It was worth the trouble of moving, exporting, importing and setting up everything again.

Hope this local/small company will not suck. But it possibly can’t suck as much as (mt) did. Nothing can.

Because I have to divide my energy between different projects FTT! stay a humble yet fan-tas-tic Inspiration Gallery, containing only the most fan-tas-tic science-fiction, fantasy, horror, gothic and anime art!

This whole week a Fan-tas-tic Top 10 will be posted to celebrate this humble yet fan-tas-tic milestone!

Expect some great inspiration collections like:

And if you do like what you see, don’t forget to rate the fan-tas-tic art and subscribe to FTT!

Now the reboot. Although it’s now much darker and more ‘serious’ It looks cheesy and B-movie-ish once again. And I’m simply entertained by the unusual long trailer. And how can you not like Michael Jai White after Spawn!?

It’s a very different (and even original) approach and it could even appeal to those who don’t know the game (anymore). It will not suck at the same level as Dragonball evolution or Street Fighter: The legend of Chun Li.

After the Avatar hype, which was good, but not great nor original at all and Batman: Dark Knight, which was great but too overhyped and overrated…this is the first movie which makes me wanna blog about it.
Now, is that a good omen? I think so.

update: bummer…it’s not an official trailer yet. It’s a ‘directors vision’ to impress bobo’s at WB.
Well I’m impressed…does that count!

Very frustrating indeed. So? So, I’ve made the bold decision to blog (a lot) less and to start being creative (again) and to get things done: meaning among others that I should read less about designing and developing and actually start designing and develeoping.
I’m already occupied with two humble projects at the same time and I should get those finished first.

This article kind of gave me the last push to make the decision: Stop Launching Blogs, Start Contributing. If I should need to promote one of my projects, I think it would be more productive if I do that via another blog, which has a decent amount of audience and gets promoted already by the community.
See how I already got rid of all these ‘social’ save and bookmark buttons?

So? So, I heavily customized the Portfolio theme you’re looking at now and made the projects the homepage: The focus is clearly on the projects and I’m not looking for traffic spikes (any more), but trying to get things done.
Expect less blogs (unless project related) and expect more humble projects, which do get finished on the homepage.

I’m actually quite relieved, that I can spent all this time and energy on actually delivering ‘new stuff’ instead of ‘just another blog’.

A sci-fi & fantasy (‘Fantasy’ as in ‘bikini babes with oversized un-practical swords’? Yes! ) gallery powered by my own Fan-tas-tic! WordPress theme.

You can read more about this project under the fan-tas-tic tag.

An exclusive vBulletin powered soccer forum. Heavily customized. And Exclusive as in ‘focus on quality regarding members and posts’…so no need to be the largest forum in the universe; just the best in the niche!

For some live demo and examples check out the sub categories, sub stats, tags or any single posts at the Fan-tas-tic! Inspiration Galleries: click on the Google Buzz button and see what the buzz is about!

As you may have noticed from de demo above I’ve got my social sharing and bookmark stuff also outside the loop, which makes this a bit trickier than it should.

That’s why my code is centrally in the functions.php of my WordPress theme. And here’s how full code behind the Google Buzz button looks like:

Let’s dissect the code for a quick analysis.

The URL

Line 1 contains the URL you want to buzz; the variable $share_link is the URL you want to pass through. You can replace this with the_permalink() if you are on a single post page.
I use the Buzz button also on other pages than the single post page. Therefore I need to use the following function in the functions.php:

function ftt_get_currenturl(){ return 'http://'.$_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]; }

The title

Line 2 contains the title we want to buzz: although you can use the_title() when on a single post page, I use wp_title(), because I use the Buzz button also on other pages.

The thumbnail

Line 3 contains the actual image we want to buzz, along with some optional text.
Already somewhere above this you should have the following statement to get the proper thumbnail for the current post (when on a single page) or the last thumbnail/post on the page, which should be satisfactory too:

$thumbnail = wp_get_attachment_image_src(get_post_thumbnail_id(), 'thumbnail');

The Result

That should do the trick! Now, when you click on the Google Buzz, you should get something like this:

You can play around and adjust stuff to your liking. Let me know in the comments, whether this works for your (gallery) site.

