Creative Commons retiring the Public Domain dedication

I strongly believe in not re-inventing the wheel, not only in the technical parts but also in licensing, this is why I use and promote Creative Commons licenses (despite their flaws) and this is why I supported using the Creative Commons definition of Public Domain for projects like the Open Clip Art Library. And it worked well for a while.Until Creative Commons was unhappy with the Public Domain dedication, probably not branded enough for their taste and for their need for attention, and "invented" a replacement, CC0, which was received not as warmly as they hoped.

Now we are at a new milestone: Creative Commons is retiring their Public Domain definition, they leave many of us, users of their licenses, in the dust, with only two options: embrace their new CC0 license or use a scary Public Domain Mark, plastered with "not recommended" disclaimers. Take the poison of your choice! That much for trust and continued services... I had better expectation from a community project.

Now projects like OCAL are at a crossroad, having to decide a way forward. People like me are also in trouble: I used the PD dedication quite a lot to share many resources, now I have to update some of my websites and not sure how... I can see two ways:

• write my own dedication, as much as I hate re-inventing the wheel and writing one
• use a more restrictive license, that will harm my users and the usefulness of the shared items

. There is one thing that is guaranteed I won't do: migrate to CC0... on top of the objections I had before, now I feel Creative Commons betrayed me. And for betrayal, there is no forgiveness.

The downside of using hosted services

I strongly believe publishing something on the web involves commitment: you put the content online and have to stand by it, do not ever delete it, or if you must delete, then replace with redirects: deletion will break pages, links, references and cause problems to people who relied on you. Nothing is worse than erasing history.

So happened when, for unknown reasons, Yahoo deleted my flickr account, now even the embedded do not work any more, leading to a large scale breakage: my photography blog, which used flickr as an image source, is ruined, the large amount of work needed to fix it will incapacitate me for a good while. For this blog I think I may have to live with the breakage: trying to fix some old articles will confuse a number of aggregators. But the works part is, it break an unknown number of pages who used my content as intended, under CC-BY-SA, and break the legal ground of this use with the disappearance of the canonical source - and I feel really bad about this, by having no way to help those people, I feel like letting them down.

In an age when a lot of people are moving towards externally hosted services, I get myself traumatised by this experience and going to the opposite: what you have in your hand is holly, you can control and rely on it. All hosted services have a TOS allowing to remove your content at will. Do not depend on them for anything mission-critical.

But let's change the tone, look here:

This little guy is searching for a house, along with a ton of other not yet published images (some are just as innocent as it and some are the kind that if published here would bring me huge traffic, lots of page views, comments, Page Rank and some ad clicks).

A new tentative personal photo galley

For quite a while I was searching for a self-hosted solution for my photo gallery, willing to move away from Flickr (which I still think is the best gallery from a technical point of view, too bad about its other downsides). Well, the Yahoo guys just gave me the final impulse for the switch by deleting my flickr account (don't know why, I received no warning about that, my suspicion in linked to a photo where I was criticising their recent deal with Microsoft).

I tried but really do not like the layout of other image hosting services like Picasaweb of SmugMug, I find them bad, ugly and too expensive but since I already have my own hosting solution with plenty of disk space and bandwidth and also don't care about the social network side of those services, a self-hosted gallery seems the optimal choice. The problem is, none of the existing solutions makes me happy.

After trying a number of existing solutions (I am too lazy and too busy to write my own), I am inclined to give phpGraphy a try:

As I said above, it is far from perfect, there are a number of pros and contras, making me to install a test instance, play with it, think more and ask for feedback (pretty please...)

My pros:

• no database. It can work with an MySQL backend, but by default it works with flat files, which is a plus in my book, I want something light, small and easy
• as said above, light, small and easy
• RSS feed for last uploads
• ability to upload images with scp and automatic thumbnail generation
• user comments and ratings
• ability to display EXIF info
• clean layout by default

My contras:

• no captcha and no OpenID login for comments: it seems like I have either to leave the comments open for everybody or require authentication to my site, both bad
• no comment notifications by email: these two are almost show-stoppers (I would hate to block comments)
• no ability to adjust the licensing info for each image and album
• old-style album-based format instead of the photostream I got used to
• no tags/keywords/labels and no navigation based on tags/keywords/labels, only album based navigation
• no search

There are also smaller complains, like the inability to easily offer HTML code for embedding in web pages and the lack of geotagging, but those are not vital.

So please have a look at my test gallery (populated only with very few images) and maybe give me some opinions (I am looking for a self-hosted FLOSS solution). Thanks.

Solving problems, one step at a time (photos)

Storing the photos online is only a part of my problem, storing them offline is the other: in a few months my collection grew enough to fill the hard drive, my current one is not that big (is quite old) and I find very hard to delete photos (I could probably delete about half of them).

this is what I whish to put online
So obviously I had to buy a new hard drive, I went with an external one (USB), WD My Book Essential, 500GB (I figured this should be enough for a couple of years), the price is not bad and the device is nice.

