Category Archives: Pondside Planner

Purpose, priorities, and progress.
Goals, grit, and growth.
Fundamentals, focus, and frameworks.

#50by50 #23 Part 2 – Fix my digital photo gallery – Test WordPress galleries

The PolyBlog
February 6 2018

In my previous post, I talked about the various approaches I have taken to hosting my photo gallery online — self-hosted, merged with Vimeo / DailyMotion / Youtube for videos, and then SmugMug. But I’ve always wanted to re-patriate the files to my main server, and my new hoster will let me do that now. Sign me up! Oh, wait, I’m already signed up!

Oh, wait

The “oh wait” moment was that I realized that I don’t have a good solution anymore for managing galleries and videos on my site. I had a separate install of Piwigo, and it caused a huge load problem with my old hosting solution. Except I realized looking back, it didn’t. It was a plugin in WP that caused the problem, and I had it again with WP on the NEW hoster later. But they were able to fix it. It wasn’t Piwigo. So I could go with Piwigo again (a full separate software install, not just added to WordPress). Or I could try finding a fully integrated solution within WordPress itself.

Lots of people run photo sites with WP as the engine. I’ve tried it in the past, even paid for some apps to try the full version when the trial version looked promising. But I’ve never found a great solution for me. It was worth a try again, but I would have three giant caveats.

First and foremost, it couldn’t mess up my media library. WordPress has a media library where it keeps your uploaded pics and videos. The default version doesn’t have much in the way of abilities to quickly sort or manipulate groups of files, so the last thing I want is 5000 pics and videos all in one little library. Whatever solution I use has to have an ability to create separate media libraries or galleries, or at least allow me to categorize and manipulate them in smaller groups.

Second, it has to handle video. There’s no real point in installing a picture gallery if I can’t manage the videos too — that’s the whole reason I struggled previously. I don’t want to keep doing it manually. If I had to do that, I might as well leave it with SmugMug.

Third, the plugin has to work relatively simply and seamlessly. Some of the ones in the past have had really complicated taxonomies, or hierarchies that made no real sense. I’m not talking simply counter-intuitive, I mean completely backwards logic. Photos go in albums, albums go in sets, sets might form a gallery. The words come from the physical world. But lots of programmers have inverted those taxonomies to put images in sets that go in galleries that then go in albums(???) at the top of the hierarchy. WTF?

If it isn’t making my life easier, and those are the three criteria, I might as well pass. So I decided to give ten plugins a try in WordPress and see how it would go.

A. NextGen

This is the most popular gallery in WordPress, hundreds of thousands of users. And I have NEVER been able to get it to work reliably. It’s possible it conflicts with my theme choice, although I’m not sure why. It’s powerful, and it doesn’t mess up the media library. I hear its logic is stable, understandable and works. I don’t know. Because this time around, all I got was the white screen of death — it apparently conflicts with the security plugin I’m using, which blocks part of its pop-up screens for creating galleries. And while I could dance on the head of a pin to make it work, it won’t handle videos anyway. Strike.

B. Photo Gallery by Web Dorado

This one is also popular, and while I wasn’t sure how it was handling the media library or workflows, in the end, it didn’t matter — it handles video only by embeds from other sites (like YouTube), it won’t handle directly-hosted i.e. uploaded videos. Foul ball, strike two.

C. Envira

I feel a bit harsh on this one. From my perspective, Envira is basically crippleware. It says it can and will do all sorts of wonderful things. Which you can try by buying “this” plugin along with “that” addon. Strike three. One batter out.

D. FooGallery

At this point in the process, I’m looking at plugins that have over 50K users using them, and FG seemed promising for video and workflows. Except it completely messed up the internal media library. Strike one.

E. Huge IT Image Gallery

Like Envira, it has limited options without a bunch of other plugins, and no video. Strike two.

F. Portfolio Gallery

I was hopeful for this one, as it had video options, but like the Photo Gallery by Web Dorado, it only shows embedded videos, not directly-hosted. Strike three, second batter out.

