osama i. al-dosary

When you upload your images to be viewed on the web, its best to reduce the size of the image to fit into a normal browser window and more importantly so that web site is quick and responsive to viewers. If you are working with a lot of images at once, such as for photo album, doing a manual resize for every image can be a hassle. Therefore you need look for a tool that can do batch resizing of your images at once.

I used to use IrfaanView to do batch resize. Now that I’ve completely moved my personal stuff off of Windows, I need a tool that can do the same but on Ubuntu. … In comes Mogrify. Mogrify can do many things on multiple files concurrently. All I care about doing here is resizing my photos, though.

To install mogrify, you need to install imagemagick suite, which mogrify is part of:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

To resize an image, do:

mogrify -resize 640×640 MyPhoto.jpg

Keep in mind that this command will whipe out the old file a replace it with the new modify image. So make sure you are working on duplicate copies of the images.

You can also the resize in terms of percentage:

mogrify -resize 50% MyPhoto.jpg

To do a batch resize on on all the images in the directory, do:

mogrify -resize 640×640 *.jpg

Once again, use with caution or on duplicates, as the original image is lost.

My old hosting environment stopped working and with it so did my on-line web-album.

I’ve been meaning to rebuild web-album since I moved my blog to new hosting. But I keep putting  it off. I tried using the a web album, simply called Gallery, offered by my new hosting. But seemed complicated at the time and I never got it up and running.

During my recent vacation I had some time to play around and I tried the other two web-albums/photo gallery software that was provided by my hosting provider, which were Coppermine and 4images-something… Both seemed a bit unfriendly and not feature rich. So I decided to try Gallery again. It turned out easier that I originally thought.

I’ve uploaded two albums so far to try out. So far so good. So I will be uploading the others soon.

Please take a look here and send me your comments:

http://fakebucket.com/photos/ or

http://dosary.net/photos/

When I moved my blog to WordPress I read some best practices that said I should not require users to register to in order to post comments, claiming that I didn’t need to worry about spam. So I left it open for anyone to anonymously post. It worked out fine for the first year or so. Then about a month ago I got over 4′000 spam comments within a few days.

I stopped the open policy, but now I’m stuck with all these spam comments that I’m not sure how I’m going to get rid of.

I wonder why the sudden rise of the spam comments. I’m guessing that spammers have been able to get around the text guessing game that WordPress uses, somehow.

I thought I’d list my favorite Firefox extensions for easy access:

• del.icio.us
• googlebar
• flashblock
• autocopy
• IE Tab
• FasterFox
• SwitchProxy

And if you don’t have Firefox yet, you can download it from: http://getfirefox.com/

I now have blog-by-email fully working in order run the update script
automatically.
Every time I send a new blog by email, the script “wp-mail.php” needs to
be run to update the blog with the new entry. In order to have the
script run periodically, I used the ‘cron’ command
to invoke the script every few
minutes. The command I used to invoke the script was the following:

wget -O /dev/null http://fakebucket.com/blog/wp-mail.php 2>/dev/null
wget: is a command to retrieve a web and saves as a file.
‘-O /dev/null’: means save the the retrieved page to ‘null’, or in
otherwords, get rid of what has been retrieved.
‘2>/dev/null’ means cron should through away the command output.

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Apparently the blog-by-email feature doesn’t support HTML emails, nor embedded images. I noticed that attachements are uploaded to the the ‘uploads’ directory.

It works!

I did face a problem though. It was not in the documentation, which is the you have to put the full email@domain.com in the username field. I got the answer from here.

I’m posting this entry from the Firefox Extension “Deepest Sender “. I’m trying to figure out the easiest way to post into WordPress, now that I’ve moved away from Blogger, which was very convenient to use.

—

[Edit]:

Now that I’ve tried, it seems that it doesn’t add much to posting directly through the blog. I just found this Javascript WordPress posting link , which is much more useful. I bookmark the script in my browser, and whenever I stumble upon a site that I want to blog about, I simply click the bookmark, and it opens a post box with the link in the body and the title of the page in the blog post title.

Now I’m going to try figure out the ‘post using email’ feature.

I’ve moved my blog due to privacy concerns after Google has taken over blogger. You can find my humble blog at  http://blog.dosary.net/,  http://dosary.net/blog/ or  http://fakebucket.com/blog/.