  I like to keep my original-sized images to myself and want to just be able to set all of the permissions for all of the albums once.
  • Watermark issues!  It seems that my albums like to have their watermarks vanish periodically.  This is a bit troubling as I want to be able to protect all of my content at least to the extent where people might awknowledge the source of the photos.  I think this might be due to Dreamhost issues with regards to php_memory limits.

All in all, it’s very powerful software.  I just wish they’d change and/or fix these few things.

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Best practices for permalink structures?

I get the feeling that I need to change the way I do my permalinks in my wordpress installation. Currently, I just use %postname% which provides for pretty structures with my pages (a good thing) but makes duplication of names in my blog posts problematic. Also, longer titles, such as this post’s, cause a bit of an unruly URL to result. Then again, it is more descriptive than the default which just spits out a post or page number.

There certainly are plugins available to migrate a permalink structure which would be useful were I to change mine. This website claims the best permalink structure is a “blog/category/postname” hierarchy. I definately like the use of the “blog” part of that permalink structure in that it separates off posts from pages (at least that’s what I would assume it does…). People on this forum seem to think that using a “category/postname” or “postname” structure will significantly slow down your database. The WordPress Codex states that using only “postname” has the potential to screw up things within WordPress although there is a note that questions if this is still true in 2.0+ versions.

It seems that there are a whole bunch of opinions out there. I wonder which is the best and most relevant for my website’s situation.

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