In Germany it is not legal to use Google Analytics without a indication. (Heise Online [German], a serious publisher of computer magazines). Therefore I’m not longer using Google Analytics. If you are surfing on akeller’s world no data will send to Google. Anyway Google knows already too much, on the other hand Google Analytics is not really reliable. All visitors that disallow Javascript (advisable) get not traced.

Nevertheless I’m interested, why (search-query) my blog is visited. For this reason I’m using SlimStat. In the last time more and more visitors are searching for a “PhotoScape Manual”. Hence I want to link to the good screencasts on the PhotoScape-Homepage. The screencasts are without spoken words and therefore somehow multilingual. Just watch and try it by your own. If there is a specific question you can leave here a comment or use the contact-form. If I’m able I will answer.

In the SemanticScuttle forum I promised that I will release this weekend a sneak preview of the SemanticScuttle Theme I’m working on. Unfortunately I had no time to finish it, therefore here only a screenshot of the theme, it is named “Miss Monk”:

As far as I finish it you can download it here but I have to ask for your patience because the next weeks I will be very busy.

Maybe you are also working on the style of your SemanticScuttle installation than this cheat sheet is maybe helpful for you:

It shows the basic elements of the standard cascading style sheet. If you want to print it you can download the PDF-Version.

Possibly you get an error-messages after installation. There are two known issues at the moment.

Opening-Tag <?

In the file templates/top.inc.php at line 52 is “<? ” used as an opening-tag. This is valid according w3 but some web-server do have a problem with this tag. Just change it to “<?php”

Warning: setlocale() [function.setlocale]

Maybe you get an error-message like:

Warning: setlocale() [function.setlocale]: Passing locale category name as string is deprecated. Use the LC_* -constants instead in C:\web\SemanticScuttle\includes\php-gettext\gettext.inc on line 131
Warning: setlocale() [function.setlocale]: Invalid locale category name LC_MESSAGES, must be one of LC_ALL, LC_COLLATE, LC_CTYPE, LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC, or LC_TIME in C:\web\SemanticScuttle\includes\php-gettext\gettext.inc on line 131

I had this once with an local XAMPP-installation. As far as I find out this is a problem of the web-server. For details visit PHP.NET.

Because this is only a warning you can avoid the output of this message by modifying
/includes/php-gettext/gettext.inc, at line 131 you find:

$ret = setlocale(LC_MESSAGES, $locale);
Just at an @ before setlocale:
$ret = @setlocale(LC_MESSAGES, $locale);

Today I rediscovered the program PhotoScape and I like it very much.

Normally I use for retouching photos  Photoline, FixFoto and also Inkscape for special effects. But the tool PhotoScape is somehow different, it gives you all you need for a fast photo processing. Only the One-Click Option “Perfectly Clean” from FixFoto it is not able to reach. (FixFoto is shareware and for the the option “Perfectly Clean” you have to pay additional.)

Beside the editor there are additional functions:

• Picture Browser (I normally use FastStones ImageViewer, also Freeware)
• Batch-Processing, very useful for a collection of pictures
• Album, group different pictures to one, fast and easy
• Combine, like Album, combine pictures
• Gif-Animator, nice but for animated Gifs I use Beneton Movie Gif.
• Print, Index-printing
• further Colorpicker, Renamer, RAW Converter

At the Help-Pages you can take a look, there are different screen-casts available which shows you the functions. I guess also my father is able to retouch his pictures with this nice  software and I will install PhotoScape at his PC next time I’m going to visit him.

What I don’t like are the limited functions for compressing jpeg-files.

Here are some sample pictures only touched with PhotoScape, but compressed via JPEG Imager.

[Mit PicLens anzeigen]

Finaly I want to point to the Donate-Page of PhotoScape. If you are going to use PhotoScape much, than show your appreciation. 10$ are not that much for such a nice tool.

After we installed in the first part Semantic Scuttle we want to make some adjustments to our installation in the second part.

Cleanurls

If you take a look at the links in the top-menu you see for example a link like “http://domain.xxx/populartags.php/” for the popular tags.

This is not looking nice and we are going to change this via cleanurls. After adjusting, the link should look like: “http://domain.xxx/populartags/”. This is realized via a .htaccess-file. But watch out, this is not available for all servers.

