Doing the first of the month chores for the practice, and tweaking the backend of the photo gallery for the sites here.  Zen Photo put out an upgrade that’s working nice and smooth, and allowed for a new template that I’m really loving.  Nice to have a bit of freshness in place as we head into spring.

I haven’t shared that much here recently because life’s been a bit slow.  Winter, even a So Cal winter, can get me that way.  Spring will be here soon enough though.  Looking forward to some short trips and some sunshine to get me out of my current rut.

Interesting article at S.F. Gate on the Top 10 searches on the various search engines for the first part of 2008.  For what it’s worth, I don’t think any of those searches would have brought you here, no matter how far down the list of hits you browsed.

Out of curiosity, I checked Google Analytics to see what did bring you here.  Excluding things like variations on the name of the sites, the top 10 for Howling Point for the first part of 2008 are:

1. cal poly
2. cdpuvbhfzz
3. pornanimal
4. pongo
5. pongo dog
6. chuck hartley
7. pongo point
8. red shirt school of photography
9. pongo the dog
10. smoritos

The list was a bit different over at the photo gallery.

1. la jolla rough water swim 2008
2. naked bartenders
3. jason fung water polo
4. ombac rugby
5. stefan partelow
6. james cracknell
7. santa barbara
8. water polo
9. displayimage.php add your comment
10. triton invitational water polo

Yes, the comment spammers’ search for a certain former exploit was the #9 search on the photo gallery.  Now you know why comments were turned off before I switched to a different gallery package in July.

While I’d like to think that the continuing interest in Pongo is due to, well, him, and being the site muse for five years, I suspect it has more to do with being named after a Disney character and sharing a name with a defunct Latin American social networking site (pongo point).

I wasted most of my Sunday coding on the sites, and now I’m just vegging on the couch watching Futurama while Spinner makes some pancit for dinner. Life is good.

Despite the slacking, there was a good swim and steam yesterday, and the coding means that comments are back on the photo gallery. This will be an ugly Business of Law week, but at least I’m going into it well rested, and fairly content.

Diego and I are on our own for a few days while Randy and my camera cavort around Miami.  Snacks wherever we want and lots of scratching ourselves in inappropriate places until Tuesday night.  We bond well.

I started off the time alone by attempting to make some long overdue upgrades to the photo gallery look and feel.  The gallery’s been powered by Coppermine since it started in 2005, and while the template’s never been exactly what I wanted, it worked and I was never able to figure out their coding.  Now, after a couple of days of dedicated tweaking, I’m thinking that I never will.  Gawd what a mess, and I’m now pretty sure that the reason it wouldn’t bend to my will isn’t a lack of skill but a lack of flexibility in the core of that program.

Been experimenting with Gallery 2 as an alternative, and so far I’m favorable impressed.  I remember comparing them back in oh-five, and deciding that Coppermine was the better option then, but Gallery seems to have more than made up the difference in the last three years.  Expect some changes on that side of the site in the near future. 

Be happy to hear any comments about other experiences with the packages, or other self-hosted photo galleries, but as was pointed out to me (again) this last week, I”m too much of a control freak to ever turn over a portion of the site to Flickr or some other third party again.

Following up on last night’s post, I’ve seen a bunch of comments in a lot of places about the cdpuvbhfzz hack.  Just in case it’s helpful to someone who lands here sometime, here’s the local perspective. 

Sometime Saturday or Sunday something got into the Vista site server and added one line to every file that ended in .php or .htm.  Every page – even obsolete unlinked test scripts and the like.  The included line set up an iframe and a link to content from a site with the name above and ending in dot com. 

I’m not sure what it was supposed to do.  By the time I saw the attack the targeted site was unreachable, so it was just generating DNS errors. 

Because most of the pages there are actually products of multiple pages of included php and htm, each page visible to the browser had multiple renderings of the broken link.  This caused page loading to time out sometimes.

Although the Coppermine admins (via their forum) are still being a bit defensive, by an amazing coincidence the only site impacted locally was the one running Coppermine’s gallery software, albeit an older version.  That said, once in the domain, it didn’t limit itself to rewriting Coppermine files, but spread thoughout the domain. 

 Vista is updated and cleaned now, and I get to spend too much time this morning changing passwords around the world, just in case.  Crew Classic was wonderful, by the way, but that post will have to wait for a while.  Some photos are up though, and more should go up this afternoon.

My apologies if you saw the mess that was our photo gallery earlier today.  Nothing like coming home from a great day with the alums to find your site has been hacked, and incompetently at that.  It looks like the losers were trying to serve some ads, but pointed to a blocked or dead server.  Things seem to be fixed now, but I’ll be keeping an eye on things as best I can.

