Clker.com - weblog

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

I’ve been working since yesterday on an addon to openoffice.org , which will directly insert images from clker.com . The way it works is by searching for the images you want, adding them to my basket , then going to openoffice.org and hitting the addon button.

Just from few minutes I got the basic idea to work, and the addon is accessing the contents of the basket. I would now give the openoffice.org team a super thumbs up on the UNO implementation and the way it is designed - also to the netbeans team.

I’ve been out all day today, eating almost at every stop turkey, stuffing plus driving for more than three hours from Germantown to Ocean City - yet I’m so excited about this addon and still working on it. I’ll see how much longer I will last before collapsing :)…..

Watch the website after thanksgiving for the release of the addon - I’ll do my best to get it out by Monday if not before.

Technorati Tags: openoffice, open, office, org, addon, clipart, clker, turkey, thanksgiving, stuffing, ocean city, germantown

Human beings are visual creatures. Pictures and eye sight is the second important way by which humans learn after hearing. Adding pictures related to your post will help visitors get your point. Exactly like adding pictures in a presentation, which help people understand the description made by the presenter.

Adding pictures to your weblog post will also help attract attention to your article, and increase the time your visitors stay. Pictures breaks the boring lengthy text of an article and gives the reader a break in the middle.

An important factor is then how easy is it to a) find a picture ad b) add it to your weblog?

Clker.com offers a huge collection of high quality cliparts. All cliparts are tagged with relevant words making it very easy to search and find the exact picture you’re looking for. You can directly copy the HTML code and paste it in your weblog’s page. All pictures can be easily embedded in any HTML source.

By default, all pictures are floated to the left making the text wrap around it without wasting your weblog space. You can manually remove the float and allow the picture to occupy a full horizontal area as shown above.

Technorati Tags: blog, clipart, cliparts, clker, Embed, find, HTML, pictures, search, weblog, wordpress