New year's eve excitement

Today I was mostly sorting and processing photos. I also went to bed for a bit during the day because I had a headache. With Mauser and Bo I watched Tron, played Goldeneye multiplayer, and went to see K.K.

Various

This morning I worked on a testcase for a Google Chrome bug where images aren't shown in ATOM feeds where the content is xhtml. I submitted the bug report, then played on Rayman Origins on the xbox with Mauser for a bit before lunch.

In the afternoon I received my latest credit card statement in the post. I noticed that I was charged £1 interest, and the same on my previous statement. I have a direct debit set up to pay off the full amount each month, so I wondered what this £1 interest charge was. I looked on the MBNA website, but couldn't see anything there, so phoned them.

After being on hold for a while I spoke to someone, and they explained that any cash transactions accrue interest on them from the date they are made until they are paid off, with a minimum charge of £1 per month. So as well as charging a cash advance fee on any cash transactions, there is also this monthly cash transaction charge. I just need to make sure that I don't use my credit card to pay for anything that can be considered cash.

I uploaded some photos to my photo website.

For the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening I did some sculpey as McRad wanted me to do sculpey at the holiday at home thing. I decided that the standard coloured sculpey would be too tough for most of the people, but the soft sculpey should be OK. Since we only had 1 pack green Studio sculpey and about 1/3 pack yellow Studio sculpey, I bought a 6 pack of coloured soft fimo from ebay. I also bought 2 packs of super sculpey since we've run out (and it is also soft enough for most people to use), and a pack of sculpey firm for our own use and to see what it's like.

I hope 6 packs of soft fimo will be enough as the packs are only small (56g each). I thought I could probably photocopy some pages from L's polymer clay book for ideas of things for people to do. We'll also need knifes for being able to cut the clay as well. I made a caterpillar from the book today with the Studio sculpey, and it came out okay.

Camera system comparison

This morning I was doing some more work on my photo website. I noticed that the contact form for the website was throwing up a lot of errors. But when I looked into it, the problem was actually with the PEAR Mail class I was using. I was using the class correctly, but the class seems to be written for PHP4 rather than PHP5, and is missing the keyword 'static' in front of methods that are meant to be called statically.

I downloaded the latest version of the class, but this still had the same problem. To be honest, I think I might just leave these errors. Correcting the errors in PEAR seems a bit much to me.

I spent most of the day trying to get Mailpress set up, however it didn't seem to work properly. When you subscribed, it would add you to the database as a 'subscriber', but not actually subscribe you to the Newsletter. So I posted to the support group for Mailpress to see if I could get any help.

Here is the camera comparison I was doing yesterday, trying to decide what camera to get next:

Since for some options I listed two or more lenses that could fulfil the same job, I used an orange colour in the spreadsheet to indicate the rows that were added to get the total costs below each option. Lenses priced at £0 are ones I already own, so there would be no cost for me.

The comparison is done looking for the things I want in a camera system. All the cameras have good image quality, so I didn't compare that. I want to be able to shoot from wide angle (sometimes known as super-wide angle) up to low-end telephoto (100-200mm). I also want a full frame fisheye for decent resolution panos in 6 +2 shots, and a wider fisheye for 3-4 shot lower resolution panos, which are better for those with lots of people / moving objects.

The reason I want a new camera / lenses is that my Nikon 18-70mm lens seems to be a bit soft on one side, and I am not convinced that my Nikon D200 camera is autofocusing correctly. I did try adjusting the autofocus, but it is quite difficult, and despite looking to autofocus correctly when doing the adjustment tests, it seems to backfocus in actual use.

My Canon 450D is even worse when it comes to autofocus, and I don't know how to adjust that. It has been to Canon, who certified it within expected tolerances. The Canon does AF correctly in contrast detect (Live view) mode, which is how I used it in Scotland, but I found this too slow and missed some shots.

