Category: WordPress

Photo Plugin Galore: First Try – Two 12 ft Dinghies in Love

The new WordPress 2.7 version makes it much easier to find Plugins. I had a project on my back burner for which I need a decent Photo or Gallery Plugin.

I have shown already some interest here for Yachts and Yachting. I have not divulged yet that I used to be an avid dinghy sailor and used to race dinghies as well. Alas ever since I ventured into our Hotel business, my own clinker built 12 foot Dinghy dating back from 1944, is stored safely without much attention lately. I’m even not sure my old stiff legs will be able to endure a regatta anymore.

On the original date of this post I used a plugin, Tylr Slidr enabling me to show you a couple of photos that I uploaded recently, but took in 2005 in Venice during the Biennial of 2005. There I found two Italian 12 ft Dinghies in the Arsenal. They were berthed opposite each other and were giving each other signs with lamps. It was an Art installation. A sort of act of love. Very poetic and I would never have thought of such use of two old dinghies in a basin that was used for maintenance of submarines.

The Artist, Laura Belem, born in 1974 in Bele Horizonte and working there, was able to make this installation with the help of a stipend from the Ministry of Culture of Brazil.

The 12ft Dinghy is a typical One Design Class. It was designed in 1913 by George Cockshott, an amateur boat designer from Southport, Lancashire, who won a competition organized by the Boat Racing Association (BRA). The BRA wanted a new sailing dinghy that would also serve as a yacht tender, and Cockshott’s design with its single, high-peaked lugsail fitted the bill.

It became an IYRU Dutch Class in 1914 and an International Class in 1920. It was even used for sailing competitions in the Olympic Games of Antwerp of 1920 and of Amsterdam of 1928. In 1920 they sailed on the North Sea with a lot of wind. The gold medal was won by the Dutch brothers Jan Hin and Frans Hin. In the 60ies I had the honor to sail against Jan Frans Hin – well, competing …. actually it was more of looking to his backside:-) The Silver medals were also won by two Dutchman (Van der Biesen and Beukers). In Amsterdam in 1928, on an inland lake near Amsterdam with not much wind, the medal winners were all of Scandinavian origin: 1)The Swede Sven Thorel, 2) Norwegian Henrik Robert and 3) The Fin B. Broman.

Recently we saw the International 12 ft Dingy class association being incorporated.
There are still several fleets:

  • In The Netherlands there is a fleet of over 200 active enthusiasts,
  • North Germany has fleets mainly around Lubeck and Hamburg,
  • Italy has several fleets and is very active,
  • To my knowledge there are also fleets in the UK, Japan, Switzerland and Turkey.

Dutch compete in Italy and in Germany. Japanese and Italians come to The Netherlands for a race sometimes. The class becomes more and more international nowadays, 95 years after it’s creation. Amazing huh?

I found a PDF file with 2007 draft Class rules in English at the site of an Italian Fleet.

This exercise in nostalgia was just to test this plugin and it seems to be what I needed for this post, although the loading of the whole seems a bit slow. What would you think? [Added: And sadly it didn’t work out as anticipated]

Added January 5, 2008: The next Slideshow of the same photos is as per the advice of Heather from Heather on her Travels and used by her at a slideshow of the Turtle Fountain in Rome. It loaded a lot easier, and was also very easy to copy and paste into your blog, but has not the full screen view mode as the other plugin….Thanks Heather! [Update: Unfortunately Slideshow has closed down]

Added July 14, 2009
Oops When I reviewed this article there appeared some hiccups and parts of the post including the two slide shows simply disappeared completely. Grrr recovering it from previous revisions must be done piece by piece as apparently a later update of WordPress (or the theme) seems to garble text into executable code…. done…it was the link to the Swiss fleet that did it!. Those Swiss:-)

Added November 9, 2009
Since this post I’ve had to delete the plugin. We now are waiting for the 2.9 version of WordPress, wich has been promised will handle media much better than it does prsently.

Added March 11, 2012
It appears Slideshow has closed its doors permanently as of March 6, 2012. Revisiting the site of Heather learned me she has now incorporated a Google + thingy…I’ll put this on the back burner for a while to look into it further.

Do You Woopra? You Should!

Woopra Screen

It was Lorelle VanFossen (from her Family name I guess she or her hubby has Dutch ancestry), avid WordPress advocate, who drew my attention to Woopra with her post Whooping Woopra Blog Statistics Program, starting as follows:

I’m rarely totally and completely blown away by anything, and yesterday at Dallas WordCamp, John Pozadzides of One Man’s Blog, who works together on this project with Elie El Khoury [italics added by HH], who blew the whole crowd away with his new blog statistics program, Woopra.

