It’s me…

Neurotic, vitriolic, nefarious.

… it’s me?

The perception of myself by other people, has always been a mystery for me.

In the last years I spent a lot of time to comprehend other people.
First, I did it with the persons near me, like schoolmates or neighbors.
After that I started to do so in huge virtual communities, and chat rooms.
At the end I approached to mass-multi-player games and I nearly found what I was searching for.

In my life, in this way, I had known a lot of persons, trying to comprehend them and -doing this- I was often observed by them.

That was never been a problem for me, cause in every relation I was always ready to vanish, in the same way I was previously appeared.
The problem is that, often, people get pissed off of that game if I pass too much time with them.
And if people get closer…
… I get crazy.

Sometimes I think that I should always give less about myself to other people…
… cause when you do, in that precise instant, they think to know you better.
It’s odd, that a prologue made from Giorgio Gaber explains this in a funny way: Il Coniglio

Masks, terrible behaviours, hate acts, fouling presence.
People still prowls around me and often hurts me with their words made of glass.

Do you want to know the truth? The truth is that I’m still searching the truth.
That research is very tough, and every piece of energy that I waste in this moment, risk to compromise everything I worked so hard in this years.

I cannot allow anyone to interfere with my objectives.
I can trust no-one, cause everyone have always betrayed me.
I want that no-one pretends to understand me.
I am alone. Just leave me alone.

Giorgio Gaber is an italian singer-songwriter that meant a lot in the Italian musical scene, from the 70′ to the day he died, in 2003.

I could write for hours about him… but honestly, I think that the only way to approach to him is to listen it’s songs and understand them.
If you just need basic informations, you can use wikipedia.

What I will try to do here is to translate some of his songs, cause he’s my favourite artist and I really owe him a lot.

Giorgio Gaber passed his entire life of artist to analyse the human being, the society, and it’s inner workings.

The result, in 30 years of music, is a struggle union of politics and emotions, a perfect-like-a-clockwork description of the human life, from the most physical necessities, to the higher elan vital.

As I always said, understanding the meaning of his songs fasten the process nedeed to understand the meaning of life itself, cause he was really ahead in that objective.

Also, it hurts a lot, forcing the listener to call himself into question in a critical way.
But… “per crescere davvero… bisogna spesso andarsene lontano, e ridere di noi come da un aeroplano”
That means… “to really grow up… we often have to go far, and laught of us like from an airplane”

This is the first part of a review about my Nikon Coolpix P5100… after 3 weeks of use.

As I already wrote, the first approach wasn’t good because it’s really different from my previous camera.
However, I can say it’s a lot better in everything, except the macro function (I will talk about that later).

The camera is small, so it can be considered a “portable” camera…
… so after some inital doubts (it’s not something you can lost and buy every month) now I bring it with me every day.

I started to experiment, first of all, every automatic function.
The scenes (the classical sunset, landscape, and so on) works great and are a good way to be “almost sure” you will not burn a good occasion to do a nice photo.

I was surprised more than everything else by the potrait and night potrait functions, that target faces automagically and follow them if the person moves.
The result is very good.

Of course, the semi-manual modes are the top feature of this camera.

I call them semi-manual cause there is no way to play with the focus, and that for me is really a great loss.
Probably, that is normal for a bridge camera… but from the best Nikon bridge camera I expected something more.
So there are only the most common three ways of using the focus:

• Automatic (infrared or yellow-light pointer)
• Macro (for very-near targets)
• Infinite (for landscapes or outdoors)

That of course means that you can’t do immediate photos (snapshots) cause the camera has to focus the target before you can do the shot.
That is an example:

Of course with some hacking you can… :

1. pre-focus another object that is at the same distance of the real target, keeping the “soft shot” button pressed
2. turn the camera against the real target
3. do the photo instantly just pressing harder the shot button

That can be done also with the flash removing the “red-eye” function.
This is another example:

I have still few photos of the same objects, to compare the two cameras …
… and I don’t think I will do more, cause the cost of Coolpix P5100 is nearly the double of the Digimax i6, so there can not be comparison between them.
However two of them are these:

There is clear that the new camera is a lot better than the old one.
Unfortunately the swans was not in the scene in the second photo, that was done two weeks after the first in the same hour.