The next step was a somewhat controversial decision: the file system choice. I could have left it fat32 as the factory default, the drive will be used mostly for photos but I may have some files over 4GB, like a DVD iso. Another option was to format it as ext3, it will be used most of the time in Linux, but I surely will need it also on other computers with another OS. So I swallowed my pride and went with NTFS. My Fedora desktop seemps happy with this choice.


That was the first step, the second step, choosing an online storage solution (flickr replacement), is still open. But since people showed interest about it, here is my progress, evaluating a few suggestions:

SmugSmug has a lot of features, but it does not look good for me, here are some of my concerns:

• I hate the uploader: I have to choose Windows or OS X, select Windows and get a clumsy Java applet;
• the HTML code to embed the photos in other websites is served as Flash and is not usable for me with Flash 10 + Firefox + Fedora;
• there is no possibility to license your photos under a Creative Commons license, all you can do is to manually add a text in the description field;
• I don't like their policy of not having both free and paid accounts, everything is paid. To test you have the option of a 14 days long demo;
• the structure is the same old and boring, based on albums. There is no gallery other than flickr where you can have one photo as part of more than one album? Like both in "FOSS" and "beer"?

The Atomique layout looks clean, but hoestly, I was scared to read in the installation instructions "Atomique is still in its very early stages. It is advised to be cautious and not use the software in a working environment"l and scared even more to read on the front page "I didn’t really find the time so far to continue my work on Atomique and I probably won’t be able to in the near future": it does not look to me like something where you can invest thousands of photos.

I also received a hint about the possibility to craft something like I want on top of Drupal: I am sure this is possible, I saw wonderful things done on top of Drupal, but such a task is much beyond my skills as a programmer (there are years since I did programming seriously) and much beyond the time I can invest in this project.

There is still Gallery2, I have an instance of it working for some months, but I don't like it and don't feel compelled to switch to it: Gallery seems to follow the "more is more" philosophy, resulting in something hard to navigate or administer. Also in the category "tried and not liked" I can mention Zenphoto, which I tested for a short while back this summer, nice, but lacking important features and the awful and feature-lacking Coppermine which we run at the Romanian Fedora community.

I am still searching, the time for step two has not come yet.

No longer a Pro or Searching for a Gallery

For a few months I enjoyed a "Pro" flickr account from a donation (thanks Gianluca), it was useful to host some photos from FUDCon, a time when I got accustomed with the website and started to use it more and more. But like any good thing in life, it ended recently. The price is affordable, so I could renew it, but with the recent news I don't even thing about that: there is no way in hell I will give money to a company that wants to sell to Microsoft or to a company which is a target for acquisition by Microsoft. That just won't happen.

So here I am, looking for a gallery software to run on my own domain, on my own website (with supposedly "unlimited" storage and "unlimited" bandwidth), unhappy with everything I tried so far, from Gallery2 which I find to complex to Zenphoto which I find to basic, asking for input and advice.

I won't move my photos to my Picasaweb account, I find its interface terrible and the limitation of an unpaid account are even more restrictive and I won't go to any obscure flickr clone, I have waiting for upload thousands of photos.

Analyzing myself, I think I understand my rejection for any gallery I saw: it looks like everything is "album" based, as opposed to flickr's "photostream" approach, where you have a river of photos with the ability to include it in as many sets as you like them and have the navigation based on sets and tags. And I like on flickr the ability to license the images as you like (for now I have everything as CC-BY-SA, but I see me making some stuff proprietary and some PD, depending on the content and its use).

So this is what I want: a clean interface, RSS feeds for everything, licensing, comments and a photostream approach. Ideas?

Photoblog

More than once after a photo shooting session I had the impulse to blog about how it went, the ups and downs, to echo my happiness or frustration. And usually I restrained myself from doing so, as I felt it will be useless noise in the various places places where it is aggregated - not a good thing to restrain yourself.

Of course I could use tags to filter the topics, but I don't want to be that restrictive and let from time to time some offtopic posts, so after some deliberation I decided to start a new blog, dedicated to photography (don't hurry up there, you won't find any upskirt photo), this way I can have a cleaner layout, a simpler navigation and a better URL.

With the launch of the new blog I did an important amount of preparation work: using scheduled post with a date in the past I populated the blog with photos from all those months since I have my current camera.

Of course I will still post photos here, but only when I think the subject is worthy. And, of course, the content on the new blog is also Free.

Keep Internet Explorer?

I never saw such a button on a website in the modern age (after the "e;Browser Wars") so I wonder who and why... get serious, "KEEP INTERNET EXPLORER"... someone still the worst browser on the face of the earth? What's this, a manifestation of the Stockholm syndrome?