I now fully concur with Lorella’s observation. I am not such a stats lover that I write for my stats. I blog because I find blogging a reasonable orderly way of cataloging my work / life / interests / finds for myself and sharing them with my readers. I use my stats mainly out of curiosity, because it shows me how people land on my site and what they are interested in. It always gives me (too) many ideas what to write about.

What is Woopra?

Woopra is not just another stats program, it is the re invention of the blog stats program.

Still a Private Beta
It was launched recently. Is still in private Beta. It is a small 4 man operation. You can sign in on their site. Then it takes quite some time before they let you in, because the demo at Dallas WordCamp drew so much attention that they can’t handle all requests in a timely way.

My short experience
I signed up shortly after Lorella’s post dated March 30, 2008. My patience was honored and I was let in on April 27.

I am in the process of installing several new workstations and a new server. Especially for Woopra I now have installed a second screen that constantly features Woopra. It is fascinating to see readers check in real life. You can see where they landed from, which search terms they used, where they land and which posts or pages or categories they read. It is almost too addictive and together with Twitter makes me forget Face book entirely.

Woopra has a built in chat functionality. I have tried it out with some of my readers and it works. I presume it scares the hell out of a reader when he gets a pop up screen out of nowhere and there are some concerns about the safety of the chat function. I take it that has to be ironed out yet. Also they have a plug in for WordPress that I haven’t even downloaded yet. You can tag your readers, so you can really start communicating with them if you wish via the Chat box. Twitter or mail.

For me the biggest surprise is that Woopra shows me that from all my posts here the two posts that draw the most readers are almost totally unrelated with my main subjects.

I suggest you check it out!

Update

If you want to see other peoples raves on Twitter, just check out Tweet Scan on Woopra. A link I found through a visitor just a few minutes ago.

Piclens 1.6.3 update: A Brilliant Must Have Plug In for Photo and Video Browsing

Piclens Screen 1 From ITB2008 Berlin Travel Bloggers Summit 460 pix.jpg
The opening Screen

Some time ago I came across Piclens from the company Cool Iris via a recommendation from Internet Guru Doc Searls. Doc has no search function on his Blog. A severe neglect! At first I couldn’t find his post back.

As an aside: He also recommended Flickrfan in a post Less T, More V , but that is for the Mac aficionados. I have no Mac.

Eventually my persistence did find me Doc’s: Nice Plugin.

Another aside is that a commenter to that post advised to have a look at Photo Synth. I didn’t (yet).
What is Piclens?
Piclens is available as a plug in for Firefox and some other browser flavors to view large numbers of pictures on sites like Flickr. It is an amazing quick way of browsing around a lot of photos. Much quicker than Flickr’s slideshow and also much quicker than Adobe Bridge or Adobe Lightroom of Adobe for those who work with it. Brilliant!

Piclens Screen 3 From ITB Berlin Travel Bloggers Summit 460 Pix.jpg
The Full Screen

My first impression:
Wow! Cool! but you can’t link to the photo you like. This has been fixed with version 1.6.3 and hence I believe it is ready to become a mainstream plug in.

Piclens Screen 4 From ITB Berlin Travel Bloggers Summit 460pix.jpg
The Full Screen with one photo in the centre zoomed in
and following you each time you move your mouse
Piclens Screen 5 from itb2008-berlin-travel-bloggers-summit-460-pix
A video wall alike browsing screen

For these examples I used the ITB2008 Berlin Travel Blogger Summit Flickr Pool.

Piclens Screen 2 From ITB Berlin Travel Bloggers Summit 460 PIX.jpg
A Screen with one photo zoomed in maximally

Be aware!
Today the plug in page of Firefox only offers version 1.6.2 without the tagging and linking possibilities and not yet version 1.6.3 with the tagging and linking! That you should obtain from the Piclens site.

Piclens now for Youtube!

It took me some time to find out how Piclens would work with Youtube. It is only a small indication somewhat forlorn on the site of Piclens:

Piclens screen for YouTube searching
The only way to open a Youtube video search

You always should launch Piclens first from your tool bar where it installs itself. In the Piclens screen you then open the Youtube search tool of Piclens which you find at the top of the Piclens screen.

But then you have something!

Piclens Screen with YouTube Piclens Search

The result of a Piclens search on Youtube. The video starts playing immediately!

I like this instruction video and its song best

Here is the video itself:


The song is “Technologic” by Daft Punk, also a must have:-)

Further goodies

You can download a tool to make your own site Piclens compatible.

There is a WordPress plug in: A must investigate.