So with both my current cameras the problem is autofocus. I have tried manual focusing with them, but for anything other than macro, I can't get the focus correct manually. Manual focusing in liveview with the 450D is possible, but it doesn't feature picture-in-picture magnification. So you have to magnify where you want to focus, focus, then unmagnify and make sure the composition is correct. This is nearly impossible if the subject you want to focus on is moving.

I have included manual lenses for the NEX and Canon 5D Mk II in my options to purchase though. The NEX features focus peaking, and the 5D Mk II has a split prism viewfinder available (at extra cost) to aid in manual focus, as well as the larger viewfinder naturally making manual focus easier.

I didn't include the 17-40mm L lens for the Canon 5D Mk II as the wide-angle option, but instead looked at some prime lenses. From what I've read in forums the 17-40 L lens isn't sharp in the corners until f/8 - f/11. A good selection of primes offers the best quality and light gathering ability, but is more expensive, heavy, and large. The 5D Mk II also doesn't have an adjustable LCD screen.

Although I've never used a camera with an adjustable LCD, I imagine they are useful for more discreet street shooting, to enable better shooting from the hip. It should also be good for low angle (e.g. macro), high angle, and any other strange angle shots.

Exposure Bracketing is also important to me, with my D200 I often find the camera doesn't have enough dynamic range to capture a scene in one shot. New cameras are probably better, but I still think there would be situations where exposure blending or HDR would be needed.

The NEX fails in this regard, with no exposure bracketing available. It also doesn't have a viewfinder, though I understand one can be purchased at an extra cost.

The Canon and Nikon options are both pretty similar, however I prefer the Nikon as I already have more Nikon lenses and accessories than Canon. I will also want to be taking my Fuji IS-Pro with me, which is Nikon mount, so the Nikon option allows sharing lenses etc. with the Fuji cam.

The Micro four thirds option is lacking in that I couldn't find any wide fisheyes available for m4/3, only full frame fishes. Also, both the Nex and micro four thirds cameras don't seem to have any macros available. You can use old manual lenses on both, but this would entail either shooting with the lens stopped down (bad in low-light), or having to manually stop the lens down as you come to take the shot (bad for keeping focus when hand holding).

My current preference would probably be either for the m4/3 option (due to low weight and size) or the Nikon option (due to my existing Nikon gear). I don't intend on purchasing anything right now anyway, so will be interested to see what stuff is released over the coming year (but before I go on holiday again and need some new photo gear). I think I should be okay with my current gear until I go on holiday.

Websiting and playing boulder dash

Checking my emails this morning I had two very similar emails promoting SEO services:

Hi,

My name is Monica and I'm the webmaster of SerpSynergy.com

I work on many projects for my partners websites and by doing so
I came across website-name.com and I immediately wanted to contact you.

As you might aware, getting links from good quality sites would definitely
help you in terms of Page Rank, traffic and higher ranking in major search
engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

If you're interested in more details, please get back to me
and I will suggest you all my tips, tricks & knowledge I've gained
with years of experience in the SEO field.

Hope to hear from you soon and have a great day :)

Thanks,

Monica Banyard
monica@serpsynergy.com
Serpsynergy.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/monicabanyard

and:

Hi,

I would like to introduce myself my name is Marian, webmaster of SocialSEOMaster.com
among other sites that I personally maintain.

While working on a project for my partners website I've found website-name.com
and I decided to contact you to tell you little bit more about what I do.

I'm a SEO expert with vast experience over the years in the SEO field
placing my partner's websites on Google's 1st results page for the
keywords they're after.

I would like to elaborate more and send you more information, to share
my thoughts, tips & tricks.

Please let me know if you're interested and we'll take it from there.

Thanks a lot,

Marian Dolan
marian@socialseomaster.com
SocialSEOMaster.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/mariansdolan

I checked their websites, and while the design is very different, the concept is quite similar - a single page with a bit of text, lots of graphics, and only one link, to the contact page.

My guess is that they're either both the same person, or maybe two people who have bought into a 'become an SEO expert course' or something similar, which gives a general template of the email to send and website to create.

