Stories from April 2008

Pixaria 2.2.5 is now available

Posted on Wednesday, April 30, 2008

It's six months since version 2.0 of Pixaria was released and appropriately enough, the newest release is also a milestone as it will be the 40th public release of the script since version 1.0 back in January 2006.

The new version includes a couple of new features, notably a new rich text WYSIWYG editor for the blog and an optional image based CAPTCHA for the contact form and registration pages.

Also included are plenty of bug fixes and other minor enhancements so for full details, check out the release notes and file change log.

Current registered users can get the update by e-mailing upgrade@pixaria.com

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Mark Hamburg leaves Adobe

Posted on Monday, April 28, 2008

The iconic Mark Hamburg is, after 17 years, leaving Adobe for Microsoft in a move that's sure to set people talking about the implications for both companies:

Jeff Schewe is fond of saying about Mark, "be careful what you wish for"!

For example, around the time I first joined the Photoshop 5.0 beta a lot of Photoshop customers had requested a multiple undo. What we got was far more than that, and came in the form of the 'History' feature, which had the ability to take snapshots and paint from different history states.

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A note about upgrade payments

Posted on Monday, April 28, 2008

It's now six months since Pixaria 2.0 was released which means that for many of you, upgrade subscriptions and the entitlement to new versions of Pixaria are coming to an end.

If you paid for your upgrade using PayPal via the link on the purchase page, your subscription should automatically renew as this was set up as a six monthly renewing subscription. One or two people have contacted me to say that they were not aware of this so if you don't want to upgrade to the newest version of Pixaria when your subscription expires, you will need to login to PayPal to cancel it before it renews.

I will be adding a 'one off' upgrade link to the purchase page for those people who want to upgrade without a continuing subscription and I'd like to apologise for any inconvenience caused for anyone who was confused by how upgrade subscriptions were handled.

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Java upload with resize coming soon...

Posted on Monday, April 28, 2008

There's good news for everyone looking for easier upload and import of images into Pixaria. I'm currently beta testing a new version of the Java upload applet included with recent versions of the software that now includes the ability to resize images as well as upload them.

The new applet will for the first time, give Pixaria the ease of use of drag and drop resize and upload meaning all you have to do is take photos and let Pixaria do the rest.

This exciting new feature will make its debut with version 2.3 of Pixaria which will be out during May and will, as usual, be a free upgrade for all current registered users.

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Pixaria Spring Sale Coming in May

Posted on Monday, April 21, 2008

Normally sales and discounts on products only benefit people making a new purchase leaving those people who've already bought the item wishing they'd waited... Well not with the Pixaria Spring Sale!

For the entire month of May, additional licenses of Pixaria are half the standard price which is just $97.50. If you're a registered user of Pixaria 2 and would like to set up Pixaria on more than one website, then this is the ideal opportunity to get started!

Not sure why you might want to have more than one Pixaria website? How about...

Separating your commissioned work from your stock images or public image gallery.

Running separate libraries for different parts of your business such as weddings and portraits.

Running multiple stock sites with different themes and content.

Running a group of sites acting as a webmaster for your own clients.

Creating a personal website for family and friends.

Full details of the promotion will be announced at the end of the month but if you have any questions, please let me know.

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The perils of photography on the street

Posted on Thursday, April 17, 2008

Interesting article from BBC News discussing the increasing problem of overzealous law enforcement officials haranguing innocent photographers - both amateur and professional - in the street.

"They [police, park wardens, security guards] seem to think you can't take pictures of people in public places. It's reached a point where everyone in the photographic world has become so concerned we're mounting campaigns and trying to publicise this."

Read the full story here

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Pixaria road map for 2008

Posted on Tuesday, April 15, 2008

A couple of people have asked me recently about my plans for the future of Pixaria, specifically when I plan to add certain new features like support for new payment gateways or multiple resolution downloads.

Because I don't work on Pixaria full time, it's hard to pin down exact times for the addition of new features and most of my development time is spent in implementing minor changes and bug fixes to existing features. Having said that, I do think it's important to have a plan so I thought I'd share my goals for Pixaria over the next 12 months.

At the present time, the three most requested features for Pixaria are:

Improved support for importing large files.
Support for more payment systems e.g. Google Checkout.
Support for multiple sizes of image download.

It's my intention to have all three of these points sorted by the end of this year at the latest but hopefully much sooner as they are now all in progress...

