Clker.com - weblog

Now you can upload multiple files at ones. Zip all your SVG images in one zip file, and upload the zip file. The upload page will then loop through all SVG files stores inside the zip, and will try to add them.  Upload limit is still 2MBytes.

Technorati Tags: clker.com,   svg, clipart, upload

I’ve been recently working on the website theme, colors both on the weblog side and the main website’s side. I believe it looks much nicer and less crowded this way. I will be synchronizing the style sheet of Wordpress and the website’s main part so that visitors and users won’t feel they’ve moved into a different place.

I also added a privacy policy page, still have to link that to the footer of the blog. Sometimes, after commits and updates some functionalities are broken. I will be checking and testing around the website to make sure everything still works. You can leave a comment here if you face.

I’ve been experimenting spatial image querying lately. Hopefully, below every image spatially similar ones will be showing soon regardless whether they were tagged or no. There’s a lot of work involved here, and hopefully I will roll out soon at least some experimental version to see how users react to it.

Technorati Tags: website, theme, wordpress, update, colors

The web server has been shutting down by itself for the past week. I tried looking at the logs to figure out why I come to my office and I find it turned off. It looks like there’s a hardware problem causing the server to shutdown suddenly.

Luckily, I didn’t get any database corruptions - not until now. I changed the power supply and testing to see the results. In my experience almost 90% of the time it is a power supply problem especially that I’m loading the server with an extra useless PATA hard drive just to make GRUB happy.

Technorati Tags: grub, hardware, failures, clker, clker.com, power supply

Finally, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s 4:21 AM and I’m very happy to reach this stage with the openoffice addon.

You can download it Openoffice.org addon for clker.com integration . Installation is very easy, from the tools menu in openoffice, select Extension Manager. Click add, and point to the file. You will need to restart openoffice for it to work.

This extension will show you the contents of your basket stored on clker, and will allow you to place any clipart image in the clipboard, then you can paste it in the correct place in your document.

Still there are some minor issues:

1. The addon parent is currently null, so an extra window will appear in the task bar
2. The way we place the picture in the clipboard is by loading it in draw, select all and copy then closing draw. There are better ways for doing this. You will notice that the screen will flicker especially if your using the ODG or the SVG formats since draw takes some time to render the vectors.

In case you wanted to play with the source, the addon source is here.

Technorati Tags: addon, uno, openoffice, gallery, clipart, online, clker

Many things happened over the thanksgiving weekend. First there’s a lot of work done in reading the svg metadata, parsing and using it. Now, all the tags inside the svg files are used as tags for the images. Also, the title of the clipart page first is obtained from the svg metadata. If the svg metadata did not have a title, then we make up a title from the original svg filename.

Over the search bar a bread crumb is now visible that shows where the user is, and how he is opening the tags and relative tags. Under the search bar, the most prominent tags are shown. This helps the user to fine tune his search.

Technorati Tags: clipart, clip, art, images, files, tags, tagging, svg, meta, data, metadata, title, keywords, search

One of the SVG pictures that had troubles is the powered by Ubuntu logo. In an earlier post I described that I’m doing some SVG cleanup, and still to expect more cleanup in the future. One of the images that I was looking forward to is the powered by Ubuntu logo. So I’m up to some coloring for this night ! I will try to make a unified theme for both the website part, and the wordpress weblog part, and of course will incorporate the powered by Ubuntu logo, since this server is actually powered by Ubuntu.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, powered, powered by ubuntu, server, webserver, apache, wordpress, theme, css, style

More cleanup since yesterday. I found that some SVGs have bogus linked images, which makes inkscape show a big red cross saying “linked image not found”. I added a pre-filtering stage before the thumbnails are created in which the SVG is cleaned up. In that process, bogus image insertions are deleted, and non-ASCII characters are replaced by spaces. This is another issue that appeared with non us-english files. I found that there are characters over 127, but the XML file is assumed to be ascii, which again makes inkscape and other programs I’m using throw errors.

I ran the thumbnail regeneration script and lots of images are getting cleaned up. There are still some problems with ODG export, and little by little I’ll get all of the problems taken care of.

Technorati Tags: inkscape, odg, clipart, openoffice, openoffice.org, openclipart, openclipart.org, svg, png, export, cleanup, clean, up