This morning I did some more work on my website. First I looked into if the addThis wordpress plugin could be modified to just link to a new page with a list of all the different social networks / bookmark sites supported by AddThis. This is what the plugin already does in Google Chrome for me, just it doesn't work in IE.

But the code didn't seem that simple to change, and this functionality is not actually that great anyway - the list of sites on the AddThis page is so long it takes a while to find the correct button. Also, it involves two clicks - one click on the AddThis button to bring up the list of supported sites, then a second click on the site you want to bookmark / share the link on.

So I decided to look at other social bookmarking plugins again. One I already had installed was WP Socializer. This plugin spews up a lot of PHP errors, all seemed to be to do with undefined variables. I thought it would be worth at least attempting to fix the plugin, so did this. Most of the errors were due to concatenating to a variable that had not been set, or accessing the value of an array key that did not exist.

After getting rid of the errors on the client facing side (the plugin still had lots of similar errors on the admin side I didn't bother fixing), I looked to integrating the plugin's js and css with my combined js and css files. Strangely, the plugin didn't seem to be including its js file. I checked the file and it had a addBookmark function, which just alerted a message to press Ctrl + D to bookmark the page.

In my combined js file I already had an add to favourites function from sociable (which I had been using previously), so I modified this instead of using the WP Socializer javascript. But when I tested it in Google Chrome, it wasn't working. After doing some googling it seemed like some browsers don't support adding a bookmark via javascript, and instead it is recommended to just tell the user how to bookmark the site. This is exactly what the WP Socializer js function does, so I just copied that across and deleted my modified sociable js addBookmark function.

After getting that sorted I installed the Mailpress plugin for my photo website. I wanted to use the same email template that I use for my photography tips website, however I spent quite a long time trying to find the template, and couldn't find it anyway. When I checked the Mailpress theme settings on my photo tips website it said there was a problem with the selected theme, and was using the default theme instead.

I think that I must have upgraded the Mailpress plugin and this resulted in my customized theme being deleted or overwritten. Doh! So now I'll have to spend quite a while again testing to try and get a reasonable looking template again.

Sarah and Mark came to stay for a couple of days in the afternoon. We all had Christmas dinner together in the evening (Pheasant and Guinea fowl), then played boulderdash afterwards.

I also looked at different camera upgrade options for me, maybe I will post my thoughts tomorrow as I am sleepy and going to bed now. Bye!

Christmas

Today I went to church in the morning and then updated my pog website. In the afternoon I helped Ben make some cookies and did the washing up.

In the evening I watched a Laurel & Hardy film with the family and tried debugging the AddThis plugin for wordpress. Unfortunately I think the plugin (actually it's the AddThis javascript, not the plugin itself) is broken in too many places for me to fix.

The problem is only appearing in IE9 for me. I think that probably the js is doing some browser sniffing and doing things differently for IE than the other browsers, and because I serve the site as XHTML (XML) this is breaking the js. So I am going to have and try another different social bookmarking plugin.

I was thinking of giving the sparrows "Lil' Maniac" badges for a Christmas present, but

• I don't think they'd let me get close enough to give them the badges
• If I pinned badges on them it would likely hurt or even kill them

So the sparrows didn't get any Christmas presents, but probably had their best Christmas ever anyway as it was relatively warm today.

Websiting

This morning I thought about how my wordpress blog feed sent a 304 Not modified header if there hadn't been any new posts since the feed was last requested. For my photo website feed I hadn't implemented this, but it seemed like it would be a good idea. Otherwise a feed reader would have to download the whole feed each time it wanted to check for new items.

However, when I looked for tutorials about creating a feed using PHP, none of them seemed to mention this. However, I did find a tutorial on dealing with sending Last-Modified headers here: Using HTTP IF MODIFIED SINCE with PHP.

I read the W3C info on the Last-Modified header, which states that HTTP/1.1 servers SHOULD send Last-Modified whenever feasible. I haven't been doing this on any of my dynamic pages, however I can't see how I'd be able to implement it, other than on pages where the images are sorted by date.

