2012-10-01 22:57:02 - Happy Galleries
The galleries are in a good spot. The major functions that I was looking to get in are done and working. Everything else is a relatively minor change/iteration now. In fact tonight I was able to improve on the gallery permissions. I guess I need a new to do list. Here is a start:
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Properly secure the entries. I need to figure out if I want to keep the current model of security on the models.
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Add a javascript widgit to make gallery security easier
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The arrows on the gallery are pretty much crap.
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Make sure the text wraps better on the entries.
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A different layout maybe?
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Moveable overlay for the images in galleries.
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Videos (This is major and would probably require a new machine).
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Use of keyboard to control image movement
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A better index on for galleries.
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Comments? Maybe not
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Tags for everything
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Search through said tags.
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Switch to InnoDB or even Postgres
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Clean up the user authentication and authorization.
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Move images from one gallery to another
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Psedo galleries that can consist of images from other galleries, but have a different security level.
I think that's it for now. Its a big list, but many of the items are smaller tasks.
2012-09-13 21:53:55 - DB timeouts and the galleries
So there has been quite a bit of work done behind the scenes. The most important part is the config fix for sqlalchemy. It seems that ,by default, sqlalchemy doesn't refresh it's connections to the database fast enough for MySQL. MySQL's default is to timeout a connection after eight hours. That eight hour limit would cause pyramid to error out, the uwsgi instance would stop, and the user would see a nginx gateway error. Of course this would only happen after eight hours of idling.
Anyway, I made a change to sqlalchemy's config so that it would refresh the connection after a few hours. This was done by the following code
sqlalchemy.pool_recycle = 14400
At first it didn't seem to work, but I think I can safely say that it was a success. My best guess is that I didn't restart uwsgi properly and therefore there were still workers without the config. Regardless, I haven't seen a nginx gateway error in quite some time.
Another thing I have been working on is the photo gallery. This gallery is still not ready for the public, and it is only accessible to certain users. Once I build in some more controls I will make some galleries public. I just can't wait, because I am really proud of this one. It is now my central repository of photos. I just need to get a NAS to make it really secure.
2012-08-16 23:46:39 - Apparently uWSGI and Pyramid don't play nice
I have been slowly adding more features to the site. The first one is that the galleries now have pages. You are no longer bombarded with all the pictures in a gallery. This is also nice because all the pictures don't load. This means less data is transferred on each gallery request.
The second feature (actually bug fix) was a hack to the WebOb library. It seems that uWSGI version 0.9.6.8 that I am running has a glitch in it where the urls aren't generated correctly. This error results in odd URLs with double slashes, and even URLs that are missing the root. To get around this I had to hack webOb as per https://github.com/Pylons/webob/pull/61. Hopefully uWSGI will be fixed and I can remove my hack, but at least it works.
Finally, I updated the menu a little. An anonymous user won't notice the change, but now there are drop downs so that admin users can access other parts of the site that were only accesible via direct request.
Anyway, it is getting late and I need to commit my changes.
2012-07-29 20:16:03 - And we're live...again
This is the first official live post for this site. I made a great amount of progress to get the site to where it is today, and hopefully updates will be more frequent.
As I posted in past, this site is now running on Pyramid which is fantastic. No more messy PHP or homegrown solutions for simple things. I am using JQuery for some of the flashier effects, CKEditor for my posts, and JQuery Tools for the overlay. Regardless, I am very happy with where this site is. I was hoping to get this published either today, tomorrow, or by Friday evening the latest; so getting this up tonight is really magical for me.
The thing I am really excited about is the gallery (login required). It allows for bulk uploading and meta data entry en masse. I still need to work out the kinks. My goal though is to get it up and going so that our pictures are uploaded quickly and efficiently. That way family and friends can overdose on pictures of Andrew.
