Started in 2007, two episodes so far. Here’s the raw RSS podcast feed, and here’s the iTunes Preview Page, and here’s the equivalent Zune page.

I think the Leahpeah Podcast is due for a new episode.

Tech background: I used mp3feed.php as the core of this podcast script. The Making a Podcast documentation from Apple is really excellent if you want to do it from scratch.

In rooting through the site, I came across this:

… which we put in place when there were folks deeplinking some larger images on her site. It was kind of fun, though she never got the kind of traffic or server impact that imagine Jason Scott got during his MySpace/Goatse adventures.

Anyway, I upgraded her photos area, no, not her flickr account, this predated that. It’s got photos from about 2002. It was run with Gallery, which for its time was pretty good. It had theming, could import photos from the filesystem, and automatically did thumbnailing, and could import videos, pngs, gifs, jpgs, bmps. It worked well.

But it was a pain to maintain and theme. I avoided doing anything with it, and as time passed small changes would cause problems. I had done some includes across the rest of Leah’s site, and these caused problems because I made other changes later. It was running version 1.5.3. I neglected it, and it gathered spam comments and had a big memory allocation error at the top of the page and UGH! The frustration.

Well, with the release of the new version of Leah’s site on a new server, nice and clean, I had the opportunity to work on a staging server to see if I could upgrade the site and make it work. And so I started. I downloaded the latest version: Gallery 3 RC1. That went well, a nice process altogether, but rather detailed. Image apps have to point at a lot of local resources – ImageMagick or NetPBM, folder paths need to be set — it takes some attention to get it right. It uses MySQL on the backend and Kohana as the underlying application framework. It looked like a go, and loading new photos and making new albums worked fine, but there was no option to import from Gallery 1, only Gallery 2.

Okay, fine, I thought. I’ll just upgrade to version 2. No problem, version 3 is only a Release Candidate anyway. So I did the same process again, though different. It’s a clunkier process, but I got it working pretty fast. Then I went to import my Version 1 Gallery with the import docs, and it didn’t work.

Uh, what? I’m on 1. Gallery 2 can import 1. Only, no, it can’t import my specific version of Gallery. It needed to be running version 1.5.10 to be importable.

So I installed version 1.5.10, clunkier still, but familiar to me. Though I had a heck of a time finding where to fix the install errors, mostly the locations of binaries. The interface is maybe a dozen different tabs with lots of options. And voila, I got it working, rebuilt the thumbnails and things seemed to work okay.

Once I was there, I ran the import from Gallery 1 into Gallery 2. That required lots of rather long processes to determine if my .data files had enough integrity and whether there were any photos that were leftovers from the prior version. Several were, and Gallery 2 fixed that.

Luckily, the instructions on The Gallery Codex are very, very thorough. If you have upgrades like this to do, this is your bible. Follow those instructions very carefully.

So I got Gallery 2 running great, and looking great, and all the photos were imported properly. It did take about an hour and a half to process all the photos into the new format, but working = good. Once that was done, I thought, “well heck, might as well push forward to Gallery 3″ — which worked pretty well, until I came to the process where it was going to import comments.

That process indicated that I had about 12 hours to wait until all the comments would import. I thought, “that can’t be right.” I let it run.

And run.

And run.

After about 45 minutes I thought to myself. How many comments could these photos have? Turned out that number was about 135,000. Which, uh, was ridiculous.

So I went looking for a way to run Akismet against the comment database in Gallery 2. That sort of worked. So I thought, I’ll try the same thing against the comments that had already imported into Gallery 3 (if I remember right, about 4000). There was no easy way to do either.

So then I was rooting around in the MySQL database for my Gallery 2 install. Running queries, killing off spam comments. I knew I had some comments I wanted to keep, and the thought of deleting them all just because the damn spambots had hit this ancient Gallery so hard irritated me. So, based on my hatred of spammers, I pressed on and worked till I found some patterns I could use to bulk delete. I was pretty tired by that point. In retrospect, I could have gotten much further along had I started ordering the comments by date from the start. Instead I was using the keys in the database, thinking lower meant earlier, but the import from G1 to G2 was not in chronological, so my PK’s were a mess.

So I finally got through that in Gallery 2. And I reimported G2 to G3. It recognized the photos already imported, brought in the comments, and voila! I had a working gallery with all my photos.

G3 has much better organization. It’s definitely cleaner to look at on the filesystem, which is nice. G1 had a separate folder for source files (albums) than the gallery, which was a pain in the neck. Being able to simply rename the folder, and change a few configuration settings made it worth it.

Of course, then I wanted a slightly prettier theme. Well, G3 themes are really not fully baked yet. Some had simple .zip file downloads, some of which point to a github account. They’ve done some great work, but they’re really not ready for the masses to use this in the same way, say, WordPress has been forced to be.

I found a nice theme by Stopdesign and that’s how it looks now. It’s not perfect, but it’s plain.

I was going to build a theme from scratch in the same way I’ve been building WordPress themes lately, but I’m holding off for a while.

This was a lot of work, but it was all worthwhile when I came across this photo from 2003, of my wife and stepkids, from 2003:

Seeing this photo made my heart dance. It made all the pain of upgrading worthwhile.

Oh, and for comparison, 7 years later, the kids look like this:

It’s been a great chance for me to try out Tumblr. I think it’s a great, focused tool. It’s blogging for people who are not interested in the blogosphere. It’s great for sharing images, and it can be great for socializing. I know it’s enjoyable for me to bounce ideas back and forth with Chris.

The downside of posting mostly images is that images seem to be posted mostly without permission. Anil Dash’s YouTube and the Million Mixer March is worth reading if you’re interested in what it might mean for all of us to be copyright scofflaws. I think people ignore the issues of permission and copyright entirely now, after all, it’s just a blog, it’s just Facebook. I view fair use more liberally than I used to. I figure, if someone wants to complain, they will. I worried, for years, about putting up the audio of the Larry King radio stories I captured 2002. It took me 8 years before before I was willing to put them up without permission.