G. Photo Gallery by Supsystic

Of all the galleries, I think this one was the coolest. It has a round layout, and the photos looked awesome in it. I don’t know if I would want it for all photos in my gallery, but as an option, it looked good. But it was tied into the existing media library, and it could only show videos that were already posted / embedded. Strike one.

H. Gallery by bestwebsoft

I was feeling a bit desperate at this point. I had worked my way through all the big names in photo galleries in the repository, and was now down to plugins with less than 50K users. Not looking hopeful at this point, and this one was no different. Pretty basic, and it was integrated with the existing media library. Never even got to figure out workflows or if it would handle video. Strike two.

I. Existing commercial galleries

As I mentioned, I had tried some commercial galleries previously. Social Gallery plugin was one that I tried a couple of years ago when I was hosting the videos elsewhere, and I thought at the time that I would try to just embed them. Except it has no real video options. Foul ball.

I also tried Global Gallery aka WordPress Responsive Gallery, but it too had no video options. Another foul ball.

The most promising one from the past was one called DZS Video Gallery. It has ways to handle locally hosted videos, it is separate from the media library and while a bit raw for workflow, I liked it enough previously to buy and give the full version a try. Except it never worked. I couldn’t get it configured correctly previously, and the creator offered to fully log in to my site to get it configured properly if I just gave him my full login and password, serving info, maybe the name of my first pet or parent’s middle name. Yeah, it sounded sketchy. Maybe he was on the up and up, but after buying something that he swore worked out of the box, and given I have a relatively vanilla install, the fact that it wasn’t working was not creating much in the way of trust. I just couldn’t get it to integrate and play, and I wasn’t willing to hand over admin privileges to someone halfway around the world that I didn’t know. I tried to get a refund at the time, but no luck. Live and learn, right? Anyway, I tried it again since I already own it, updated the download, still didn’t work.

Strike three, WordPress is out! Or was it?

While WP wasn’t working with standalone gallery plugins, or at least not easily, I didn’t give up on it. I tried a bunch of other plugins that allowed me to manage my media library in different ways, essentially letting JetPack and WordPress handle my gallery on their own, but it was either too manual or didn’t integrate with video. In the end, some of the galleries were pretty good-looking, but I just needed another solution, preferably a better one too.

#50by50 #23 Part 1 – Fix my digital photo gallery – Introduction

The PolyBlog
February 6 2018

Among my 50by50 goals, I have a series of inter-related ones called “get my sh** together”. Since those don’t look very nice as page titles, I’ve tweaked it a bit to make it a little more family-friendly (my son, Jacob, age 8, does read my blog, so I should clean up my act). And one thing that has annoyed me on the digital front for a very long time is my online photo gallery.

I won’t bore you with the long version of its sordid history, but the short rant is that I have a website (polywogg.ca) that I pay to host. And so I have my own domain, my own file area, relatively unlimited file storage related to the website (i.e. I can’t turn it into a cloud server, but for the purposes of a website, it’s open season). So I should be able to have a gallery for my personal pictures and video clips. But when it comes to video, almost all the basic hosters have the same limitation.

No hosting video.

If you want to have video on the site, you generally have to upload it to Vimeo or DailyMotion or Youtube (with the ownership and advertisement and privacy issues, oh my, that go along with these sites), and then link to it from your site by embedding the link in your post. It works really well, don’t get me wrong, but dealing with those video sites is a pain in the patootie. A few years ago, I was putting the videos in a password protected area of Vimeo or Dailymotion (I don’t even remember now which one it was), and linking them to a web gallery on my server, running Piwigo as the photo gallery with video embeds. It was working okay, I uploaded about 3000 photos, and then I ran into a problem with the hoster. They claimed it was Piwigo, and after a bunch of testing, frustration, and failure, I eventually killed the Piwigo site and moved everything — photos and video — to SmugMug. Like Flickr and others, it allows you to upload personal photos and videos and then share them. There are basic accounts that are free, but I would have quickly overwhelmed those limits, so I bit the bullet — and paid $80 / year to host everything at SmugMug.