In the next review I will:

• Compare the macro function that is the only thing I miss from my old Samsung Diximax i6 (I have to decide if sell it or not!)
  I will of course upload examples.
• do a list of the “pros and cons” of this amazing camera.

I want to write something more than the last time about WordPress.
I also hope that in the future I will muse on more about publishing an article with so much hurry.
It’s not easy to use an instrument like this one, the faster it is, the less you can think when you use it.
That’s confusing, cause if blogging software is revolutioning the world making always more people settle on the web, it also make them produce more shit.
I have to think about it.

When I started to use WordPress, I was searching for a powerful blogging platform, easy to edit and customize, but also well developed.

At the beginning, I was dubious about WordPress… cause it seemed to me more a game than a blogging platform.
The platform itself was very basic, but a lot of people was using it, so I tryed to hold on and I looked it’s code.

The first feeling was friendly. I have always developed with php in that way, using a lot of inclusions to abstract up things… changing the behaviour of a page just including from a different source.
Also, the attempt to define a standard, the WordPress… functions and tags, was so appreciable.

So, I googled for”WordPress Themes” and also for “WordPress Plugins“, and a world opened in front of me.
A huge amount of websites, with a huge amount of code.

A Revolution, in the world of blogging.
It needed an in-depth examination.

First I tryed some plugins, amazing for me they was Plug & Play just like the hardware, and that their use don’t involve any change in the platform itself, at all.
I have also appreciated that a lot of official plugin exists, demonstrating that the WordPress stuff wanted originally a light and basic platform to spread in the web, and that everyone can download the extras he wants/needs.
That was encouraging.

Then, I tryed some themes. Amazing. A click, and go.
That is not really unusual in the world of the web platforms, but in WordPress you don’t change just a style or a template… you change everything.
Coding with WordPress is like doing a website with a more powerful version of php, able to fetch posts, pages, display their links and navigation gadgets with just a row of code.

Also, the tags makes it very easy to extract sensible data from the posts/pages, making it possible to do a cross-blog theme in few minutes.

And that, is what I did. Yes… not really in few minutes… but everything needs it’s time, if you want to do it well.

Definitive solutions are rare in a world that change every day like the world of Web Developement.
However, to do a website like this, to publish my thoughts, my photos; to create something that people can see with any kind of additional intervent by me, a solid base is important.
Publishing of images is also very important for me, cause manage thousands of photos is hard, and also, once their online you always want to be sure that they are viewable and that the way you use to reference (so show) them in the posts will never change.

Infact, my idea of weblog is not limited to “post articles and upload photos” but also to put that all togheter.

A post with some images inside it, will tempt the reader to see other images, and also an image can express things often a lot better than words.

In this sense, my choice of image publishing web-platform was very hard, cause the two most popular plugins that do this on WordPress seems really similar but are a lot different.

This plugins are, of course, WPG2 and NextGEN Gallery.

After a forum discussion I did in both the sides, I found in Alex Rabe the developer of NextGEN Gallery a better developer to work with.
Friendly, Avaiable, and also similar to me.
We share the same motto, “learning by doing”, and we both like photography.

So, if you’re deciding wich plugin to use between WPG2 and NextGEN Gallery, and you googled here, consider reading this “pros and cons“ before doing your choice:

1. WPG2 is a plugin that, installed on WordPress like any other plugin, will allow you do publish your photos.
   But how?
   In realty, every WPG2 tab is functional to itself, and will help you to understand what of your webhosting and/or Gallery2 is missing.
   Infact, you will have also to install Gallery2 to make it work.
   Also, it’s hard to understand how pass from the installation part to the “view my photos inside the blog” part.
2. NextGEN Gallery creates, when you install it, some addictional well-structured tables to contain your photos.
   The tabs are intuitive and will make you use the plugin without reading any documentation, exactly how you did with WordPress the first time you used it.
3. Gallery2 is really a strong and advanced platform to publish pictures and videos, but are you sure you really need thousands of php scripts to do what you need?
   A Gallery2 “WordPress installation” don’t exist, for WPG2 the typical installation is required, and I spent two hours just to upload the 3000+ files it consists of.
   Also, every time you will open your wordpress page that huge amount of scripts will be loaded, just to extract a picture.
   Infact you will not just use WPG2 as backend to handle your photos, and WordPress frontend to show them, they will run toghether.
4. WPG2 is not a plugin to include Gallery2 inside WordPress, but a plugin to include WordPress inside Gallery2.
   You will need a Gallery2 theme compatible with WordPress , and developing your will be so hard cause there is a lot of code to be included in the pages.
5. NextGEN Gallery is transparent, you will just need to include a [ gallery=5 ] tag in your pages and the gallery will appear, a [ singlepicture=400 ] and your picture will appear.
   Light, simple. Like WordPress.