Easy to understand why I obfuscated the URL, I don't want to drive any traffic to such a website, but it is in Romanian and the text say "This site is optimized for Internet Explorer. Vor visitors using Firefox, we recommend at least the version 2.0.0.16"

How to get your blog on Planet Fedora - screencast

As some people are confused about the "technical difficulties" of having their blog added (or re-added) to Planet Fedora, here is a small screencast about how to do it. So can you still honestly say the barrier is to high?

The screencast is made with OGG Theora so it should work out-of-the-box in Fedora (or any Linux distro), but if there is anyone "technically challenged" that much so it is too hard, I uploaded the clip also to YouTube:

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Webcomic 2.0

As disappointing as it may be, my countdown has ended and it was related to my webcomic... sorry if you had greater expectations :D

Anything that's put on the web is measurable and the measurements for my Fedora webcomic showed unsatisfactory results, so I had two options either to drop it or make it better. Being excessively stubborn, dropping was not an option so the only way remaining was trying to improve, and as I can't improve the humor (as it defines me as a person) I worked on the graphics. So here is today's edition:

Along with the new graphics, I came with a new process, based on a clipart style, with pre-defined images which can be quickly assembles in a comic strip. I also introduced a new website for the webcomic, showing the latest issues (extracted from my blog) but also a number of goodies: the Romanian translation but, probably more important, what I like to call the cast of characters, a page containing a number of characters I imagined I could use, with full source available as SVG and a short description (this can be improved) and also a lot of images which can and will be used: items, emotions, strip templates (all with the corresponding sources), so anyone can create his own webcomic.

Here is a teaser:

Count with me: 22, ... 3, 2, 1, Fedora !!!

Now that the "official" release counter for Fedora 9 is live we can all make use of it:

To add it to your own website or blog just copy/paste the following code:

<script id="fedora-banner" type="text/javascript" src="http://fedoraproject.org/static/js/release-counter-ext.js"></script>

Translations in a lot of other languages are also on their way...
Spread the love, build expectation, show the count-down graphic.

F8 "Infinity" web banners and buttons

I like simple things and I like the texture from the "Infinity" background so I did a few very simple preliminary web graphics with an "Infinity" feel, they will probably serve as a base for some better graphics to come:

• plain and simple banner:
  


• with the "Infinite Boundaries" initial concept from "Infinity":
  


• with the traditional "infinity+freedom+voice" message:
  


• buttons:
  

Userbars, Fedora, Inifinity

Userbars are some small graphics (350x19) used by forums posters in their signature to show their interests, affiliation, hobbies. Recently I used to post a little more than usual (where "usual" for me was "almost never") on a few forums, but I had no userbar.

What can I do? Of course, make a Fedora userbar for myself, and with the current Ligher Touch for Máirín's Infinity, obviously I had to use it to show how much I like the graphics:

Of course I have available another graphic, more "classic" and boring:


update: more Fedora userbars, including "developers" and "ambassadors".

Spread ODF - web buttons

Red Hat Magazine has an article about ODF: the inevitable format and a follow-up to it with shareable artwork to spread the word. Those who know me should expect I can't resist such temptation and had to come with some derivative graphics, a few buttons in various (standard) sizes:

•  88x31:
• 110x32:
• 120x60:
• 125x50:
• 180x60:

One question arise: to which page those web buttons are better suited to link? So far, they link to their SVG sources, which you are invited to freely play with.

Update: I got a request, so here are some smaller sizes:

•  36x13:
•  80x15:

Progress: Authoring SVG websites with Inkscape

About a month ago I wrote about this experiment: create a website in SVG using Inkscape exclusively, put it on the web, link to it, and wait and see if and how search engines (and Google primarily) will index it.
I could present some results earlier, but one stupid mistake made me do have such a delay.

My stupid mistake

To serve a site completely as SVG you have to put a SVG file (index.svg in my case) as DirectoryIndex in the Apache config. Without access to httpd.conf, I used .htaccess for the job, which is just fine.
Not so fine is my stupidity: a few day after the site went online I needed a .htaccess file in another subdomain of my site, so I used the one from the SVG subdomain as a template. But by doing file management with drag and drop using Nautilus over SSH, I moved the file instead of copying it, and I had the directory exposed for a few days without an index file. Just enough for Googlebot, which already was all over it due to tons of links, to index the directory content.

Conclusion

I got to the conclusion just after one week, but waited a full month trying to repair the mistake described above. The conclusion is: no major search engine will index a website made entirely with SVG, will not follow links inside SVG and will not index the text.

My logs show a very large number of visits from spiders: Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp, MSN Bot, even from the Baidu bot, but all those will do is to ask for the website root ("/") and maybe for robots.txt, so the links are not followed. (my robots.txt is empty on purpose, the goal of the experiment was to see what search engines do on their own).