Overall, it’s been great. It took me a while to get up and running, but eventually, I had it all working, so all good. Except it has still been costing me $80 a year when I’m *already paying to host a website elsewhere*. Grrr…oh, and about ten months ago, my workplace updated their firewall blacklist and SmugMug was on it (to prevent people streaming video to the office and sucking up bandwidth) — so when I do blog posts and paste pics from the site, the pics don’t show up in my articles when viewed from work or some other government sites. Which means some of my posts about HR that have pics in them don’t show properly. It has been on my list to fix, but a pain in the patootie to find an alternative, as the most likely alternative is finding somewhere where I could host everything. A new hoster, perhaps. There’s a small chicken-and-egg loop in there, move the site or move the pics, and I’ve not bothered to fix it.

As I said, most basic hosters don’t allow video. They are afraid because video can drastically suck their bandwidth, which they can’t afford to do on basic sites at basic rates. And they don’t want to charge someone $5 / month and have them start streaming movies and trailers for the masses. Except that’s not what I’m doing. I have a few personal videos per month that when posted might get watched by up to five or six people, and then it will sit dormant most of the time. Low bandwidth, nothing major. I know that, the hosters don’t, so they have general policies that say “no video” and they block it internally on the site for all their hosting accounts.

So imagine my surprise recently when I tried a video on my WordPress site and it not only uploaded, stored and loaded on a page, it actually played. WTF? It isn’t blocked? But I know it violates the general terms of service, so I contacted them and asked the question. Maybe I pay them a bit more each month or year so I could host a bit of low bandwidth video on my site? I’m paying SmugMug $80 a year; anything less than that, or potentially even a little more with it fully integrated with my website, and I’d be in digital heaven.

Their response? No extra charge, as long as it is low bandwidth, go ahead. Hallelujah and pass the upload app!

#50by50 #22 – Decide on a new car

The PolyBlog
February 1 2018

I drive a 2009 Nissan Rogue, base model. While it isn’t flashy or sporty, I’m not a “car enthusiast”. I don’t care about whether it can do 0 to 60 in 3 seconds, I just want to know if it has enough power to pass three cars on a two-lane highway or not. I honestly care more about reliability and cargo space than styling or engine displacement.

Since the car is now 8 years old, I’ve been thinking that maybe, sometime soon perhaps, I may start to see big expenses creep into the picture and the big giant decision will start to loom:

Fix or ditch?

Transmissions are often big-ticket items, but mine was covered under warranty and replaced about 20K back, with a new warranty on the replacement. I’m good for a while.

We’ve done brakes a few times.

Nothing gigantic looming.

But I had a small issue recently — my back shocks started leaking until they were completely dry.

I talked to my father-in-law who has probably forgotten more about cars than I will ever know, and he felt it was likely time to think about a new car too, which was the way I was leaning. I had planned to run it into the ground, but that ground was getting closer (literally with the shocks gone).

During the evaluation of what needed to be done, I did a test drive of the 2017 Rogue, looking at a step up in level, and it is like night and day. Moon roof availability, relatively the same handling, interior upgrades, tech packages. Overall a much nicer car than we have currently, and that was part of my thinking too — I spend a lot of time in the car, and I want some perks added to the package. One that I would love to have is 360 degree cameras that show the side line-up for parking between lines in parking lots, front and back cameras and proximity alerts, etc.

Then the quote for repairs came back around $2K, and we were now in the realm of ditching the car in favour of a new one.

The Nissan Rogue was an obvious contender. The existing model meets my needs relatively well, so why change? We looked at a few options, including a demo model with full styling packages, and it was a viable choice.

But if we were going to do a real search, we wanted to do a real search.