In the future, I hope to help Alex Rabe in the improvement and developement of this wonderful plugin.

By now, I have only done a plugin for it to display random and recent albums, that I’m using in my website in this page.

NextGEN Gallery is the plugin I’m using for this website.
An image publishing plugin for NextGEN Gallery done by image publishers.

I want to thank all my readers …

This weekend, more precisely sunday, I reached the peak of visitors, with the number of 75.
That is so important for me, and I’m happy that my photos was viewed by a high % of them.

Now this website’s structure/code is nearly finished, (at least is usable), so I will concentrate only on my photos, the publication of other articles about useful things, and on my other projects.

Other projects “on the stocks” are:

• a collaboration with Alex Rabe, developer of the NextGEN Gallery to improve his plugin.
• a change of this theme’s xhtml generator, to make the html code compatible with the SandBox theme.
• the publication of this theme, hoping to get in that way some visibility.

In the meantime, thanks to everybody.

My second article in this section wants to give thanks to all the persons that have written the free plugins for WordPress I’m using.

• Fist of all, I want to thank NextGEN Gallery written by Alex Rabe.
  I post-dedicated an entire article to it’s wonderful plugin, cause I’m also helping him with some improvements to the code.

Other plugins I’m using are:

• Akismet, an amazing anti-spam plugin for WordPress.
  It have already captured more than 2 thousands spam comments inside my blog, and the number is growing fast.
• Top Level Categories, a very useful plugin that allowed me to remove the prefix “category” from the URL of my blog.
  With that I managed to make an interesting stucture for my blog that is divided into sections, that are organized both with pages and categories with the same section URL.
  This will also be the primary feature of my theme whom I dedicated a separate post.
• WordPress Database Backup, that is sending at my gmail account the backup of my database every week.
  That makes me feel safer. Thank you.
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator, that is creating a very nice Sitemap of my website’s structure.
• My Category Order, a very nice plugin to order the categories of WordPress.
  Why don’t you do a “page” version? The ShiftThis | Order Pages plugin sucks.
• Broken Link Checker, that is so useful to check the links in all the posts/pages of a WordPress website.
  

I love this website.
I worked on it very hard.

I used WordPress to do it, and I customized it doing myself the theme and installing a lot of plugins that I will describe elsewere.

One day I will publish this theme, but not now.
It is not finished yet… and I have to change a lot of things (like I did today with the menu) to allow people to use it with any content.

For now, I just want to relax and use it, cause I need to write and publish my photos.

The first post I want to do in the Web Developement section is about WordPress.

WordPress is really an amazing blogging platform.
If someone asks me “I have to do a website… can you give me some tips?”
WordPress is my answer.

In the past I have always done websites with notepad from the beginning to the end, passing through the “database fight” and the “styling match”.
WordPress, makes things easyer for everyone.

First of all, it puts down a standard, and I like standards.
A standard of data-structure, a standard of website administration and managament, a standard of blogging.

And standards are useful, cause happy coding brings clean code, and like they say theirselves, “code is poetry”.

I fought a lot with WordPress in these weeks, but at the end, I get in touch with it.

I don’t want to do technical articles about WordPress, cause honestly there is a lot of people that know it better than me.
This is just a post to say them “thank you”, I hope that one day I will be able to give back something of what you gave to me.

If you need further informations about WordPress, a good website to get started, is it’s website: wordpress.org