Hello WordPress 2.7

I took the plunge and upgraded to WordPress 2.7.  So far, so good.  Nothing seems to be particularly broken.  The administrative interface is very different from the last version but I’m getting used to it.  It feels like some information takes more clicking to get to.  I also don’t like the new color scheme.  It’s very gray.

Soon the theme I use, Tarski, should be putting out a new version that will take full advantage of WordPress’ new features.  Once December hits and I have a few free days, I will be coding up a few templates and plugins for the site to make it a tad bit prettier, too.

My final concluision: 2.7 is a Good Thing.  I will be much happier though when it’s out of beta.

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.

Resource Hogs, Gallery2-zilla, Transitions, My Thesis

Since switching over to Dreamhost a week or two ago, I’ve been working on transferring over all of the static content that I maintained in parallel to my WordPress installation at my old webhost.  Finally after much futzing about, I transferred over the first two real pages of photographic content.  Behold, minimal content from the very first few days of my time in Tuinsia!  There are literally only two of the very first pages completely transferred.  It takes significant effort to coroberate between what I have on my old site, what I am putting onto this site, and Gallery2’s structure.

Speaking of Gallery2, it can be a real resource hog.  I guess that’s partially my own fault though.  Rather than only upload the images that I plan to use in the sizes I want, I uploaded ALL of the original images.  At last check, I was pushing close to 11,000 images.  Just the battle to get everything uploaded and imported into Gallery2 took a week.  And I haven’t even organized but a few galleries worth of photos.  The biggest problem comes from the image manipulation packages that Gallery2 uses.  They eat resources for breakfast.  Trying to resize all of the original massive images to thumbnails of various proportions, several different resized viewable images, and the like on top of watermarking everything can really bog the server down and ocassionally makes it barf out full-size images for no apparent reason.  This is especially problematic on the left column of my WordPress theme (Tarski) where I end up with the odd MASSIVE IMAGE OF DOOM.  It appears though that the ooccurance of these images might be largely limited to when I am logged in as an administrator to the site.  Otherwise, I believe it just returns a blank image box.

A slightly less big problem is trying to perform any operation on the Gallery2 database, which runs through a MySQL backend, that accesses more than a few records.  It seems that I must be on a heavily loaded database server with Dreamhost, or Dreamhost has a draconian policy toward MySQL queries and the number of records that can be accessed at any one time, or Gallery2 is particularly resource intensive when working with very large numbers of images.  Whatever the case, it makes dealing with the entire image set a bit difficult.

If only there were a way to perform tasks such as creating resized images and thumbnails, optimizing the database, and other maintianence tasks on my own machine rather than on the server…  That way I could actually get them to complete correctly AND not drain the resources on my shared hosting plan.

In other news, my masters thesis is slowly coming together.  There are so many sources that I am still trying to digest!  I read through a 300ish page textbook yesterday evening and skimmed the majority of the important sources.  Each new book or paper I encounter holds a roughly 25% chance of being something quite valuable that demands a day or two of attention.  While processing all of these sources, I am also trying to write bits and pieces of the acutal thesis.  Hopefully in another few days, I’ll be able to start writing in ernest.  First though, I have to clear two 1000+ page tomes and about 40 articles related to those monsterous works.