We checked out hybrids at Toyota. We calculated the added cost to go hybrid, and as long as we were keeping the car longer than about 3-5 years, the higher purchase price would be compensated for by lower operational costs. In the end though, I just didn’t like the feel of the car.

We tried to check out the Honda CRV. We went to the dealership, and while I hadn’t made an appointment, I wasn’t expecting any problem talking to someone. It was a weeknight and the showroom wasn’t busy. We went in, went straight to the vehicle, opened it up, climbed in and out, took out our measuring tape and measured things with seats up and down, forward and back. Anybody would see we weren’t kicking tires, we were actively seeing if this car would meet our needs. Serious sales potential. When we were done, I had a concern about the interior styling as the one area jutted out into my leg space, and I wanted to know if it was that way in all styling packages. I have no idea the answer as nobody would come help us.

We were there for 15 minutes and nobody came to see if we wanted anything. When we were done, we walked out into the middle of the showroom, and were clearly looking around for someone to talk to…but three people hiding in little cubicles saw us and ignored us. A guy was coming back from talking to the receptionist, and walking straight toward me. I went to ask him the question, clearly looking to engage him, and he turned, walked towards the manager’s office and ignored me. WTF? Your business is that good that you can intentionally snub and ignore customers? Really? I wouldn’t take a car from them if they PAID me to take their vehicle. Ass hats. I decided that when we bought the car, we would take a picture (we always do) and send it to them to thank them for ignoring us and steering us to their competitors. I was tempted to send it to head office too.

Next up, I wanted to try a Subaru. Partly as so many of the Subaru owners are passionate about how happy they are with their purchase. We were in an elevator at work the one time, and a coworker mentioned they were looking and considering the Outback. Another woman, someone none of us knew, turned and said that she had bought an Outback, and it had CHANGED. HER. LIFE. It was actually a little bit creepy.

Anyway, I tried the Outback and fell in love. I grew up driving big Buicks and Le Mans and Le Barons and basically large land boats with power steering. While the Outback isn’t big and clunky, it had the big solid feel I grew up with, and I was totally comfortable driving it. Great rating out the wazoo, very comfortable, all good, except for one thing. The seat height from the floor is only about 13 inches, compared to the 15-16 inches in the CUVs. Basically, it’s a car with car seating, not a CUV. Andrea really didn’t like the seats, and while the rest was probably enough to compensate for it for me, I didn’t disagree. It was likely going to be out.

The Subaru Forrester by contrast wasn’t quite as comfortable for sheer driveability, but it was pretty good. Great styling, good tech packages (backing up, driver assist, but not sides).

While we were considering the Forrester, we decided to try the Santa Fe Sport. I was doubtful there was as much room in the backseat for Jacob (the online specs showed less room), but it turned out to be equally spacious. With more pep for the acceleration. I confess though that I’m still a bit leery of Hyundai’s quality. Some friends in the know said that it is much better now, but I wasn’t convinced. Some of the ratings are good, but I didn’t feel like it was as solid a build to drive. Small, but persuasive.

We made a decision. We would go for the Forrester. We even made an appointment with the salesman to go in and discuss the final financing.

But there was one niggling detail. We weren’t entirely convinced we needed a new car yet.

I know, I know, you’d think we had already decided that, but it was a bit in context. I was willing to let it go, even if I felt it might have another year or two left in the old girl. And the repairs could be done for a bit less, closer to $1500, and one of them was just an irregular tune-up cost since it was overdue. Which meant I was looking at a bill of about $1200-$1500 to fix it, vs. the big financing option to buy.

What was the deciding factor? It was two-fold.

First, I was a bit grumpy with the salespeople. The Rogue isn’t in bad shape, pretty good actually, nothing really wrong with it, and the online book value puts it somewhere between $5K and $5500. Sure, those numbers can be a bit high, and you’ll see less to sell it in the end, but north of $4500 for sure. Plus, I had winter tires and summer tires for it, on rims, and they were both only a year old — almost $2500 worth of better-than-average tires, call it discounted to about $1200. Which would put me back squarely in the $5000-$5500 range.