If I have 20 pages sorted by rating, and a new image is added today that gets inserted to page 10, pages 1-9 would still be the same, while pages 10-20 would be last updated today. The only solution I can think of would be to create a new database table with a record for every single page that could exist. Then whenever a new image is added, calculate the pages that would be changed and update the pages table with the new last modified date.

The work required to write this logic, the size of the new db table, and the extra processing work required for the server means it is not worth implementing a Last-Modified date for me. It is okay for the feed though, since there the images are sorted in date order, so you can just get the date of the most recently added image.

I did what I was hoping to be my final run with the IIS Site Analyser, but then still found some more things that needed to be corrected. I found that as well as the RSS feed, Wordpress also had an ATOM feed. I realised that you could have ATOM and RSS feeds in wordpress, but I didn't think that both of them were linked to from the blog. I thought wrong obviously.

So I did the same for the ATOM feed as I did the other day for the RSS feed. But then I found some more problems. The ATOM feed had an id specified like so:

<id><?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?></id>

This seems to be quite incorrect, since it means that all feeds for the blog would have the same id. In a similar way, the alternate link (link to the HTML page that the feed is for) was the same for all feeds:

<link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="<?php self_link(); ?>" />

For fixing the id issue, you can just use self_link(), which gives the URL of the current feed. For fixing the alternate link, I took Wordpress' self_link() function and modified it slightly to remove '/feed' or '/feed/atom'. This gives the url of the page the feed is for. I put this function in my theme's functions.php file:

/**
 * Display the link for the currently displayed feed in a XSS safe way.
 *
 * Generate a correct link for the rss link or atom alternate link element.
 *
 * @package WordPress
 * @subpackage Feed
 * @since 2.5
 */
function get_self_alt_link() {
 $host = @parse_url(home_url());
 $host = $host['host'];
 return esc_url(
  'http'
  . ( (isset($_SERVER['https']) && $_SERVER['https'] == 'on') ? 's' : '' ) . '://'
  . $host
  . preg_replace('/blog(\/)?(.*)?\/feed(\/atom)?(\?.*)?/', 'blog/$2$4', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])
  );
}

The alternate link issue is relevant for RSS feeds as well as ATOM feeds, just I missed the issue before when I was modifying the RSS feed template.

I spent most of the rest of the day trying to fix some issues with my google maps page. I was sure I had it working okay before!

Various

This morning I wrote up yesterday's blog post and also put the Goodwill Season song on youtube:

I was also thinking about adding the Christmas Orphan Boy song onto youtube. I thought it sounded like it was by the guy who did the Austin Ambassador Y-reg song, and sure enough I was right - his name is John Shuttleworth. What I didn't know is that John Shuttleworth is actually just a character played by comedian Graham Fellows. When I saw him many years ago playing Austin Ambassador Y-reg on the Tonight show on Yorkshire TV, I thought he was a genuine guy with a sense of humour about his music. When actually he's an ungenuine guy with a sense of humour about his music.

Anyway, the song in question was already on youtube, albeit as part of a Vic and Bob sketch with about 3 minutes of useless babbling from Vic & Bob before the actual song. Since the song is available on itunes, lastfm, and on CD from Amazon etc. I didn't bother adding it to youtube.

I ran the IIS Site Analyzer a couple more times on my site, each time finding some things I'd missed that needed correcting. It takes quite a long time to run each time, and also quite a long time to delete old reports. While I was waiting I read dpreview's Mirrorless Roundup 2011

Later in the afternoon and for part of the evening I made a Lemon and Coconut cake with L. Only problem was, we didn't have any coconut.

For birthday presents I got an A3 laminator from McRad, Chocolate from L, and an Olympus LS-5 sound recorder from Clare and Mauser. I went on eBay and bought a wind muffler for the sound recorder as from the reviews I have previously read it seems like this is quite important.

I also bought a North Korean calendar that has nice photos of North Korea. Hopefully it will arrive before 2012, but it is being shipped from Russia I think, and post is quite slow at this time of year, especially with all the bank holidays coming up.