Pioneer on the Internet – Sean Gursky

When I changed hosting plans with GoDaddy I encountered a few problems with Gallery2. All of the configuration was correct, but when I uploaded a new image the square thumbnail would not appear. I deactivated the Square Thumbnail plugin from Site Admin > Gallery > Plugins, and reactivated it but there was no change.

I attempted to rebuild all thumbnails from Gallery > Maintenance but I received an error message about the last image I uploaded. I figured something was wrong and began the task of troubleshooting.

If I have a problem with Gallery2 there is a good chance the answer can be found in the support forums. The forums were helpful but there was never a ‘catch all’ thread for my problem. Since I have gone through this process twice in eight months I wanted to write the steps I took for future reference and possibly for others if they have a problem when their square thumbnails are no longer being created after a host move.

Getting Started
The Thumbnails / resized images section in the FAQ got me on the path to troubleshooting the Graphic Toolkits. I started off with completely uninstalling ImageMagick, Jpegtran, NetPBM and Gd. At this point I uninstalled the Square Thumbnails plugin; I don’t know if this was necessary to remove the Square Thumbnails plugin but I did not want to take any chances.

Installing ImageMagick, Jpegtran, NetPBM and Gd was easy, but configuring them was where the majority of my time was spent. Gd installs without configuration, but the other three require a bit more attention.

ImageMagick
Fortunately ImageMagick is accessible by a public directory on GoDaddy hosting accounts, so when I had to provide a path for the IM (ImageMagick) binaries all I had to enter was “/usr/local/bin/” and Save Settings.

Jpegtran
This is where things got a little more difficult for me. There is a /jpegtran folder at “/usr/bin/jpegtran” but that would fail to crop the image when I tested the binary. I also received the error message “Incorrect exit status for jpegtran command”.

I downloaded my own Jpegtran library from the file “jpegtran.tar.gz”, which can be downloaded from here. I extracted the file and uploaded it to a folder inside of my Gallery2 installation. Then I set the folder and its contents to 755 and tested the settings again and this time the crop function passed.

NetPBM
I downloaded a version of the NetPBM file from Sourceforge (the same file is mirrored here). I extracted the files to a folder inside my Gallery2 installation and set the folder and its contents to 755. When I ran the test I had the “Jhead” path empty and had several error messages.

I attempted to install the “Jhead” library with Jhead.gz and jhead-latest.tar.gz but neither appeared to work. When I did this in April 2009 I was not sure if I had “Jhead” installed or not, but I am still able to use NetPBM on MIME types image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/gif, image/png and image/tiff so that will meet my requirements for now. If I find the answer for the “Jhead” library path I will update this post.

With ImageMagick, Jpegtran, NetPBM and Gd installed and configured I reinstalled Square Thumbnails and when I re-uploaded the image my previously broken image now appeared.

In March my Project 365 photos, custom images and blog posts were eaten by 1and1. It took several weeks to go through the grieving process. I still find the missing images on my three years of Project 365 a sore spot, but eventually I came to terms that my blog posts would be gone but I would pick up the pieces and start again.

There was the possibility that the site could be recovered, even in part, but I did not want to get my hopes up that it would play out. Thankfuly, with the assistance of a few co-workers (Keith and Brent) they got to work on recovering posts through Yahoo’s web cache.

What followed was work that spanned several months as basic HTML pages were parsed with PHP and formatted into an XML document that WordPress could easily import. I understand the words but the process baffles me. It started with using Yahoo’s API to save the pages and then put them through the ringer to come out shiny and clean on the other end.

I am not sure how many posts I had over the years, I thought it number over 500, however, the magic that Keith and Brent worked was able to salvage over 180 going as far back as my first post in October 2005.

I have relied on my blog archive to tell me what I was doing this time last year or to remember a specific concert review. It wasn’t until those posts were gone that I realized how much this site meant to me, and that is why I will continue to update it.

Import WordPress

1. Importing post Velvet Mafia…
2. Importing post Studying Hard…
3. Importing post B-a-n-a-n-a-s…
…
182. Importing post My Right Keys…
183. Importing post My Not So Perfect Storm…
184. Importing post My Music Radio…

All done. Have fun!