1. Open the file “config.inc.php” and set $cleanurls to true
   $cleanurls = true;
   Save the file and test if the cleanurls are working. If everything is doing fine your are done and you can skip the next steps.
2. If it is not working open the file .htaccess (it is in the root of your installation, if you don’t see the file ensure, that you switched on “show hidden files” in your FTP-program). In Line 29 and 30 you will find:
   RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/?(.*) $1.php?query=$2 [L,QSA] #option 1
#RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/?(.*) $1.php/$2 [L] #option 2
   Add a # at the start of line 29 and delete it in line 30:
   #RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/?(.*) $1.php?query=$2 [L,QSA] #option 1
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/?(.*) $1.php/$2 [L] #option 2
   Save the file and try again if it is now working.
3. If it is still not working, open the file “constants.inc.php” and commend or delete the lines 21 to 23:
   // Correct bug with PATH_INFO (maybe for Apache 1)
// if(strlen($_SERVER["PATH_INFO"])
// $_SERVER["PATH_INFO"] = $_SERVER["ORIG_PATH_INFO"];
//}
   Save the file and try again.

If it is still not working, please leave me a comment and I will try to find a solution. Please check first if your web-server supports .htaccess.

Valid XHTML 1.1?

Start your favorite browser and open the W3-Validator put in the address of your Semantic Scuttle installation. The result will be about 28 errors und 19 warnings. This we should fix if we want to be beloved by search-engines.

1. If you get the error: “cannot generate system identifier for general entity “PHPSESSID”.”, open the file “index.php” and add in line 21 before:
   require_once('header.inc.php');
   this line:
   ini_set('arg_separator.output','&');
2. Open the file /templates/bookmarks.tpl.php and search: echo '
<img class="thumbnail" src="http://www.artviper.net/screenshots/screener.php?sdx=1024&amp;sdy=768&amp;w=90&amp;h=68&amp;url='.$address.'" alt="" />';
   Add in front of src=”http://…. an alt=”":
   <img class="thumbnail" alt="thumbnail" src="http:/....
   and change the & in
   screener.php?sdx=1024&sdy=768&w=90&h=68&url='.$address.'"
   at the end there is missing a “/”, add it:
   $address.'" />';

After checking with the validator again there should remain only one error:
Line 28, Column 150: document type does not allow element "input" ...
Until now I didn’t figure out how to fix this error but I’m still search a solution. Maybe you know how to solve it?

Other service to generate thumbnails

Because we just edited the right place in the /templates/bookmarks.tpl.php:
echo '<href="'. $address .'"'. $rel .' ><img class="thumbnail" alt="thumbnail" src="
http://www.artviper.net/screenshots/screener.php?sdx=1024&amp;sdy=768&amp;w=90&amp;h=68&amp;url='.$address.'"></a>';
Here is given the code for generating thumbnails. By default this is artviper.net, if you want to use this service you should notice:

• The service is only free for non-commercial sites and you should add a back-link to artviper.net.
• For commercial projects you can buy a licence here.

From time to time the generation of thumbnails with artviper takes a long time, because of this I tried to find an alternative service.

Websnapr.com

Fast and reliable service, no registration needed, premium-service available.
Disadvantage: There is a watermark “by Websnapr.com” on each thumbnail

M-Software.de

Also for commercial projects free and no registration needed.
Restrictions according content e.g. no pornography.
Disadvantage: Generation of thumbnails needs some time.

Seekxl Snapr.de

Free service, back-link is needed a back-link is not needed. If you are registered (also free) you can set up an custom image if the thumbnail is not generated yet – but than you have to add a back-link to the service.

Mr-Thumb.de

Free, the generation of thumbnails could be faster.

www.webseitentuning.de

Free, unfortunately slowly.

livethumb.de

Free, watermark: “preview by liveThumb” if you don’t link back. Relative fast and reliable.

picoshot.com

Free and fast but sometimes problems to generate the thumbnail from the given site.

www.shrinktheweb.com

Free for 250,000 requests per month, pro-features for some fee. Generell registration needed. Fast and reliable. Anomaly: can not deal with ‘http://’.
Solution:
$n_address = substr($address, 7);
Than call via:
...Url='.$n_address.'

capture.heartrails.com/

If you are able to speak Japanese, this service is maybe something for you.

