Chichipanguanorrea 3.0

Sharing your pictures on the web seems like a very trivial matter, right? well I can tell you it is not that trivial. Here is my story.

Back in 2004 when I first created Chichipanguanorrea I chose Fotopic as the solution for sharing my pictures. The interface was ugly but uploading the pictures was very easy with a Java-based plugin. Unfortunately the free version of Fotopic has a limit of 250 MB which I reached a couple of years ago. Today if you ask me to rate Fotopic, I would give them a 4 out of 10.

Later in 2005 I created a flickr account and started uploading pictures. Since the free version of flickr has a limit on the amount of data you can upload each month and it only shows the last 200 pictures (the rest of the pictures can still be accessed through perma-links), I decided to use flickr as the place to upload ONLY my best pictures. I really like many of the features flickr offers: tags, a huge community, nice interface, geo-tagging, but the limitations prevents it from being the best option for uploading tons of pictures.

In 2006 I decided to try some options I could easily integrate with my WordPress blog: I tried FAlbum and Gallery but it was zenphoto who won my heart. I installed zenphoto in my blog and have been using it since then. It is really easy to upload the pictures and the galleries are created automatically. My only complain would be that including a picture inside a post is not so straight forward.

Today I decided to revamp my picture gallery after updating my blog with the latest WordPress distribution available last night. I’m between upgrading my zenphoto installation to the latest version which has some new features or trying NextGen gallery, a WordPress plugin that seems to be very popular among WordPress users. The good news is that I can try NextGen without removing my current zenphoto installation nor I have to duplicate my picture galleries.

Here are some examples of how NextGen works:

Test 1: adding a picture with the reflection effect

Test 2: adding a picture with a watermark

Test 3: adding a gallery

[Show as slideshow]

At this point I’m liking NextGen a lot, but I’m having trouble getting the pictures to show up. I think this is because I’m pointing to the pictures from zenphoto and the permissions might not be properly set up. I noticed that even in zenphoto I cannot open a picture file directly

I’m not going to give you all the nasty details, but I just updated Chichipanguanorrea 3.0 to use Wordpress 2.5 and it wasn’t a smooth upgrade.

Anyway finally I got everything back in order so you (and the other 4 readers) can continue enjoying the Chichipanguanorrea sensation.

Designed by JD

Chichipanguanorrea 3.0 staff wishes you love and joy during these holidays and an amazing new year 2008. This time we are very sorry we could not hire neither Ugly Santa nor Ugly Elf, but we put together this beautiful christmas tree to keep the holiday spirit alive and we hope you enjoy it (specially if you are a ‘millionaire‘, a ‘devil‘ or a ‘powerful‘).

I’m a terrible blogger. I promise I will publish Halloween pictures soon. Expect the Devil and the Punk coming back!

But just in case you care: life is good and I’m doing fine.

Blogs turn very lame when you dont post regularly. Recently I haven’t had anything exciting to write about, so my blog has been falling into the lame category. This post is just to summarize some of the things I have been doing recently or that I’m going to be doing in the near future.

Party, party, party

After coming back from New York, I’ve been going out a lot in Austin. I have too much fun going out with friends and last night was the first friday in a loooong time that I stay at home, and it wasn’t even because I didn’t wanted to go out, but because I could not get my friends to join me and I decided to stay at home and take it easy.

Moving to a new group at National Instrumenst

After being in the Integration Services group at NI for almost 6 years, I’m going to be transitioning to the System Configuration Services group around September. I’m very excited about the transfer because I’m going to have new challenges and opportunities ahead. This group develops the ‘Measurement & Automation explorer’ application which helps users configure NI’s software and hardward among other services.

NI Week 2007

NIWeek starts next week and it means listening to great keynotes, having breakfast at Las Manitas, meeting with friends that work in other NI branches but come to Austin for NIWeek and in general being excited to be part of NI.

Wedding at Puerto Escondido

My friend Eva is getting married in Puerto Escondido, Mexico and I’m traveling there between August 15-19. Marcos is not sure if he can come because he is waiting for some paperwork related to his green card process. I hope he can make it though.

Facebook fever

Social networks is something that has been arround for a few years. I have accounts in hi5, friendster, mySpace, LinkedIn and recently signed in for Facebook. My experience with FB has been amazing. The website is very well done usability wise. Very elegant and simple, but powerful. I already have lots of friend connections and its great to know what is going on with their lives. Social networks are not meant to replace physical human interaction, but to enrich it. I highly recommend that you give it a try.

Austin City Limits 2007

Yes, I’m an idiot. I didn’t purschased my ACL wristband on time and now I’m going to have to wait for a last minute deal, hoping that someone can’t make it and wants to sell the wirstband to me. This year’s line up is amazing: Björk, Queens of the stone age, White Stripes, Killers, Muse, Arctic Monkeys, Bloc Party, …

Me verás volver 2007

Soda Stereo one of my favorite rock bands in the world is doing a tour after their last tour ‘El Ultimo Concierto’ 10 years ago (1997). I’m going to see them live in Monterrey, Mexico on November 9th!