This was a beautiful sight to behold. A huge thank you goes out to Keith and Brent for their effort on this, because without them Pioneer on the Internet would still be a shadow of its former self.

What is in a name? When it comes to marketing a brand or an identity the consensus is to come up with something and stick with it. Over the last few months I have been struggling with my online identity, but it has recently come to a head. Ask someone what my Last.fm profile name is, chances are three suggestions will come back. That is not how you stay brand consistent.

In 2005 I registered seagurs.com and used that as my online profile, however the use of the name was very limited. Besides the website it was only used as my Gamertag on Xbox360 and, most recently, on the Playstation PSN network. Could I really be identified as ‘seagurs’ elsewhere? Would it be a more appropriate and identifiable online identity than I realized?

For almost every other site or account I would go with ‘gursky’. It is an obvious nickname, usually unused when I register it on other sites. When Facebook launched vanity URL’s for user profile pages I began to wonder how I should be identified online. Would I go with ‘seagurs’, ‘gursky’ or something else? In the end I decided to go for something generic, but accurate name and claimed ‘seangursky‘.

The purpose of this post, and the reason behind this whole identity crisis, began when I was looking to create my custom URL on Flickr. Instead of being identified by numbers and letters I could use a name. I have been a member of Flickr for as long as I had a domain name but never knew they released custom URL’s. I was late to the gold rush but I had the intentions of registering ‘gursky‘. However, someone with a screen name not of gursky beat me to it.

What was I to do? This is Facebook all over again, do I go with ‘seagurs’ or ‘seangursky’ or something else? Ultimately I went with ‘seangursky‘ and began to wonder if I made the right choice.

I can change my Flickr screen name to reflect my custom URL, but that feels like I am giving up on an identity battle, however it is confusing to have a screen name different from the custom URL. Facebook, Flickr and Last.fm all have usernames that cannot be changed; but only last.fm is without my given name and just stands as ‘gursky’.

Only a few sites will allow me to change my name (like Twitter), but I guess the question is this: If the site allows it, should I move my identity over to ‘seangursky’? Or should there be a conscience split where social networking sites have one name but the rest don’t? Is it easy to define what is a social networking site and what isn’t?

I am at a crossroad. No matter which direction I go there will be old left overs (Xbox 360 and PSN under ‘seagurs’ and Facebook, Flickr and Last.fm under variations of my name) but which path is the right one to take?

I do not have an attachment to ‘seagurs’. It is a convenient combination of my first and last name, but is that enough to making it more prominent? Is the full name necessary? I have come to grips that I will never be the only ‘gursky’ online so perhaps this is how I can separate myself from them?

It was brief, but if you were quick you caught it. seagurs was offline for about an hour yesterday afternoon. There was an ominous message about the account being suspended and that I needed to contact billing immediately. Of course my first reaction was that a bill was not paid, but with it being deducted from my credit card I could not see how that was possible.

Apparently I had a script that was running in a loop and causing the server CPU usage to run at 100%. This is something usually left for malicious code, but this script is needed in the WordPress structure. The best I can figure is that this has to relate to the up/down hosting from yesterday. I was having problems previewing my post, and when that was happening the script was probably running and creating a problem.

I have upgraded my WordPress version from 2.0 to 2.0.2. I suspect that the time out errors I was receiving yesterday led to this script running out of control and thus the brief suspension.

Some may have noticed my sidebar getting a little weird by putting my Flickr pictures further down on the column. This only occurs in Internet Explorer, but goes away in Firefox. This wasn’t always the case as IE used to handle this. I am going to work on sidebar.php today, revert back to the original file and see if that solves the problem or make things worse in the process.

Or, you can take up arms against this sidebar revolution and get yourself Firefox. Or if you are a sucker for all things IE, install Internet Explorer 7 as the Beta 2 was released Sunday night and the sidebar problems are resolved.

Check it out and see how IE7 made seagurs work for me!