I put inside the SVG pages some unique strings, to query the search engines on them later. Of course the queries return nothing, my pages are not indexed and full-text search can't be performed.

Google Webmaster Tools say "Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Jun 19, 2007", the day when I didn't have .htaccess and index.svg was not served as DirectoryIndex.

Thanks

My little project created a lot of interest from my readers, I got a lot of links to my experiment and as a consequence a lot of visits from various bots. Thank you all!
But no thanks to the search engines, which are not able to index pages made with SVG, a W3C standard. Shame on you!

I can't draw but I want to draw people faces (with Inkscape)

As probably my loyal readers are used to, I write tutorials at a very low level, suitable for beginners. In the same note, today I'll talk about how to draw people faces (or hackergotchis) with Inkscape even if you don't know how to draw.
Something like this:

The basics: import a photo in Inkscape and using the calligraphic tool draw on top of it and then fill with colors and add highlights and shadows.
Sound interesting? Read more.

At some point I had the idea to make it a screencast, but the video would be long and in need for some editing. PiTiVi is far from usable and Avidemux2 can't work with Ogg, so I'm back to HTML, which is good, a HTML page is better indexed in search engines compared with a video :p

This tutorial has also a Romanian translation.

HTML layout and fonts

A lot of web designers want an impossible thing: their pages to look exactly the same, to the last pixel, to every user, no matter which platform or browser is he using. In many cases they try to circumvent this by using ugly hacks and Flash.
The fonts are one of the biggest cause and the lack of their availability is huge. I just started to address this on all my websites using the Liberation fonts pack.

It is very simple and obvious: you don't have any guarantee about a certain font is installed on your target system, but you may get a guarantee of having a metric equivalent of it, and Liberation is exactly this: the metric equivalents of the Microsoft fonts, so you set one font as the primary one and its metric equivalent as the fall-back option.

As Linux is my primary target, this is what I do in CSS:

font-family: "Liberation Sans", Arial, sans-serif;

Of course, is possible to do it the opposite way:

font-family: Arial, "Liberation Sans", sans-serif;

YouTube, screencasts and Ogg Theora

According to YouTube Help Center:

What video file formats can I upload?

YouTube accepts video files from most digital cameras, camcorders, and cell phones in the .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG file formats.

So how about Ogg Theora?
In a moment of craziness I recorded a very short and excessively lame clip with Istanbul and uploaded it to se what it happens, the end result was unexpected: it worked.


For those reading my post via various Planets where the Flash object is not included and wanting a proof,a here is a direct link but you will not find anything interesting at its end. I think I will start doing more screencasts (if my underpowered desktop will let me record long clips).

Authoring SVG websites with Inkscape

This really is an interesting idea: create websites using Inkscape exclusively and publish them on the web in SVG. In theory it should be fine, SVG is a W3C standard so it should be supported by browsers (and I personally don't care about browsers not supporting W3C standards - cough, IE, cough), Gecko 1.9 and Firefox 3.0 are coming with better SVG support, Inkscape in nice (But not perfect) for authoring websites.
So far the main blocker I see is the way Google and other search engines index SVG files, the reports are mixed, some say they are indexed full-text, other say they they are indexed as images, some say they are not indexed at all.
My own experience show the SVG files from my personal SVG clipart collection don't have assigned any value for PageRank despite being online for a few years already and barely show in search results.

So I did a very small (3 pages) and simple website 100% with SVG and I link it from a couple of blogs waiting for crawlers to index it. After a few weeks will try various queries in search engines and see what shows up.

If you have additional ideas or knowledge please share in the comments.

google searches: .com and .ro and my blog

A google.com (NOT .ro) search on either "tuica" or "ţuică" (the same but with Romanian diacritics) will return my humorous blog post about Fedora 7 Moonshine on the second position of the first page with results, right after the Wikipedia definition of the word (I can't really expect to beat Wikipedia) and in front of an Uncyclopedia article on the matter.
Neat stuff!

On the opposite face of the coin, a search for either "tuica" or "ţuică" on google.ro and my blog is nowhere to be seen (where nowhere is "not in the first 30 or 40 pages with results). Google will detect your geo-location and for users from Romania will default the searches to google.ro.
This is not good for my Romanian readers, but it is a direct consequence of my conscious decision to blog almost exclusively in English, you can't have all.

GIMP rain animation tutorial, "patrulaterul maro" buttons

GIMP rain animation tutorial

After a number of Inkscape tutorials, it was the time for me to make a GIMP one, this one about creating a fake a rain animation effect, like this:

It is quite big, with many large images, so I put it on a static page from my tutorials website, if you are interested, read it in its original location.



"Patrulaterul maro" Buttons

As I am in the mood of showing some creative products, here are a few political buttons I made for my own use, but I share them with my Romanian readers who may find them useful.