 
All of this thumbnail-services what to have a back-link or require this explicitly. But I think, this is OK. Nothing is really free. Therefore next we will take a look, where to place this link back to the thumbnail-service.

Maybe you know an other thumbnail-service? Please leave a comment, thanks.

Templates

The different areas of Semantic Scuttle are organized by means of different files. The main of these are:

Head (header): /templates/top.tpl.php

Here you should add some meta-tags.

Foot (footer): /templates/bottom.tpl.php

In the foot you can place the back-link to the thumbnail-service.

“About”-page: /templates/about.tpl.php

Here is a good place to add some information e.g. about your person or / and a disclaimer.

About how to change the style of Semantic Scuttle I will maybe write something later on.

Bug: Renaming Tags

In Semantic Scuttle version 0.89 is a little bug, the renaming of tags is not working. The solution is published by Andreas Glaeser.

Open the file “tagrename.php” and add in line 23 after
"require_once('header.inc.php');" following line:
$tagservice = & ServiceFactory :: getServiceInstance('TagService');
Open the file “/services/tagservice.php” starting in line 69 you find the function “renameTag” add a “return true;”, should look like:
function renameTag($uId, $oldName, $newName) {
$query = 'UPDATE `'. $this->getTableName() .'`';
$query.= ' SET tag="'.$newName.'"';
$query.= ' WHERE tag="'.$oldName.'"';
$query.= ' AND uId="'.$uId.'"';
$this->db->sql_query($query);
return true;
}
Now the renaming of tags should work fine.

This was the second part of the tutorials about Semantic Scuttle. I would very appreciate some feedback if this is helpfully for you. The translation (I’m German) takes unfortunately some time and I’m not sure about its quality. If I get the feeling, that my articles will help others than I will go on and write another article about Semantic Scuttle.

Today this blog had a lot of visitors from all over the world and all want the same … loading a file named: register.php. Strange, there is no file “register” in the blog. Why would over 100 people load this file from here? At the first moment I thought that this is just an other attack against a wordpress-installation but there is no file with this name. Also aunt Google had no clue …
Maybe this is related with Scutte? Since I publish some articles about Scuttle this accesses started and the file-name would also fit. Strange, because you have to visit “My Bookmarks” to reach my Scuttle-Installation and for registration you have to go here.
Update:
Since yesterday I redirect all requests, ending register.php to this entry. In the last 24h there were 386 requests for this file. Could please somebody, who is looking for the file leave a comment what is the meaning of this request? Is this black hat seo? This is boring me …

It seems, that the developer Marcus Campbell (Scuttle) doesn’t have time at the moment to take care about his Firefox Add-on Scuttle.

Therefore I publish here a short instruction how to modify the Add-on to work with Firefox 3.

1. Download the Add-on here
2. Rename the file scuttle-0.3.1-firefox+fl.xpi to scuttle-0.3.1-firefox+fl.zip
3. Extract the zip-file
4. Open the file install.rdf in an editor and search

   <em:maxVersion>2.0.0.*</em:maxVersion>

5. Change the version-number, e.g.:

   <em:maxVersion>3.0.2.*</em:maxVersion>

6. Generate a new Zip-file of the project with the modified file and change extension to .xpi
7. Open the Firefox 3 add-on window and drag and drop this new file

Now you can use this Add-on also in Firefox 3. The Add-on is not very complex, I guess it will do also with further versions of Firefox.

For all, who don’t want to do this modification them self, you can download my modified version: scuttle-0.3.2-firefox+fl.xpi.

Changes against original:

• Version changed to 0.3.2 for better differentiation
• Version will run with Firefox Version: 1.0 – 3.0.*
• I added also a German translation, but there is still also English included

Credits to Marcus Campell for Scuttle.

[Update:]
Since FF 3.5 my modified Version (V 0.3.2) is not working any longer. Therefore you can download the next Version 0.3.3 here, this will work with FF less than version 4.0

Semantic Scuttle is an open source social bookmarking system and a further development from Scuttle. Some well known hosts uses Scuttle, e.g. Alltagz.de.

In this short tutorial I will give a short description how to install Semantic Scuttle.

For the installation you need an account with PHP and MySQL. It seems that there are also other database-systems supported but I didn’t tried to install on a different database than MySQL.

