datensal.at

To present pictures in my photoblog I sometimes just cut a certain section out of the original picture. In detail it means that I create a completely new picture with a different size using The GIMP. The bad thing: EXIF data isn't copied doing that kind of manipulation (of course!).
Since I'm really interested in the camera settings people used to take certain pictures I definetly wanna have a look at the EXIF data. To transfer this data from the original picture to the newly created one GIMP doesn't offer the needed functionality. But there's hope - it's called jhead, an EXIF jpeg header manipulation tool which is available for all popular platforms like Linux, FreeBSD, OS X and Windows. The debian repositories offer a package as well.
To transfer the EXIF data this simple command line does the job: There's even a special command for batch operations. This would be where the parameter &i substitutes the original filename for this name.
Of course this operation invalidates the EXIF size values of the picture but that's not the point in most cases anyway.

Finally I started my own photoblog at gelbersprudel.de after having found this neat software named "pixelpost".
I'm gonna publish the best shots I took over a longer period. I still consider myself as a bloody beginner concerning photography so I'm looking forward to constructive criticism. Check it out every once in a while. :)

It's done! My weblog is completely ported to the new blog software.
Under the hood a minimalistic lightning-fast python script with the tongue twisting name Kukkaisvoima is doing a fantastic job now.
While my former choice Drupal came with about 500 files in the default installation Kukkaisvoima consists of just one file. Yes right.. just ONE! And believe me, it isn't packed with 2 millions lines of code (roughly 1000 lines after my modifications!). I wasn't happy with Drupal anymore since it usually took a whole while until some html code was rendered in the browser. It just felt too sluggish for a simple weblog like mine. Though Wordpress wasn't an option in my opinion. Since everybody uses it the effort put into hacking that software is humongous and I already did my experiences concerning hacked root servers misused as bot drones.
I'm happy with the new minimalism so I'm writing this article in my favorite text editor Kate saving it as a simple text file and uploading it to the scripts data directory. Done! No database, no HTML form editor.
Anyway, the original software was a little too minimalistic for my taste. So I modified the python sourcecode to make it meet my demands. I wanted to have the opportunity to create static sites that don't show up in the article and category list. In addition to that I tried to port the beautiful Wordpress Theme Misty Look which worked not that bad. Though I had to modify the script again since functionality and layout isn't seperated that well. Not even talking of the CSS work that had to be done (I kinda hate that). After some code cosmetics I'm gonna publish the modified source code and the Misty Look Stylesheet file on this site. So be patient.

Oh, and as you may have figured out at this point I'm partly writing english from now on. Similar to my decision to micro-blog bilingual I'm gonna do that here as well. Germany-related topics are still gonna be posted in german though as well as some more complex ones that are just too tough (for me) to translate into english.