menuing

The last few days I have been looking for a way to display a tree menu of categories and sub categories on one of my websites. First I wanted to see if there were any CSS solutions. There were, but unfortunately neither of them suitable for my purposes.

One type is to use fragment identifiers on the sub menus and link to these from the sub menu title. Using the CSS :target pseudo selector, you can then open the sub menu when the sub menu title is clicked. You can see an example here: CSS Tree Menu example, which is from this article: Pure CSS expanding tree menu.

I don't think this technique would work with multi level tree menus (which is what I have). And another problem is that the browser will jump to the fragment linked to. Not a problem in that example menu that easily fits on a single page with no scrollbar. But it is an issue in most real life situations.

The other technique involves inserting checkboxes into your menu and using the :checked pseudo selector. A very clever idea, but I don't really like polluting my markup with a form and checkboxes just to achieve an effect without using javascript. You can see this one in action here: CSS Tree Menu demo, acommpanying article here: Pure CSS collapsible tree menu.

So instead I wrote some jquery to make my menu collapse / expand in a tree menu style. However, after doing this I realised that it wasn't that great as it stopped people clicking through on the category links when they contained sub categories. I abandoned my (working) javascript and decided to just change the settings in the wordpress admin panel so that the menus would display as a drop down instead of all printed out in the sidebar. Not ideal, but cleans up the sidebar, and allows users to choose whatever category or sub category they want to view.

Wip

Recently I read this article about photographers that plagarized other's work: What we can all learn from the recent events of Jb Sallee, Jasmine Star and Doug Gordon. Apparently they are all famous photographers, Wedding photographers I suspect, as I'd never heard of them.

That article linked to this blog, which I found interesting: The BUSTED! Log, which describes itself:

To all the dedicated photographers who thought they could get away with shaming their clients...

To every professional who forgot how small our world is since we all got connected via the Internet...

To each passionate artist who forgot to think before they typed...

Way to go! You're now BUSTED!!!

And another link the article contained was to Photo Stealers. This blog I found very interesting. Previously I had heard of one fauxtographer, using other people's photos and passing them off as their own work. But this blog currently has 5 pages, with multiple fauxtographers called out on each page. I find it amazing that so many people would try to pass off other people's work as their own. Surely anyone that hires the fauxtographer will notice the difference when they get their photos back, and then demand a refund as the quality does not match that of their other work.

If the fauxtographer is capable of achieving the same results as the stolen / stock photos they used, then why wouldn't they just post their own work in the first place. And some of them make up fake stories about the photos they supposedly took. Very weird!

Photo Stealers also has a facebook page where they point out even more than are listed on their tumblr.

I read an interesting article about Tumblr and photos that go 'viral' on it: Remembrance of Things Never Known: Examining the Inner Workings of Tumblr. To sum up the article, vintage style photos of things that things that most of the users (teenagers according to the article) have not experienced seem most likely to go viral. But the main takeaway point from the article (at least for me) was that even if your photo does go viral on tumblr, it is unlikely to actually have any benefit for you.

Downloading

Most of today I was trying to clear some space on my Ubuntu Virtual Machine. I had copies of logs on there from the web server, so I thought it would be sensible to remove these from the VM and just store the copies on my PC filesystem instead. But there were two problems with this that made it take all day.

The first was that I had zipped up a lot of the logs and deleted the plain text files in the VM. But what I didn't realise, is that I had forgotten to then delete these logs from the Web Server. So when I tried to sync the logs stored locally with the logs on the web server, there were loads of old logs on the server that were missing locally. And so these old logs were downloading.

After discovering this, I unzipped all the old logs, so only the new logs would be downloaded from the server. But the process was still extremely slow due to a slow internet connection today.

I am pretty sure I have all the logs from the web server successfully copied on my PC now. I will just need to do a check tomorrow, and then I can delete them from the server. I've already deleted the copies from my VM, freeing up a lot of space.

I also went on a walk with McRad, Clare, and Lil' L to Husband's Bosworth. We had a leaflet that tells you about all the interesting buildings there.

And I watched a documentary about the President's photographer. It was quite interesting. It makes the president's life come across quite similar to the Queen, meeting people, going to events etc, and not making any real decisions. The president has a large staff and there appeared to a massive amount of work that went into each event he had to attend. Very expensive, and making the president seem like figurehead that people can look to, and want to see.

On eBay I have been looking to purchase a lens baby for a while, but they always seem to be too expensive for me. One of the auctions the seller linked to a video they shot with a lens baby. I watched the video and do think it is pretty creative (though down to the photographer rather than the lens baby): Sea Sick.