Kuddos to the DreamHost team for creating a one-click process to update a WordPress installation.

It took me 5 minutes to upgrade my blog

Almost a year ago I posted in this blog that if you search my name on Google, Chichipanguanorrea was the first hit.

Back then I was using HostRave as my host provider and SimplePHPBlog. I also mentioned that I wanted to add a counter to my website to monitor traffic. I installed BBClone and it works great. So far Chichipanguanorrea 3.0 has been visited by 5638 unique visitors.

Then I switched to a different host (DreamHost) and blog freamework (WordPress). When I did this, my website fell down from the top position of the Google ranking. The first hit (ranked 16th or something worse) was not even from my own site, but instead it was from Marcos’ blog.

I read once that one of the criterias for Google to rank a website, is by looking at how recent is the domain. If a domain is younger than 1 year, the site will have less weight. That kind of makes sense, because you should trust older websites more than new ones. But in my case, it wasn’t really a new website. It was an old website being moved to a new domain.

By the way, I just found this article that I could have used in the past: Switching to a New Domain Without Losing Your Google Rankings

Anyway, I was sad to see that I was no longer the coolest Daniel Jaramillo on the web! It really hurted my ego!

But no worries people! Google has now put me back on #1!

I decided to give Flickr a try and created an account and installed a WordPress plugin in my site to support it. I need to say that the integration was very easy and I like the results. I also installed a plugin to export my pictures directly from iPhoto to Flickr.

Flick has some constrains on free accounts:
- Only 20 MB can be uploaded each month
- Only 200 pictures will be hosted by Flickr. They say that after 200, you can still access your pictures, but I’m not sure if this works with WordPress.

I decided that I can live with those constrains if I use Flickr only to upload the pictures that I like the most. So let’s see how this new experiment of becoming a professional photographer works!

After less than one year online, I decided to get serious with Chichipanguanorrea and give it a nicer home. I bought 2.4GB of space at DreamHost to host my site and I also bought the jllo.net domain. My idea is to host my brother’s, my mother’s and my dad’s sites as well, and also ask my sister and other relatives if they are interested on having their own web site.

Since now I have all the power of MySQL, I replaced my SimplePHPBlog system with WordPress.

All I had to do was generate an RSS from my old site and import it to the new one (see details below). I lost the comments on the posts, but I don’t care too much about that. I also had to fix some characters (vowels with tilde and ‘ñ’s) and remove an annoying CDATA section enclosing the posts. I also had to re-categorize the posts. But the whole process didn’t take more than 1 hour.

I also created a cool header with some of my hobbies represented in there.

Chichipanguanorrea 3.0 is juicer and prettier than ever!

Migrating from SimplePHPBlog to WordPress

When I did this the versions were: SPHPBlog 0.4.0 and WP 1.5

I noticed that I got a few visits to my site from people looking on migrating from SimplePHPBlog to WordPress, so I decided to give a more detailed explanation of the process. I hope I can remember all the steps since I did it a few months ago.

Change the preferences of the SimplePHPBlog, so it displays ALL the posts you have ever created in the main page, and not just the last 10 or 15. Then export your current SimplePHPBlog as an RSS document. From the main page of your SimplePHPBlog, right-click the ‘RSS 2.0′ orange icon (on the right sidebar) and select ‘Save Link as…’ and choose a file name like ‘my_old_site.xml’.

When I imported my blog I lost the categories and had to create them and assign them to the posts manually. I think that if you create the old categories in WP (use the same names. Is it case sensitive? not sure) before importing the RSS then WP will assign them properly during the import process. Let me know if you get this part to work.

Now import the RSS inside WordPress.

The sad part: you’ll loose all the comments inside the posts. I didn’t found an easy way of importing them. Oh well, life is never perfect…

And finally the ugly part:
The RSS generated by SimplePHPBlog, encloses the post body inside the <description> tag and adds a ![CDATA[...]] enclosure to it…

For example:
<description><![CDATA[This is the text of my post... blah blah blah...]]></description>

CDATA sections allow you to enclose text inside XML without having to worry about escaping XML special characters like <, >, ' or ".

But WordPress doesn’t remove the CDATA sections so you have to do it manually after you are done importing your XML. Yes, you have to do this on each post.

I also had to fix special characters like tildes (á, é, í, ó, ú) and Eñes, since I had some posts in spanish.

I’m thinking that a better option is to use a text editor and remove all the CDATA sections. Do a manual find/replace on the XML looking for <![CDATA[ and replacing it with blank text. Also replace ]]> with blank text.

Save the XML and open it with an XML parser to make sure it is still valid. Most browsers can parse XML.

If you succesfully tried this second option, leave a message here to let us know that it works.

Welcome to the new look of Chichipanguanorrea. I just installed the 4.0 version of SimplePHPBlog which comes with some new features:

- Calendar view for entries

- Contact Me form

- Block addition (see my new Photos block)

- Categories (now entries can be categorized)

- Stats (I'm still trying to get bbclone up and working)

- Entries rating

Enjoy your visit!