Resurrection

January 23rd, 2009 Chris

Christmas is over - with the lowest seasonal sales in my brief history (6 years). And now I’m turning to finally getting some closure on a first release of Indie. Luckily the weather here has been cool and sitting in front of the computer isn’t as draining as last summer. I’m trying to get back into the groove. There are a few bugs to fix but the main thing is testing under IE. Did I mention that? Yes, probably but cross browser fixups are my least favourite work. Just posting to say - hopefully with a new push I can get this open for fun and games soon.

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Bogged Down and Sputtering

October 6th, 2008 Chris

Well, as anyone following this can surely tell I haven’t done anything for a few weeks. The beta version of the site is up but not yet open. It works but needs more fiddling to be ready for the beta cycle. I have been busy for a while with other projects and now it seems next week I’m moving to a new apartment. That will keep me tied up with packing and arranging things for another while yet.

It’s still in my plans to get the remaining details wrapped up ready for an opening of sorts. The main issues left are getting IE 6 & 7 working properly. I think there are a number of problems there. Someone told me the forum part doesn’t work on IE 6. So I need to find the time to sit down for a day and work through these things. Then I’ll wipe the database clean and upload a bunch of my images for the beta opening. I’ll have to make it clear to people that I’m not wanting them to upload images “like mine” but hopefully images “much better” than mine. It has to start somewhere.

I haven’t had any comments or contact from any viewers or other interested in this project. As a result it’s more or less dropped in priority. This is selling season on ebay and I have been working on expanding that lately. For sure, if you’ve been waiting for this great new art photo site to open then please do let me know. Otherwise I’m inclined to think no one cares anyway.

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Server Hassles

September 6th, 2008 Chris

My second server is up now. I wasted a couple days dealing with firewall issues. Usually I can just install my firewall and it works. This time though it seems the hosting company missed some needed kernel modules and I had to wait for them to get those in place. But after that it still wouldn’t work. Or at least the firewall started but it wouldn’t block anything. So after much dicking around (and the support staff giving up) I removed it all and started fresh with my own version. It works now but is not as sophisticated as my usual implementation. La dee da.

The two test sites are running - USA and UK. I have been testing things and fiddling some details of the backend stuff. There is a bunch of test images up but they are not authorized so I’m not yet ready to open access to the public. Photographers would have a tizzy-fit if I published images without rights. I’ll have to remove all images and then upload some of my own (rather boring) images for the initial beta test and hope that great photographers fill the void quickly. Also have a heap of junk forum posts to dump too. That should all be easy though.

The main thing I’ve been working on the last couple days is getting geo-located DNS working. This is a variant of DNS that will route users to the node that is closest for them with the idea that it should also be the fastest one. There aren’t any DNS servers out there that offer this cheaply (hmmm, there’s a another idea) so I’m providing my own support for this. At first I was patching PowerDNS to do geo-routing but that has turned out to be insufficient and just trying to build the latest svn code has now become an impasse. So I have turned to my old trusty TinyDns (djbdns). This is a very small light-memory DNS server that has no geo support. I’ve created my own patch for this to give me the type of geo-location I want. Ok, so this is working now and I’m just about to build it on the live servers and test it there.

Also over the last while I re-vamped the login/password flow to be using secure SSL. That’s a good thing even if not critical for now. It’ wasn’t so easy though as I’m using heavy ajax and the browser security model doesn’t allow posting ssl in the background. I have got a decent workaround going and now I have to go buy an ssl certificate so that security messages aren’t popping up every time users login.

Step by step. After these details are in place I need to complete some back end routing between the two servers and then the BETA opening email will go out and hoards of eager photographers can rush in to test everything. In my dreams. But I do see a couple people checking my blog each day so I know one or two of you are patiently waiting.