Tumblr is social, but I’m not very social there. It is great to group-blog with friends. I’ve missed that since I sold San Diego Blog back in 2007 (aside: I just posted over there, and got no comments at all, sad).

Back to social blogging — it’s fun to see what CPG posts, and to see if I can find items that are similar or related. Almost like how he and I used to sketch–riffing on each other ideas. Instead of drawings, it’s images and videos. In a way, it’s like the mix tape equivalent for blogging. It’s kind of amazing how my interests in the subjects covered there have stayed so strong, so long. It seems to be about science fiction, aerospace, space travel, comics, Japan, Blade Runner. My 16 year-old self would be right at home posting to New City, though he would be shocked about the ease with which one can use search engines to find interesting and obscure images, so quickly.

One of my favorite aspects of blogging images is you can do interesting at-a-glance visualizations that give a snapshot of what’s on a site. Here’s Tumblr Mosaic Viewer, on New City:

And as a side issue, “New City” is a very old concept of Chris and me. It was going to be the company name we would use for our world domination plans. Here’s an ancient image I made on the Amiga. Circa about 1986-1988

How many of you are regular users of tumblr? How do you use it?

I went, myself, back in 2001. That’s 9 years ago. Austin was a great town and I had fun.

These many years later what stands out is meeting the folks from evolt at Evoltageddon 2. That was fun–really fun actually — The Ginger Man was a great bar. At the time I was an admin for Evolt, a community of web developers. There were a few other people I vaguely remember seeing. My memory is fading. I think I ran into Matt Haughey between panels. I attended film panels and web, or really “interactive” panels. I especially remember going to the premiere of No Maps For These Territories, a documentary about William Gibson. I attended the Webby Awards, I think. I had fun, but I didn’t fearlessly dive into the social aspect. I think had I gone 2 years later I’d have been much more social. I can experience some of SXSW via the podcasts they will release after the show is done. Leah will be promoting her various projects and probably participating in a panel.

I miss her, but I know she’ll have a good time!

Amy Adams recently confessed that she sometimes finds herself acting like her Gisele character from the movie “Enchanted” to please her young fans.

She tells, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain to little girls, ‘Shhh, I’m in disguise!’ One time I was at an airport and I was spotted by an adorable three year old. I thought I’d ruined her life. She looked at me as if to say, ‘You’re not Gisele!’ I thought, ‘I can’t be responsible for her loss of faith,’ so I told her in my Gisele voice that I was in disguise so that Queen Narissa (evil witch) couldn’t find me. And she was like, ‘Oooh!’

(via suicideblonde)

Once again, Balsamiq Mockups has proved awesome for quickly getting to agreement about basic layout and design.

Check it out, particularly if you’re a college who wants to give a talented running back, great student, and very giving kid a break!

Leah asked me to implement a simple redesign she had cooked up. She was tired of the heavy and dense site she had, and I am responsible for turning her new design into a clean, purely WordPress driven site. It seems to work well so far. See Leahpeah: flawed but authentic.

I moved a fair amount of stuff around. One thing of note is that I changed her former blog url structure, which included the post_id as part of it. The way we worked this site was she began to input prior pieces of her site, then I would do selective imports of her posts and pages. Some pages did not make the cut.

Unfortunately the impact of that was that all her old urls were then off. Primary database keys are great if you’re going to stick with the original database. If you import it in chunks, the impact is catastrophic for the permanence of links. So last night I made a list of all the former links using a backup of the site, then did the same thing with the new url scheme. This worked great, and now permanent redirects are in place for all 1115 of her old posts (since 2002!).

It was a lot of work, but so far so good. Her blog is the most trafficked part of her site, and that area is slightly different in terms of including footer blog chrome:

Leah is about to get a bit more attention as she’s now appearing on the Showtime website, and fairly soon will be appearing on Showtime itself. A critical piece of being able to handle the possibility (it is not guaranteed) of high traffic is wp-super-cache, which I have active and ready. We’ll see if a) any traffic comes and b) if her WordPress install holds up. Now keep in mind, Leah’s site has withstood a dooce-ing or two.

Oh, and by the way, for the uninformed: doocing is analogous to slashdotting. Or, wait, actually, what is the best metaphor for “a high amount of traffic from one source all of a sudden because of a mention” — digging? fireballing?

One of the things that made this project go so fast was the fact that we did wireframes of the new Leahpeah.com before we started one bit of code. This helped immensely with the process, and aided greatly through the use of Balsamiq Mockups is really a great tool for rapidly putting together a site and getting to an understanding of what pieces and parts will and won’t be necessary.

if you have had someone close to you pass away in the last few years, i would really like to hear about your experiences related to the web. This can be anything from trying to find a funeral home or caskets, to trying to create a memorial site, or dealing with a remnant social network page. what were good experiences, what were bad experiences, what was missing, and any general reflections on dealing with death in the digital age. thanks.

Go to need some insight on death and remembrance in the digital age and let him know. You know, I met him once, and he was quite a nice fellow.

via Daring Fireball

You can move to a blogspot blog, (which you could do before) or change from self-hosting to being hosted by Blogger/Google by changing the DNS to point at Google’s servers. This is similar to how tumblr handles custom domain hosting.

The real failing here is that this does not account for whatever images or other multimedia you have in your posts.

It’s great that Blogger is doing all this work to communicate the changes, but I don’t think this migration tool is that great a solution. It’s also unclear to me how well this will work if you were hosting your blog in a subdirectory of your site.

This would not have been a solution that would have worked for any of the folks I’ve recently migrated.