Simpler upload and import

I'm working with a Java developer to add support for simpler uploading and the results of this are starting to appear in Pixaria now. My intention is to provide support for integrated uploading and resizing all in one interface. This will combine with a quick import option for adding images to the library in a process that should make getting images from camera to library as easy as two or three clicks.

Payment gateways

Next up are more payment gateways... These are a little bit more complex because they all work in different ways from each other and need fairly rigorous testing which makes them quite time consuming to add. Google Checkout in particular doesn't make things very easy by requiring multiple accounts and a secure website certificate for testing. The next payment gateway to be added will almost certainly be Google followed by Authorize.net - hopefully both of which will come by the end of the summer.

Multiple sized image downloads

Moving on to multiple sized image downloads... This will hopefully be a little more straightforward to implement and I anticipate having support for buying web resolution images within a couple of weeks. If that goes well then other sizes will follow soon after.

Pixaria 3

Further down the line, I'm planning to offer Pixaria 3.0 next year probably in June and development will be starting at the end of the summer.

The shortlist of features for this new version is still completely up in the air but the two big ones that will definitely be there are:

Full support for multiple languages.
Additional payment gateways backed by a simple API for adding new ones with minimum hassle.

Supporting development

As Pixaria is a spare time project for me, the license fee is vital to cover the costs of server space, e-mail and the time that I invest in the software. I currently put in about 10 hours a week on development and support for current users and this all has to fit in around my day job and time away from the computer resting my eyes..!

To ensure that Pixaria continues to grow and improve, I rely on support from the user community on the forums, by e-mail and more importantly by users recommending Pixaria to friends and colleauges. It really does all make a difference and it's really appreciated so here's to the next 12 months!

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Pixaria 2.2.4 is out now

Posted on Sunday, April 13, 2008

Pixaria Gallery version 2.2.4 is out now and is a highly recommended upgrade for all current users. The major change in this release is a radical overhaul of the Pixaria database which is intended to improve the performance of the software dramatically for many users. In tests some sites have experienced searches performing up to ten times faster than compared to version 2.2.3.

Also included in this update are a wealth of minor enhancements and big fixes which are recommended for all users. To get the new version, please e-mail me at upgrade [@] pixaria.com quoting your initial payment or upgrade details.

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Pixaria Speeding Bullet Edition

Posted on Saturday, April 5, 2008

Now I'm beginning to get settled in to my new job, I've been able to start sparing a few brain cells to think about Pixaria again and my focus is turning to performance.

My own websites are hosted with MediaTemple in the US while I'm based in London and the extreme physical distance means that both the Pixaria Demo website and my personal site suffer a little with speed particularly for the first page load. With this in mind, I've been doing some research to find out how I can speed up the performance of Pixaria both in terms of page load and behind the scenes in the database.

The first thing I've done is to look at how people use the script. It's very common for people getting started with Pixaria to experiment with importing and working with images, often deleting them to start again later with different files. Over time, database modifications can lead to internal fragmentation of the database structure which can result in a performance hit, particularly when lots of entries are deleted or changed. These problems can build up to cause significant slowdowns which will eventually adversely affect how a Pixaria website responds.

Fortunately, there are ways to fix these issues and in version 2.2.4, Pixaria will include a new 'Optimise image library' command on the dashboard which will allow you to quickly optimise your database. The command shouldn't need to be run very often (maybe once every few weeks) but if you ever delete large numbers of files, then it will definitely be worth running the optimiser on your library. In certain parts of the script, optimisation will be handled automatically so don't panic if you forget to run it..!

Moving on from database fragmentation, another issue that can affect performance is how requests to the database for rows of data are handled. In MySQL, performance can be improved by using indices to speed up searches through very large tables of data. Database columns with indices can be searched more quickly than those without them resulting in significant performance gains.

Since the images and gallery image order tables, among others, can be very large indeed, I'm going to be doing some work to improve the indices in Pixaria and add some new ones which should boost the speed of searches and gallery browsing.

Finally, one other major area where speed can be enhanced is in the use of Javascript. Pixaria uses a powerful Javascript library called Scriptaculous for some of the special effects and AJAX functions that add to the user experience. Unfortunately, the Javascript files for Scriptaculous are rather big (even when compressed as they are in Pixaria) and as they must all be downloaded the first time you view a Pixaria website, this can have a dramatic effect on how long the page takes to load.

In the next update, I'm going to address these issues by reducing the number of Javascript files loaded on the first page of the website and trimming back in other areas to boost page rendering speeds.

If you have any thoughts about the speed of your site or know of any bottlenecks that could do with being looked at, please let me know!

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