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Feature Freeze

August 30th, 2008 Chris

I’ve now decided to freeze features for a short while as I work on server issues. Not that everything is done but I want to get this out in front of the beta testers. There will be time to add more features after. After a bunch of traceroute testing I’ve decided that I want to set up a second server node in Europe and handle most static content myself through those nodes. I’ll still have S3 for redundancy and in case there are surges in activity it will be easy to bring them online. I’ve also tested out a CDN startup called SimpleCDN.com. First results with them are not too encouraging though. They’re cheap and probably good for offloading bandwidth when needed but from what I’ve seen so far they don’t serve content any faster for geographic localities than just pulling from my own server. I’m in Asia and the times look like they’re pulling from USA. The same in Europe - rtt of 100mS or more. They’ll be just another standby for now and since they operate as a caching proxy they’re very easy to bring online in minutes by just changing the DNS entries.

The real big issue for today is choosing a hosting company in Europe. I’ll rent a fairly small VPS server to start and I’ll expand it as demand warrants. I’ve looked at HostEurope.de, which seems very well connected for Germany, and welome2inter.net, also in Germany. The problem for me is that I don’t speak German and so problems may be hard to get help with. So I’m leaning towards a site in the UK now. The difference in traceroute times between UK and Germany for Eastern Europe (an area ripe with awesome photographers I want to bring on board) is about 25-30 mS. That’s not too bad and i don’t think will hurt page loads. Compare this to a minimum of about 120 mS extra to route to USA and you see even having a server in the UK gives a good boost to European users.

Work for next few days: set up another Nginx node in UK that will be slave (mysql) with the current one in USA as master. This configuration should provide redundancy as well allowing for one server to go down and things to still work. The UK server will have to proxy POST updates to the USA (which then replicates data back to the UK) but since updating data is expected to be a very small part of overall activity this should work out quite well.

I doubt all this will happen for September 1 - but maybe.

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Discussion Forums

August 27th, 2008 Chris

So the forums are mostly working now. I’m pretty happy with how they look. There is still a few items on my list to get done before a beta. I need to do the “edit” function for posts (probably with a time limit). And I haven’t done the Add Topic function yet. I currently only have one “bbcode” format for quoting text and even it’s a bit limited. I will need to enhance this fairly soon.

Right now my attention has turned to some mechanisms for handling search engines and permalinks. Remember, this site is all ajax based so there is a lot of javascript and most content is built on the fly. So creating a backbone permalink type system behind this is going to be the only way to get content properly indexed. There’s always more to do on my list. I’m past the one month mark now for coding and I’d really hoped to keep it within that time frame. My goal now is to have a beta opening for September 1st. That’s a nice round date to target. And even though so much is done I’m sure it will fill my time trying to get remaining details ready. Step by step though.

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One Smooth Server

August 25th, 2008 Chris

Nginx
I’ve been using Apache for years and have become quite familiar with keeping it going. But it’s always been a memory hog on small installs. I’m running my few sites on a small VPS (based on Virtuozzo) and have been for about 8 months. Before that I had a dedicated box but as things progressed on that project it became obvious that I was over spending and so I downgraded.

As a result I’m running with a 128MB memory limit. Under Apache this truly can be limiting. Paired up with PHP and MySql they are consuming every last byte and sometimes red lining during the daily backups I’ve set up. In fact every day at 4pm when the backup started the resources indicator in Virtuozzo would flag an alert. So I decided to explore some of the alternatives better suited for low-resource environments.

A few days ago I moved my sites over to Nginx (a small footprint open-source Russian server project by Igor Sysoev). That’s pronounced Engine X. Apparently this little dynamo is now serving between 1%-4% of the websites worldwide. I think that’s pretty amazing for something that was unknown a few years ago. Anyway, I built the source and worked on the config initially at home here for testing Indie and then moved it onto the “real” server and got the sites migrated. That went fairly smoothly - the main issue being translating a few “rewrite rules” I use from Apache code to Nginx code. Not so hard, and in a few hours I had everything going fairly smoothly on the new engine.

