The Ryndex

Kendra used to be my little cousin. Now, she’s legally an adult and (having graduated from high school) is bumming around Europe with her friend Brenda.

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For the amateur archivist, a digital camera is a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you take photos that you wouldn’t dare take with a film camera. After all, every additional photo is essentially free (particularly true with rechargeable batteries). You aren’t paying for film, or hard copies, and there’s no effort required to see your photos after they’ve been taken. The result is more photos. Better photos. More creative photos.

On the other hand, you take photos that you wouldn’t dare take with a film. THe result is more photos. Fuzzy photos. Ill-advised photos. Dull photos.

My rule has generally been that if I can’t be bothered to give a photograph a meaningful file name, it’s not worth keeping. I download each set of photos into a folder (named “YYYYMMDD Description”) and then go through, giving each one a title. If I can’t remember what it is (it happens) or it’s the tenth in a series of the exact same shot, it gets thrown away without regret.

It takes a lot of time, but it seems to be worth it…

The problem comes when I have a lot of photos in a short time. I don’t want to throw them away, but I’d like to have them logically named.

So here is what I want. An application that:

1. Sorts all the photos in a folder by “Date Picture Taken” (not necessarily file date!) and displays X thumbnails at a time in the LEFT side bar.
2. For all the photos in the folder, the application should be able to set the “File Creation Date” to “Date Picture Taken”
3. The currently selected picture is shown, filling the center.
4. There’s a text field below the picture, where you can edit the filename of the photo. It should make very intuitive (and mostly correct) predictions based on what I’m typing. Arrow keys should scroll through past selections. The return key makes the change.
5. It should be extremely easy to select a list and name them “eiffel_tower.jpg”, “eiffel_tower2.jpg”, “eiffel_tower3.jpg”, etc.
6. I like to name my photos all lowercase with underscores separating words. I consider this a good standard for potential web resources (keeping the clarity of distinct words, but avoiding any potential problems or confusion with spaces or file-sensitive file systems). This application would optionally enforce this rule.
7. I frequently name my photos along the lines of “location_name_interesting_feature_person_name#.jpg”. Maybe instead of renaming photos, I should be adding JPG comment fields for “Location”, “Feature”, “People” and then constructing the picture title from that (automatically adding the number). Yeah, that would be a lot of fun.
8. The application should be able to do something intelligent with photo rotation. I don’t know quite what yet, but man, that bugs me.

I’m still thinking about this. I could write this application, but I’d be much more happy using a tool that someone else wrote.

Lots of stuff happening right now — don’t know when I’ll get that Brittany thing completely finished. Sometimes I’m too picky, and hate putting things up in a raw state.

In the case of the picture, I picked one at random from among those in Brittany. Here you go:

Aren’t I insouciant?

In other news, I contributed to the Wikitravel Paris article, but forgot to log in as me, so I don’t get any credit. It’s hard to write fluid and comfortable, yet informative prose.

In writing fluid, comfortable, informative prose, one of the difficult things to do is to describe the difficulties, I should add.

I need a picture of myself. An official lookin-good picture to use in all the profiles I have on a million sites. I know I appreciate seeing pictures of other users — it adds a lot to the experience. And there are tons of pictures of me up on my travel log site.

On one hand, I’d prefer a flattering photo, but I also want one that looks like me. I’d like to be able to give it to you so you could find me in a train station. So I’m going through all of my photos this week to find an appropriate one, and I’ll put it up in my profile when I do.

One of the things it appears you can’t do with the free version of Blogger is write your summary paragraph and have a “click here for more” link. This isn’t a feature. It’s a serious requirement. I usually have ten or so of my last travel log summaries on the front page, and the full log on another page. Without the extended entry, the front page would be enormous.

I imagine that the lack of included images would be addressed by hosting the blog on my own web site.

There are frequently spam vandals on my other weblog (which doesn’t have Brittany up on it yet, even though I’ve done all the photos). You may have noticed the occasional “buy v1agra now!” comment that has nothing to do with the site content. It’s frustrating to see these jerks splash their offensive advertising on my travel journal.

There are several ways to cope:

• Turn off comments entirely. Joe Random can go to hell.
• Turn off comments for old articles. If you didn’t see it when it was new, I’m not interested in hearing what you have to say now. This is a good idea for very topical weblogs, where comments on old articles are much less interesting.
• Every once in a while, go through and delete the comments one by one. This was a viable (if boring) alternative until someone left a hundred comments within an hour. This is what I did.
• Install MT-Blacklist (this is the part where I reveal that my other weblog is in MovableType). This simplifies the process for MovableType version 2.6.
• Install MovableType 3.0, which purports to permit only “authenticated” users to leave comments (using the proprietary TypeKey technology). Anonymous idiots with advertising agendas won’t get through, but Joe Random can’t leave his comments either.

I just installed the aforementioned MT-Blacklist, which should let me continue using my old MovableType software until I’ve finished determining whether I should go to MovableType 3.0 or Blogger.

I’m very curious if there’s ever any blog spam on Blogger.

I added myself as a user to the Wikitravel.org project. You can check out any contributions I’ve made as tinfoiled. Some of my earlier contributions aren’t noted since that was before I was logged in. Neat.

So my new coolest thing is Wiki. You’re reading an article on the web, and you see a typographical mistake. What do you do? Giggle and move on? Write the author a patient note to have it repaired (if you can find their address)? Or roll up your sleeves, hack into the system and fix it yourself?

The idea behind Wiki is that instead of hacking into the system, you click on a link at the bottom of the page, and you can correct the error right in your browser. The entire history of the edited page is stored, so if Joe Reader makes an invalid modification (or is just plain vandalizing the article), another user can just come by and clean it up. Even better, you can add and link to new articles, and the site grows with the effort of the community.

I started by added the definitive article on Medicine Hat to WikiTravel, a user-edited travel guide. I wrote about how the city got its name, using the lyrics to a twenty year old song from its centennial. I also added some snotty comments about how crappy the song was (“a crime against scansion,” I said.) I added some information about how to get there and what to do when you arrived.

Then someone else came along and fixed my misremembered lyrics. And someone else reformatted the page to look more professional and removed the snottiest comments. Now it looks like a pretty good entry — check it out at: Medicine Hat.

This is going to be a great travel guide. It’s already a great idea.

Paris could use some work though…

OK, so it isn’t original to email in a blog entry about emailing in your blog entry, but this is pretty neat. Apparently, I just write the email with the blog title in the header, and it magically appears on my blogger site. That is a significant feature!

I’m familiar with the SNMP protocol, which is used to deliver email, so technically, I could adapt any application that generates blog entries. For example, every time I play a game of chess, I could send a blog with the notation of the game automatically. But I don’t play chess.

Or I could write a blog entry every time my WLAN enabled PDA enters and authenticates itself into the WLAN in my house, so you could tell if I’m in or out. Except that I don’t have a WLAN PDA or hotspot in my house, and that would be seriously irritating.

I’ll try to think of some good examples. In the meantime, I’m finishing up the Brittany travel log on my “real” site today.

I’m working on a log about Brittany on my non-experimental site. I find writing very difficult. Every word is dragged out of me, slowly and painfully. Movable Type adds several small inconveniences, and they seem to double the effort. The Blogger editor is certainly easier to use. I’m going to play with the site templates today.