Except none of the dealers were offering us over $3K. One came close and then said, “Oops, not we’re not doing that after all”.

So I would give up a $5K car and take the $2K hit; I would get the new vehicle and with financing, shell out $5-6K per year for about five years. Not including a substantial down payment.

Or I could spend up to the same $6K per year and keep enjoying the financing-free premium of owning the car outright right now.

Second, two friends came over for dinner and in discussions with them, while they agreed with the desire to buy a new vehicle, they basically mentioned how frugal cheap they are and that they prefer to eke out every last drop of value from the vehicle before they get rid of one.

And separately, Andrea and I were convinced. We didn’t need to buy the new car, although we could. I had it e-tested, just to be sure, and yes, we could keep our current vehicle. While we won’t be driving across the country in it, it’s fine for daily use and short-hauls.

So we got if fixed. And we’re exploiting the crap out of it for now. It seems strange, but after long conversations on FB with people, we decided that our new car would be a 2009 Nissan Rogue that was already in our driveway.

But at least we know where we might start looking in two years when I’m willing to let the current car go on trade-in for whatever they choose to give me.

#50by50 #21 – A month of no social media

The PolyBlog
February 1 2018

As part of my 50by50 initiative, I wanted to do a month where I stepped away from the computer. I briefly toyed with the idea of no screens, but between work and a lot of digitally-enabled hobbies I have, that wasn’t very feasible. Nor am I a hysterical hipster worried that screens are going to destroy civilization.

For me, it is and always will be about balance. As much enjoyment as I get from some activities, some other activities are equally enjoyable but often not engaged in simply because old habits are just easier to follow.

I am not a giant social media person — I basically have only about 100 friends on FB, and when it goes above that, I start to get stressed that there is too much superficiality in my feeds. I also avoid drama in my feeds, so keeping it down to less than a hundred helps with that. On Twitter, it is mostly just about me posting review links. I don’t actively engage much. That’s it, that’s all. I’m not on Instagram or Pinterest, or Linked In, Google+, a bunch of others. FB and Twitter.

Now, I confess that while I had no fear of leaving Twits behind for a month, I was wondering about FB. Over the last few years, I have become a bit more isolated from friends and family, and could a month without FB break remaining ties? Would I feel MORE isolated after a month? It could happen, I suppose.

On January 1st, I posted a Happy New Year message, and then went radio silent. I share a few things a day sometimes on FB, so probably 100 shares fewer over the month. And no reading. I warned people I was doing it, just so nobody would notice that I went from active to ghost overnight and start asking, “Who was that masked man?” or worse, no one even noticing.

I broke the “fast” only twice, both intentionally. Some people message me through FB Messenger, and I didn’t treat that as verboten. For me, that was just an alternative to email, which was running strong throughout the month. So I did have 3-4 messages throughout the month that I responded to but without going into regular FB. I also went on Twitter once as I was looking for usage of a specific hashtag possibility and I wasn’t sure if people tagged the “noun” in question as “#noun” or #TheNoun. Wasn’t a big issue, just wanted to not wait until today to find out, and while I was on, I didn’t look for or at anything else. I got in, and got out.

Now, interestingly, I had three reactions throughout the month.

First, sure, I did feel a bit out of the loop on stuff. Enough that I would choose to return rather than just calling it quits on FB entirely. I like the interactions, some of the jokes and teasing. And heck, if my wife can use social media to teach about poop knives, who am I to say I shouldn’t be following along? (Okay, I missed some of you, I said it. Not my family though. Pfttt)

Second, I was surprised how much the social media options were integrated with some of my emails. I do subscribe to a bunch of feeds, some news-related or curations of interesting things, but a couple of them are almost all links to things being shared on social media. I put them all in a folder called “hiatus”. Similarly for when I was tagged in things, I put the notification in the hiatus folder to look at later. I relied on my wife to let me know if anything big or urgent cropped up anywhere.