Now, the nice thing is that resource use plummeted on my VPS. From typically 100-128MB memory use down to 30-40MB total. Nginx itself is using only about 1-2MB but PHP stills drags in the kitchen sink and does the dishes with around another 20MB. That’s all ok as the real payoff is that Nginx is going to be much better for serving small static files like thumbnail images, and that’s likely the large part of the data I expect to be serving for Indie. They claim that a single server has handled 50,000 simultaneous connections under Nginx. I’m willing to bet that must be one real fast server.

Oh, and after several days of running, no issues, and no more resource alerts when my backups run. Cool. I think there’s something ironic about running Russian server software too.

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Moving Along - Forums Ho!

August 25th, 2008 Chris

Well, I’ve been busy this weekend. Users can now post stars and comments and also start image specific discussions. And I’m part way through the forums page now. I have the top level topics menu working and have set up some initial topics to get going. It will be good to get feedback later on final topics for the live system but these ones let me work and build out the system. Next up is the actual posts listing and a recent activity “block” for the main page. That will bring me to “beta ready” state. I’ll probably play with it for a few days first but it should be coming up soon now.

I know, I keep saying that… get your best images ready coz’ we’re going to need a lot of them to make this great experiment get off the ground.

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The Road to Success

August 20th, 2008 Chris

I think it’s pretty clear that with a site like this success in the long term depends on getting great photos listed early on so that it will gain a reputation for great work and attract more of the same. In pursuing this I’m thinking early on to invite photographers that have great work to come join up and receive a special upload holiday. Maybe something like one month free uploads or perhaps some number like 100 free instead of just 20. I’d be interested in feedback on this idea. It sounds like a good way to jump start things and get the photo library up to the thousands quickly. After all, a site with only a few photos is not going to attract much attention.

I’d also be very interested in building a list of ‘recommended’ photographers with contact emails so that I can add them to an invitation mailing list and offer them such a deal. I’d probably limit it initially to the first 100 that look suitable. That’s 100 photogs x 100 images = 10,000 images which would be a good startup target. Of course, some may not join and so I should be ready to woo more. I just figure no matter how pretty the site, and how fast or great it works, without the photos it’s not going to succeed. If you have names/contact/websites - please do let me know with an email to invite@indiephotographer.com. Thanks.

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IE 6 & 7

August 18th, 2008 Chris

Today I spent about 12 hours on fixing issues with IE 7 layout and javascript differences. This is dreaded by most web developers as it’s always so frustrating. I was somewhat happy IE 7 worked better than I thought and in the process I fixed issues that helped old number 6 too. Though I have a list of a dozen issues in IE 6, and still a few outstanding for 7 too. Some items just disappear due to z-index bugs in IE. I have to coax them back to the land of the living. So far I haven’t had to use any browser specific hacks or style sheets. As for versions before 6 - forget it buddy, hacking for 2 non-compliant versions is enough. I wouldn’t bother except most of the world is using them still - kinda makes it an issue. By the time this thing rolls out I think it’ll look ok on IE. I didn’t think that yesterday.

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Progress Continues

August 17th, 2008 Chris

I haven’t updated for a while but I am still working away on this. What’s new? The image details editing is just done and I’m testing that now. During upload it will extract exif info and pre-fill your image details. Then you can edit the image info to adjust and add any more details you want. Member details are also working but I have a few more settings I want to add to that - like email notification preferences. The main page and all the thumbnail galleries are working. You can select sort order by Date, Score, Member, and Random. I’ll add more options as I go onwards.

New sign-ups, login, session management, and several info type pages are all go. The main part that is not functional at this point is the stars awarding and tracking, comments and discussion forums. I’ll be getting on with that in the next few days though. Then we’ll see a first beta.

I’ve also been doing a bunch of testing with the Nginx web server. My test system is running on this now and it’s working wonderfully. So I expect to be migrating my live server over this week and by the time Indie goes live it will be running on Nginx too. This web server program is light in memory use and fast. I love it. Good things are coming.

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