UPDATE

Note that something is messing the code displayed in this post! Maybe because I’ve just upgraded to WP 2.9.2!?
So I had to resort to screenshots…

AZIndex is just great, but the following mini-hack will make it simply perfect. By adding a simple yet necessary feature: generating an URL for the groupheaders: see http://fan-tas-tic.com/artists/ for a live demo and imagine you can’t click the author names for an example of the original plugin without this lill’ hack.

The general assumption is that the plugin is abandoned by its original author, since there hasn’t been any reaction on the official AZIndex plugin feedback page by the author. So I had to it myself. Again.

The following instructions makes sure a groupheader (tags, author or categy) has an accompanying link (when a subheader is selected).
The most recent version (0.8.1) has been used for this hack, but you should be able to implement it also in older or newer versions following the next steps:
0. Make your backups or try this on a local installation as always with hacks (although I’ve got a nasty habit myself of hacking directly on my live sites but do as I say, not as I do)
1. Get the original plugin from the WordPress plugin repository.
2a. Either unzip the plugin and edit az-index-content.php
2b. Or upload the unzipped plugin directly and open az-index-content.php via the plugin-editor
3. Apply the following changes:
a. Find around rownumber 172 the following statement:

$link = get_permalink($item['id']);

b. Add the next statements beneath this line:

//aytemir.com: start mini-hack
$groupheader='';
$groupheader=$index->head;
if ($groupheader=='author') {
  $groupheader_id=get_userdatabylogin($item['head']);
  $groupheader_url=get_bloginfo('url').'/?author='.$groupheader_id->ID;
} elseif ($groupheader=='cats') {
  $groupheader_id=get_cat_id($item['head']);
  $groupheader_url=get_bloginfo('url').'/?cat='.$groupheader_id;
} elseif ($groupheader=='tags') {
  $groupheader_id=$item['head'];
  $groupheader_url=get_bloginfo('url').'/?tag='.$groupheader_id;
}
//aytemir.com: end mini-hack

c. The code is self-explanatory, I think: just get the header you want to sort/order by, retieve the accompanying ID and generate an URL and apply URL in case of tag, category or author.
d. Find (around rownumber 203) the following statement:

$output .= '<li'.$charlink.($odd ? ' class="azalt"' : '').'><span class="head">'.$item['head'].$cont.'</span>'.$cr;

e. And replace it with the following statement:

//aytemir.com: start mini-hack
if ($groupheader=='author' || $groupheader=='cats' || $groupheader=='tags') {
  $output .= '<li'.$charlink.($odd ? ' class="azalt"' : '').'><span class="head"><a href="'.$groupheader_url.'">'.$item['head'].$cont.'</a></span>'.$cr;
} else {
  $output .= '<li'.$charlink.($odd ? ' class="azalt"' : '').'><span class="head">'.$item['head'].$cont.'</span>'.$cr;
}
//aytemir.com: end mini-hack

5. Save and test it (locally) and let me know if it works for you.

Don’t want to bother ‘hacking’ yourself? You could also download the fully zipped version with the hack already implemented:
1. Download this hacked version, which I doped 0.8.2
2. Upload, activate and test the plugin.

For usage and configuration instructions please refer to the original plugin site.

If you should run into issues regarding this specific hack, please let me know in the comments.

Eos Divine Protection

Red Sonja

Flight of the Dragon

Angel and Demons

Dungeons & Dragons: Legendary Boon

Budapest – Fantasy landscape

The God of Hellfire

Fusion

Purple Mage

Black God’s Kiss

Once you’re at fan-tas-tic.com don’t forget the rate the images you think it’s FTT!