Third, here is the interesting thing. Since I wasn’t spending time on FB or Twitter, I was far more productive elsewhere. I had lots of extra time. Now, I know some people think that I’m talking about time wasted just reading status updates, but that wasn’t the time suck. It was that because I wasn’t on FB, I wasn’t seeing the dozen or so articles per day that people shared, and clicking on them while I followed a funny cat video down a rabbit hole. Equally, I wasn’t clicking on LongReads (a curated feed) that shares lots of great longer articles — I usually enjoy 1-2 topics per week, minimum. And while I read fast, some of the articles could take 10 minutes for me to read.

FB is like a gateway drug. It wasn’t the drug itself, it was what it opened me up to afterwards. I never really thought of it before, but often after dinner, and we put Jacob to bed, I’ll get on my computer and rather than doing something productive, I would start perusing FB posts. 60 minutes later, or more, I was now tired enough not to want to do anything productive. So I would do a bit and then off to do something else (laundry, TV, whatever).

Without the distraction and rabbit holes, I would clear my email and be ready to be “productive” after about 10 minutes. Sometimes less. Which gave me a fair amount of other time to work on projects. I felt like I had a lot more productive time over the last month, just by elminating the gateway clicking on FB. Wasn’t quite what I expected.

Not only would I do it again, I feel like I may do it intentionally and consciously when I know I have some projects to get finished. I was able to focus a lot better, which is intuitive, but far more effectively in general than I would have expected.

Articles I Like: How to stop dwelling on negative thoughts

The PolyBlog
November 12 2017

I am a great believer in self-awareness, analysing things, and digging into things that are hiding beneath the surface, bothering you. Unfortunately, that can cause me to turn myself into a squirrel, analysing things to death…the so-called paralysis by analysis. But in the past, I also found that on occasion, if the thing I was dwelling on was negative, it could lead to a very unhealthy mental spiral. So I frequently click on clickbait articles like the one by Jenny Cook at How to stop dwelling on negative thoughts (November 2, 2017). I rarely find them worth sharing, or even worth clicking, but this one started with a decent summary.

Rumination can be twofold. If you find that looking back over the past and assessing various situations can give you answers and closure, then the effect can be positive.

However, if you find that you’re repeatedly going over and over the same situation without getting anywhere, both your private and public life may be affected and your mental health could suffer.

For the nine tips, not all tips are created equal. Assessing whether it is likely to help you in some way doesn’t really help you forget about it, for instance, nor necessarily does focusing on the positives (the “count your blessings” philosophy).

However, setting aside time to think about it and mentally doing some contingency planning for worst case scenarios takes a lot of power out of the nagging thoughts and worry. It might not be pleasant to think about, but having the contingency plan gives you a coping mechanism. There is a small danger that dwelling on that worst case scenario can lead you to take certain steps that will actually bring it about — i.e. the whole planning mantra that if you plan for something, it will happen, except in a negative sense. So you kind of have to settle for transforming the cliche of “hope for the best, plan for the worst” into “strive for the best, contingency plan for the worst”.

Her article also talks about communicating with others (talking about it), finding distractions, and being mindful of your moments, but those are not universal panaceas, and talking with others only works if you talk with the right people. There are many people who are what I call “Nike clones” — the “just do it” people. They’ll tell you what to do, and they think it is just a matter of doing it, like the Nike slogan. But here’s the thing. If you could just “do it”, you would have already done it. In most cases of personal change, something is holding you back. So talking to the “Nike people” really doesn’t help you, because their solutions tend to be very superficial.

The article also talks about two other aspects — finding the cause and learning to let go — and I wish there was more focus on them. They are often the only two ways to really create lasting change. At least they’re included though.
As I mentioned, a good summary article that I liked…