Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-28

  • Aikido Al: Origins: #aikido al #webcomics #IT

    I wondered out loud about Al’s background and Aicia was… http://bit.ly/9iVbWA #

  • Check out the MacUpdate Spring Bundle. 10 Top Mac Apps worth $400 for only $49.99. PLUS I just got AppDelete for free! http://bit.ly/macupd #
  • Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-21: Aikido Al: Zen & The Art oF Information Technology: 100 Panels of Aikido Al… http://bit.ly/dyPseU #

Powered by Twitter Tools

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-21

Powered by Twitter Tools

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-14

Powered by Twitter Tools

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-07

Powered by Twitter Tools

Ask the Photographers #2 : Flashlight Graffiti


I was doing my level best to get nothing done yesterday. As I was gleefully stumbling away I came across A.Pic.Co.Tv’s Art blog‘s post Picasso’s Light Graffiti published by Life Magazine. So I had to ask, seeing as I am definitely photographically challenged, how was this done? I emailed my esteemed colleagues…

Britt Stokes, boy genius, responded in a split second.


He opened the lens in a relatively dark room, drew with a flashlight, then a flash was fired at the end of the exposure to record him in his final position.


Our publisher, Dr. Michael Roach, emailed:

In a fully dark room Picasso drew the bull(centuar) with a small flashlight facing the camera which had its lens fully open on a tripod,  and just at the end of the move the photographer (Gjon Mili I believe) fired the off camera flash that was at the left of the camera.  The flash was fired by a manual button instead of using the synch on the camera.  Neat huh?


Makes perfect sense.
I’m glad I asked.


(Ask The Photographers #1? Had to do with camera choices for a wedding photographer…)


Image Credit & Copyright: Pablo Picasso’s Flashlight Centaur
Photo: Gjon Mili/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  1949

Slidepress- A Fully Customizable, Dynamic Media Player for WordPress

Slidepress is just the latest offering from Dominey Design, a web development company in Atlanta. Their main focus- AKA obsession- is Slideshowpro- a quick and easy and versatile Flash-based slideshow application  available as a Flash Component and a standalone xml-driven swf. Plus they offer an web application called Slideshow Director- a database-driven image and video management application for installation on your won web server.

Dominey’s vision is vast- when you purchase any of their products they offer a number of freebie export scripts for Photoshop, various version of iPhoto, a server -side PHP XML Builder, to make the the process of creating the xml file which form the basis of these slideshow applications. They also offer a Lightroom to SlideshowPro Director upload app.

$24 for an Ounce of GOLD

That ounce of GOLD is the standalone SlideshowPro app.

They have managed to create what I consider that absolute best and versatile slideshow plugin for wordpress. Yes, I know, we wordpress people have a tendency to be cheap so the $24 investment might dissuade you BUT you will be missing out in a big way. Not only does Slidepress work with Dominey’s superb image management app SlideshowPro Director, it also works with WordPress’ native Media Library content and RSS feeds from Flicker etc.

Database Connection Error! 1054: Unknown column

When I first installed the Slidepress plugin I did receive a database error:

Database Connection Error! 1054: Unknown column ‘navThumbLinkBackgroundColor’ in ‘field list’

I re-installed the plugin, I downloaded the plugin again and manually installed it and deactivated and reactivated and it didn’t resolve itself. so I posted in the SlideshowPro forum. It seems that problem is not wide spread but definitely presenting itself for other users.

A quick google for mySQL error 1054 led me to believe that the plugin was neglecting to create the aforementioned table so, while waiting for answer, I decided to muck about and see if I could learn something.

On a lark, I opened slidepress.php in BBEdit and added   
navNumberLinkColor text NULL ,
to line 229.

The error message changed to:
Database Connection Error! 1054: Unknown column ‘navThumbLinkBackgroundColor’ in ‘field list’

SO I knew I was onto something.
I added
added navThumbLinkBackgroundColor text NULL ,
to line 233

The plugin works flawlessly now. nearest thing I could figure out was that function action_activate()  in slidepress.php is missing a bunch of table names names in the list of tables to create

Great Wiki

The Slidepress plugin is brought to you by the same guys that created the crosdomain creator so it is only right that it is so well-documented. Installation instructions are pretty easy to follow and can be found at
http://slidepress.net/installation.php

Want more installation details?
http://wiki.slideshowpro.net/SSPsa/SP-Installation

time to build a slideshow

At this point I would usually build an illustrated step-by-step tutorial on using this plugin. However, the guys at Dominey beat me to it and, to be honest, I couldn’t possibly do any better.

Find it here.
http://wiki.slideshowpro.net/SSPsa/SP-Usage

UPDATE

Here’s my version of the slidepress.php file for reference. if push comes to shove, you could test your set up by dropping this file in your slidepress folder.

Download SlidePress-php.zip