Favorites

Introducing LtL's newest feature...Favorites. Frustrated by not being able to keep track of all the great photos posted on LtL by all the herders, I've added a way for people to 'bookmark' other llama users' photos. Now you don't have to figure out what to search for to find that photo of you in that ridiculous costume at the crazy 80's party back in the day.

For now, every user just has a favorites page that is ordered by most recently added. I'm open to other ways to present this. For example, it might be nice to combine a photo's favorites count with it's rating and number of views to calculate something called 'Interestingness' like on Flickr.


More EXIF

PHP's exif_read_data() function can only go so far. It's a bit of a pain in the butt to work with and doesn't report all embedded image data.

On the other had, the perl module ExifTool is an exif reader on steroids. It reports everything, maybe too much. But it's easy to use and I thought people who care about this type of stuff might find all that extra info interesting.

Just click 'more...' under the Details section on any photos page. Give it a couple seconds to display the data. It's actually looking for the source image on the server and reading the data out before spitting it back to the client in an html table. Ajax rocks.


Hits

So far Larry's been keeping track of everybody that visits an image or an album, even crawlers. It's finally come to the point where tracking all the crawler hits is just slowing down the site. For example, there are about 10,000 images on the site, yet there are about 250,000 rows in the hits table. 190,000 of those are crawler hits.

I admit, it's interesting to see if a search engine has hit your page, but the hits queries have slowed the photos page render time down from 1.5sec to 4.5sec.

So, no more crawler tracking. It shouldn't change your page view counts, as these weren't considered in the tally anyway. And remember, we only count hits if they are not your own (when logged in), and only if more than 30 minutes have gone by from the same client.


Upcoming downtime

The barn's going to move soon. Larry has finally outgrown his little shack and needs a more spacious place. Plus, server market economics dictate that we're just paying too much for our current shack anyway (about $120/mo). So we're probably going to move to a place to costs about $80/mo with nicer Llama themed Ikea furniture from craigslist.

Expect some downtime in January, maybe up to a week. I'll give plenty of notice. Small monthly recurring donations appreciated.