]]> http://aytemir.com/blog/2009/12/20/ftt10-fan-tas-tic-images-of-2009/feed/ 1 http://aytemir.com/blog/2009/11/30/dont-believe-the-hype-of-gridservice/ http://aytemir.com/blog/2009/11/30/dont-believe-the-hype-of-gridservice/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:21:18 +0000 Tschai http://aytemir.com/?p=1074 The MediaTemple Grid-service “is a cluster-based, modern hosting service powered by hundreds of servers working in tandem to power your websites, applications and email with unrivaled power, burstability and reliability”.
Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Background story

I’ve just recently moved to MediaTemple and at this moment my following sites are hosted with (mt): aytemir.com (that would be this blog), fan-tas-tic.com and VoetbalPortaal.com.
All three sites have very humble amount of traffic to handle and are WordPress or vBulletin powered, with some standard popular plugins or mods.
Nothing fancy. Nothing special.

Because VoetbalPortaal.com grow slowy too big for the shared host I was with, I had to move (all my sites) and I believed the hype and decided to move to the ‘state of the art’ and ‘digg-proof’ grid-service of MediaTemple. You never know when you’re gonna need a ‘digg-proof’ host, I guess . And boy did I regret that! And still do regret it!

I had no reason not the believe what they claim on their site: TechCrunch is hosted with them. And a sub-devision of Sony. Although on a more expensive plan. But also a lot of (big) blogs are also with the unrivaled Grid-Service of MediaTemple.

Here comes trouble

Since I’ve moved to (mt) and settled everything all seemed fine, excepts the servers where slower than I was used to with the cheap host I used to be. Bad luck, I guess.
But from day one I got ‘Lost connection to MySQL server during query’, ‘User *** already has more than ‘max_user_connections’ active connections’ and ‘Out of memory’ errors via the vBulletin backend. My site had been down for several minutes several times: Although (mt) thought that this may have been caused by ‘bad neighbours’, I never had this kind of issues with other (normal) shared hosts!

Here comes the $olution

And different employees from (mt)-support all suggested me that I should buy an additional service to make up for the initial service, which should be correctly working in the first place: I should get a MySQL Gridcontainer to make sure I wouldn’t bother by other customers on the same cluster.

Although I thought that was ridiculous and I expected to have 99,9% uptime and database-connection and I shouldn’t have to buy an additional service for a simple and humble site…I had no choice, because (mt) had me ‘by the balls’: I had already lost 50% of my monthly unique visitors during the transition* to (mt) and I could not afford to loose more!

More toruble? More $olution!

So I decide to purchase an additional MySQL Gridcontainer. Now I don’t have the ‘Lost connection to MySQL server during query’, ‘User *** already has more than ‘max_user_connections’ active connections’ warnings anymore.
But I do have ‘Out of memory’ warnings and even more frequently than before. And guess what (mt) is suggesting as a possible solution? Yes, you’re right!
They suggest I should buy an additional service to make up for the initial service, which should be correctly working in the first place: I should upgrade the memory of my Gridcontainer!

The irony of al this situation is that I had no issues with any of my humble sites at all when I was at the ‘el cheapo’ host for only 30,- euro’s a year!
Now I’m having frequently database-connection error, out of memory errors and I’m not the only one as far as I can tell from the Support Forums. And (most) of us have only simple websites.

The conclusion

Long story short: don’t believe the hype of the Grid-Service (maybe this goes only for MediaTemple) and the ‘digg-proof’ claims they make; at the moment it’s very in-stable and it has problems handling a very average sites like aytemir.com, fan-tas-tic.com and VoetbalPortaal.com.
And when there are no errors, the sites are very slow compared to what I’m used to…before I’ve moved them to MediaTemple.

So just make sure you do more research than I did before moving to another host…or you may end up paying and upgrading to most advanced servers and services, just to host a humble WordPress blog or a vBulletin powered forum!

Disclaimers

PS: the (mt) support is just advising and suggesting and they’re not really ‘forcing’ me buy additional service to make up for their initial service, which does not deliver what they promise.

PS: there are testimonials of (mt) Gris-Service users which are just happy and claim their service does just what it should!

*This is not all (mt)’s fault, because I had to switched from .nl to .com for personal reasons, but constant db-connection errors made things worse.

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