I’ve been noticing on the stats that a lot of you come from Google Images looking for pics that are over at the gallery.  Well, this isn’t the gallery.  A handy little PHP script picks a couple of images at random to display on the left side of this page, but the ubiquitous search conglomerate doesn’t seem to realize that the pics change with each page load.  So welcome, we’re sorry that you came in the wrong way, but please go over and try and find what you were looking for.

One year ago today the first pictures were posted to Vista, Howling Point’s pretentious artist colony. There was some trepidation. The gallery organization was different from the blogging here and at Beachlaw, and a bad post wouldn’t automatically fade with time. I was worried about bandwidth and theft. In fact, that worry led a lot of the planning: I’d thought about doing a gallery in Howling Point for a while but didn’t want that feature to be able to drag the site down if things got out of control. Hence the subdomain, which my wonderful host lets me cut off (throttle) or completely delete if bandwidth is getting too high without dragging down the other sites.

The experience has been great. Sure there was a bit of hotlinking and theft that had to be dealt with, but it was minimal. Comment spam crops up from time to time, but not like on the blogs themselves. The feedback has been great, and not just the smiley faces but the constructive criticism too. Having my photos viewed by others rather than just stuck on CDs has made me appreciate the hobby that much more.

Coppermine, my gallery software, lets people rate the photos with zero to five stars, but I think the better measure of the good photos is just to look at what people are looking at. Sure, some people look at the train wrecks, but overall I think the eye is drawn to what it likes and is comfortable with. The list is a bit deceptive: the top five photos have all been posted since last spring and have had nine to ten months of visiblity; number six jumped up there after only being posted in September, and number seven made it there after only being posted in October. And of course, some visitors’ opinions count more than others. Accordingly this swimmer’s thumbnail is being posted here for Nala.

But just because the visitors like certain photos doesn’t mean everything. Like Howling Point itself, Vista is our place to play. Out of 372 photos uploaded so far, I certainly have some favorites, even if they haven’t all received the attention I think they deserved. So I’m going to take the first anniversary of the gallery’s creation to point out my five favorites. They’re in no particular order – just five photos that I really like, two of which are on the wall here in print versions.

This was a timing issue for both of us. He was getting kicked out of the water for being on the wrong side of the pier at the wrong time of day. I got lucky and caught him at just the right moment to capture the dampened spirit as he was coming out of the water. The result was a shot I’ve been very proud of.

Everything on this shot just fell into place. Enough haze to show the distance between the monument and the skyline, but not such much that the view was obstructed. Sunshine for the foreground at Point Loma. Just the right breeze for the banners. Note that not one of those things is anything I can claim responsiblity for. Just lucky timing on my part.

This shot of the goalie for the Whittier College Poets water polo team from September ended up capturing the whole of the Triton Invitational Water Polo tournament for me. The effort of the reach and his facial reaction captured the energy of the game, and there was just enough motion visible in the ball to show the pace of the action.

Sure, there are lots of pictures of Pongo, and this one hardly captures his natural energy or the passion with which he approaches everything from herding the laundry pile and dust bunnies to defending me from my friends and guests, but it does capture him. Even if it’s the Pongo that only I ever see.

This was the best shot of a good game that was very difficult to shoot. It was an evening game with lighting that wasn’t just poor, but constantly changing as the sun rapidly set. I had a lot of problems capturing the action of an incredible matchup and what I did get came out with motion blurs and high grain (or the digital equivalent of grain). This shot, however, with the reflected orange of the sunset and the shadow behind the Princeton junior, came out technically good. More importantly though, he captured the spirit of the game. The facial expression, the tilt of the cap and the hands on his hips all worked to show the competitive attitutude of the players and the intensity of the game.

Thanks to all who’ve visited for making my initial anxieties pointless and keeping the first year of the photo gallery a lot of fun. I hope we can keep the second year as interesting for everyone.

I had several things I wanted to do this weekend, but between a knee hurting and the cube-people’s pager, I feel kind of grounded. I know why I’m stuck with the pager – Quicken says I can’t leave the cube yet. I just wish I knew what I’d done to the knee. I hate being grounded when I don’t know why.

On a more amusing note, giggling at the ‘bots this morning as I go through my server stats. Howling Point is proud to announce that it’s shiny new little artist colony, the pretentiously named Vista at Howling Point, is now the #9 site at Google for ‘Pac 10 Swimming.’ Amazingly enough, that puts us ahead of all but two of the actual Pac 10 member schools’ websites. While I love the results, something is just wrong there. It’s like getting to go home with the really hot person at the end of the night – love the results, but questioning the judgment (though certainly not enough to reject the results).