Monthly Archives: January 2010

Full Frame Photography Portfolio Launched

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A week or so ago, I saw that Scott Kelby had launched a new portfolio with a full screen flash gallery. I thought it looked pretty sweet, but I wanted to have a go at getting a similar, but not the same look using Javascript, not Flash. I think it turned out pretty well. You can see the portfolio here. The Javascript works pretty well. You can’t however take over the entire screen, but the images will fill the browser.

I intend to detail how it works, and provide something for you to download if you want to use it, but that will have to wait a day or two. Check back, I will share.

Upgrading WordPress and MySql on 1and1

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Upgrading WordPress is trivial now. I wanted to upgrade from 2.8 to 2.9, so I went to my dashboard and pressed the “Please update now” link. I got a few warnings, a message to make sure I did a backup first, and then finally a button I could press to do the upgrade.

Only it didn’t work. WordPress 2.9 needs MySql 5.0 or higher. Crap. I had a 4.something MySql version. I went to the 1and1 control panel. No way to upgrade. No way migrate. S.O.L. When I had created my blog and the database for it, which didn’t seem like all that long ago, the default on 1and1 was to create a 4.x database. Now I was in trouble.

Hey, no problem I thought. I was told to do a backup before the upgrade, and I had done that. I used the phpMyAdmin tool to do the backup, I could do a restore to a new 5.x table the same way, right? Not exactly. I had a LOT of data in my database. 1and1 will only let you import 2meg. I had 4 times that. I needed to reduce some data.

I know, compression! First I tried to do the data dump with zip compression. Then I found out that the import tool didn’t support it. Sheesh. Then I tried the gzip compression. For me, this resulted in exactly the same file size. This wasn’t working at all. I just need to get rid of some data. Continue reading →