Installation

1. Download Semantic Scuttle form Sourceforge.net, at the moment the latest version is 0.89
2. Extract the Zip-File and upload the files to your web-server
3. Import the file “tables.sql” to your database. With phpMyAdmin this is quite simpel.
4. Rename the file “config.inc.php.example” to “config.inc.php” and open it with your favorite editor.  This file contains all basic information about your system

Settings in “config.inc.php”

Basic Settings

$sitename           = 'SemanticScuttle';

Name of your site, will appear in the header.

$welcomeMessage     = 'Welcome to SemanticScuttle! More than a social
bookmarking tool.';

Welcome-message, will displayed above your bookmarks.

$root               = NULL;

Leave here “NULL” if your installation is not placed in a sub folder, otherwise you should write here the url to your installation e.g. “www.yoursite.xx/subfolder/”.

$locale             = 'en_GB';

Here you can set the language of your installation.

$usecache           = false;

The cache-system, for now we leave “false”.

$dir_cache          = dirname(__FILE__) .'/cache/';

Path to cache, leave the preset value.

$cleanurls          = false;

This is for setting “nice urls”, for now leave it with the default “false”.

Database

$dbtype = 'mysql4';

Choose the type of your database, leave mysql4 for MySQL.

$dbhost = '127.0.0.1';
$dbport = '3306';

For over 99% of all installations the default settings are good.

$dbuser = 'username';
$dbpass = 'password';

Place here the username and password for your database.

$dbname = 'scuttle';

The name of your database.

$tableprefix = 'sc_';

Prefix of the tables in your database. If you imported the file “tables.sql” than leave the default.

User

$adminemail         = 'admin@example.org';

This emails-address is used if a users has lost his password and is requesting a new one.

$admin_users = array('admin');

Until now there is no user but here you should already put in your login-name. If there are more than one admin use:

array(’name1′, ‘name2′, ‘name3′);

$reservedusers      = array('all', 'watchlist');

Which words can not be used for usernames.

Antispam

For registration there is a simple antispam-question.

$antispamQuestion = 'name of this application (no Caps)';

The question, e.g. =’What is 2 plus 3′;

$antispamAnswer = 'semanticscuttle';

The answer, e.g =’5′;

The rest of the file is not important at the moment, we want to have a running system quick.

1. Save the file “config.inc.php” and upload it to your webserver.
2. Browse to your installation. If everything is OK you will see:

Start page of Semantic Scuttle

Register as user

Now you should register yourself as a user. Click on the link “register”.

User-registration

Fill the form and click the button “register”. This will lead you to the startpage logged in as a user.

Start page logged in as user

Add Bookmark

Now we want to add a bookmark to your fresh Sematic Scuttle, click on the link “add a bookmark”.

Add Bookmark

On this page “add bookmark” you find some useful tools. At Bookmarklet there are two useful links for quick bookmarking. Especially the version (Pop-up) I like very much. Drag and drop the link to the toolbar of your browser and you can easily add bookmarks to your Semantic Scuttle.

Popup add Bookmark

At Import you have the ability to import Bookmarks.

Fill the required information in the form, after clicking “Add Bookmark” you be redirected again to the start-page.

Semantic Scuttle with the first bookmark

You saw, it is quite easy to install Semantic Scuttle. In the next days I will write something about further adjustments of Semantic Scuttle.

Since some weeks I’m using now for My Bookmarks the software Semantic Scuttle 0.89, a further development of Scuttle. Actually planned for “Social Bookmarks” it is also useful to organize a collection of “private” Bookmarks. The big advantage is, that you have always access to your bookmarks at any place and with any browser.

Semantic Scuttle 0.89 is already usable but some functions are missing. For example an easy ability to delete unwanted users (spammer) and their bookmarks. At Scuttle Patches Tracker is published a solution for this by Andreas Jaggi. Because some may have problems to realize this modification I made the necessary adaptation. You can download the final result. Please consult for installation the enclosed readme.txt.

Recently I played again a little with the superb program Inkscape. Yesterday I found by accident the excellent video-podcast at heathenx. In Episode 045 – Snapshot Mosaic by Richard Querin you can see how to separate a picture in parts. Here is my first result:

Panorama from the “Zittauer Gebirge”

Actually I should work on the blog-theme (really needed) but when I saw this podcast I immediately had to try this by my own.