Disadvantage
I see one big disadvantage of Piclens. Flickr Photos are uploaded under various licenses and cannot be copied easily. With Piclens you can make a screen dump and avoid the license protection of Flickr easily.

Rest assured: I am not trespassing copy rights here, because most photo’s I showed you are my own.

Post Alia
Today again Philippe Wolff was talking about the perfect storm he sees in the online travel world. See Kevin’s post at Travolution’s Blog. Well I would say this small plugin will definitely add to that storm!

Oops: I changed my 404 error template because of Blogflux

Oops, I have changed my 404 template today [Ed: It has changed again since this post].

I  was a member of Blogflux.

Blogflux is a combination of several things: A Blog directory that has organized and cataloged about 82,000 blogs by country and by topic (or tag if you whish). They have some Blog tools, among which mapstats that they have knitted together with Google Maps, a nice feature that I like. It enables you to see from where people land on your Blog. As a free member you can have a little bit of statistical analysis. In the pro version you can have some more statistical analysis.

You see from where the people look at your Blog by the position of the red blobs on the map and you see where they land on your Blog by clicking those little red blobs.

In my case you see for instance many clicks on the posts archived as number 211. When you wanted to know what post number 211 was about, you could click on the blob and were redirected to the actual post.

That was when I had my permalinks organized by date of the post and archive number of the post.

Unfortunately I could not relate each time archive numbers to individual posts unless I clicked them again.

Therefore I have changed my archiving method into date of the post and name of the post. Post 211 ) is now
http://happyhotelier.nl/2006/11/13/qbic-dutch-answer-to-easy-hotel-yotel-and-hotel-everland/. As Qbic is hot nowadays because of their recent opening and Yotel also because of their first pod hotel at Heathrow.

I found an alternative way of getting at the same post by post number which is very easy: http://happyhotelier.nl/?p=211

My older posts will remain organized in the old way, at least for a certain period, in certain search engines. People clicking trough from those search engine results are now landing on my 404 page. How stupid am I!

However I have decided to stick to this choice and apologize to all those landing on my 404 page.

I hope that the search engines gradually will find their way around this Blog when they re index this Blog and the error will fade out in the future.

We will see.

Update

As of november 2009 I have a plugin in place that enables you to redirect outside referrals to urls of your blog that are wrong because you have changed the way you archive posts. With the Google Webmaster help you can from time to time reapair errors. I have now redirected 211 to the actual post.

Last edited by Happy Hotelier on February 17, 2010 at 10:30 am

Cleaning up Happy Hotelier

Behind the screens I have been cleaning up Happy Hotelier….Well a bit: There remain more things to do.

CSS is great.

It took some time, but I found out where in the CSS Stylesheet I could change a bit ot two so that I don’t have to add manually “[strong] [/strong]” anymore when I simply want a link shown Bold. The consequence is that now I have to delete a lot of those….So be it. Why I bother? Well, when you have to use bifocals for reading like I do, you will be glad to find this to be a Blog in a font and a font size that is easily readable. I hate many of those “Stylish” Blogs that simply do not read. Take those horrible dark backgrounds….

Translations.

The WP plug in that I use is great. It makes it possible that search engines also capture keywords in foreign languages. However, in a strange way the links to the Google translation service work, but those that point to Alta Vista don’t work. So I have , temporarily, disabled the widget until I have figured it out. Also because the translate widget is in the way of XHMTL validation (not that there are not more errors left).

Del.Icio.us.

I am learning how to create simple javascripts to import on the flight bookmarks that I organize in Del.Icio.us. I will be fine tuning this. At least it gives me the means to keep track of the T-List and The L-List and My Del.Icio.us on separate pages. With their tagging button in my Firefox browser it is a lot easier than manually manage the links in the side bar. So I will be trying to change the manual links for scripted ones in the side bar in the near future.

Big Google Brother is watching you.

Despite the fears I have here – recently there is a lot of commotion in Europe over the CIA having full insight in all bank transactions carried out by Swift…Americans are not aware what occupation by a foreign country means… so they dictate the law after 9/11 – I have, for the moment, uploaded my feeds to my Google reader and show some of the interesting posts in a widget (apart little screen or frame) in my side bar. I am definitely interested in another possibility.

My first English interview.

March 1, 2007 Paul Johnson published an interview with me on his A Luxury Travel Blog.
On my wish list:

  • Solve the translation issues
  • Repair the validation errors
  • Find a better solution for the “Happy Hotelier’s RSS Picks” widget
  • Last comments widget
  • Add a couple of Digg and Del.Icio.us alike buttons
  • Related posts widget
  • Style switcher so that readers can choose how to read what I write
  • Most visited posts widget