Too many of you assholes see something on the internet and think, “HEY! I can do that too! I’m gonna be fucking rich!”.

No, you can’t. And no, you’re not.

Just give up now before you litter my precious Internet with your crap. And before you start saying “but my idea is new and better and different”, just stop right there. It’s not new. There is nothing new. It’s all been done already. Yes, all of it. And it’s not better. It’s not even as good. Someone better looking, with more money and more time already did it. An no one wants different. We say we do, bit we’re lying. If you make something different, that just means it sucks that much more.

Save us all the trouble. Don’t clutter the Internet with your crap. Just give up now and go back to eating Cheetos and playing “Left For Dead” on an XBox that you didn’t and could never have invented.

ln -s / /cow

It seems as though one of the installation scripts has this path hardcoded in it, and, without it, these scripts fail.

I hope this helps you if you should even encounter the same problem.

Work wise, I had the usual stack of emails, one conference call, and queue of frantic IMs to deal with. Additionally, I was finishing my preparations to start a new facet of my job. Basically, I will now be doing what I’ve been doing for Syracuse for Dallas as well. To start it off properly, for the next few weeks I’ll be meeting at their work locations, working with them face-to-face and providing direct support. It should be interesting but it also means I’ll more than likely be working longer days and be quite tired at the end of them. Those of you inclined to do so, please call my wife and offer to keep her company some day this week or next. I’m sure she’d be happy to have it.

We visited the hospital yesterday and took a tour of the facilities. Now that we know we’re staying here, we wanted to make sure this is where we want to have our baby. I wasn’t nearly as happy with it as I was with the hospital in Syracuse but, based on what I’ve seen and heard, this is as good as it gets unless you’re willing to leave the safety of an actual hospital and go to a birthing center, which Jess just isn’t willing to do for her first child. In Syracuse, several of the hospitals had a birthing centers inside them so that is more serious medical attention were needed, you were only a hallway away.

On the way home we performed our, seemingly, daily ritual of stopping at the hardware store, got some dinner, worked around the house a bit, watched some TV and then headed to bed.

All in all, a decent day made a million times better by spending it with the one person I love more than anything else in this world.

If you look at the code, “WordPress”:http://wordpress.org/ is really just a bunch of pieces of really bad, procedural, brute-force style coding tied together with a thin thread that they call an API and wrapped in enough global variables to leave even the most experienced coders in a state of confusion. However, it offers the most out-of-the-box functionality, is easy to extend if you don’t try to write good code yourself, and, despite its highly inefficient code, it still runs faster than most other alternatives. Therefore, it powers this site, and will be powering my new Photoblog.

I wrote a plugin to give WordPress a few more features that I needed in a Photoblog that weren’t available from other plugins or in the core WordPress system. It took me a while to convince myself not to write the code well. After several frustrated and failed attempts due to the poorly written WordPress core, I eventually decided to look at the code as a short term solution that was allowed to break all of the commonly held conventions. 30 minutes later, I have a very handy little plugin. I figure, if I’m still using the code 5 years from now and haven’t updated it enough in that time-span to understand what it’s doing anymore, I can easily rewrite it in another 30 minutes.

I have a few more changes that I need to make to the plugin so that it can lend a hand on other sections of my site. Once that’s done, I have a few more cosmetic changes to make to the site and it’ll be ready to go live. I’m very excited about this.

I’m not sure if I should release the plugin or not. I’m sure other’s considering “PixelPost”:http://www.pixelpost.org/ for their Photoblog needs would find it useful, especially if they are already fans of the WordPress feature set. I’m reluctant, however, because the code is so bad. Then again, if you’re using WordPress you’re either oblivious to bad code, or using it knowing that the code is bad as I am. In both cases, the feature is probably more important than the method of invocation.

# Use Flickr to power my own Gallery.
# Host my own Gallery and have it synchronize with Flickr.
# Host my own Gallery and use it separate from Flickr.

Flickr provides an API that will allow me, with a bit of programming, to display my images there on my own site. With some creative tagging, some fancy tactics, and a bit of coders duct tape, a working site can be produced. This is very easy to do because three or four very simple scripts tied together can handle everything. However, because Flickr does very little to protect the full sized version from unauthorized downloads, I do not upload full sized versions at all. This means that automating my lab orders becomes much more difficult. Additionally, this means that I have to rely on Flickr, its servers, and its TOS. Should those things go down, my site will be rendered inoperable.

Hosting my own Gallery is pretty easy these days, too. “Gallery 2″:http://gallery.sf.net/ is feature rich and not any more annoying than using “WordPress”:http://wordpress.org/ as my blogging software. It has a modular architecture that should make extending it fairly easy. However, it will need to be extended. In order to keep from having to upload images and maintain titles and descriptions in two places (my Gallery and Flickr) I’d like to author a Flickr synchronization module. Additionally, the only currently written commerce module, “checkout”:http://sourceforge.net/projects/gallerycheckout/, is nearly useless. Products are defined and priced globally. Overriding the price of an individual product is possible through a very cumbersome method. I need image classes, and products based on the class of image. I also need to ability to hold sales, offer coupons, and provide purchase options. So, this means that I’ll need to write at least two modules. This also means that I have to understand how Gallery works under the hood. This programming is quite a bit more difficult and cumbersome than the four simple scripts needed to use the Flickr API. However, the results are more stable, more capable, and more future proof.

Finally, I can simply host my Gallery separate from Flickr. All of the pros and cons I mentioned about hosting my own Gallery still apply. The only difference is that I don’t have to write the Flickr synchronization module in exchange for having to upload every image twice and deal with captioning and titling in both locations. If I’m going to write modules, I may as well go all the way, so this option doesn’t appeal to me.

So, I’m left with two options. One option (using Flickr) is easy to write and fairly simple to maintain. Additionally, 1/4th of it is already done: that’s how I currently sell photographs currently. Furthermore, quite a few people have written similar (yet terrible) applications that I can use for inspiration (read: theft). However, the end result is far less flexible, stable, and future proof then the more complicated method of hosting my own. Additionally, writing these two modules and releasing them to the community will allow me to give a little back and drum up a little exposure for myself in the process.

Yeah, yeah. I know what I need to do. I just hate doing it.