Katana Photo Groups

The machine that hosts Katana was forcefully removed from its long appreciated (2 year) home at the Keyes Company’s data center in Miami, FL due to some unfortunate circumstances. However, the opportunity to move the server is good for everyone. It’s now in a professional-grade data center in Sacramento, CA. This means very fast connectivity. I hope you’ll notice and appreciate the responsiveness and speed of the site now.

I’m still working out some kinks, but nothing you’ll really notice. Enjoy!

So it’s been on the “chopping block” for awhile, and I just got around to it (at the request of a site member).  In your Group Editor, there’s a new checkbox (below “Group Password”) called “Hidden”.  When Hidden is checked, the following things happen:

• The group will not be shown in the Latest Updates (this also includes Latest Updates RSS)
• Any photos from that group will not be shown on the Front Page random

I realize some people like to take photos that others may consider offensive, so this is a happy medium.  I also patched in the process to not show photos from Passworded Groups on the Front Page randoms.

I’m not dead yet. Added a new feature for groups of photos that you don’t really want publicized. All you need to do is go into the Group Editor for a particular group of photos, and then add a password. The next time you or any one else attempts to visit it, it will prompt for a password. Your password can be anything except for “********”, yes, 8 asterisks. That’s just due to some internal handling I do. Anyways, to remove a password, just clear the password box and hit update. Easy as cake.

Oh, also fixed a problem with the picture deleter.  If you were unable to delete photos that showed up as “No Picture”, try again now.

I don’t know if you’ve tried using it in the past or not, but it hasn’t been working right.  This past weekend I got pissed off enough at it and it’s finally up and functional again.  Give it a whirl if you haven’t yet.

I know, I know.  I need to make a protected / hidden groups feature, as it’s something that’s been repeatedly asked for.  Right now my PC is dying so I’ve ordered new parts to lay it to rest.  Due to this downtime and personal events, I can’t guarantee any timing other than “by the end of November”.  Cross your fingers.

Another spiffy update, and a long needed one.  Now you can download an entire group of pictures.  I should give you fair warning however: Pictures can be approximately 300-500KB each, so even a group with just 6 photos will be about 3MB.  This means that if you are on dialup, please do not use this feature.  It’s for your own good.

However, if you have high-speed Internet, such as Cable, DSL, or anything else fast, then by all means go for it.  Try it out with this group ( http://www.katanapg.com/group/1749 ) for kicks.

Just because I’m not going to dedicate full efforts dosn’t mean I won’t add stuff if I feel like I should.  Like tonight for instance.  I got fed up with clicking “Next” and “Previous”.  So I made it so that you can just hit the right and left arrow keys on your computer to do it for you.  This works in both the Group and Picture views.  Enjoy.

Just thought I’d give a small update.

I’m more or less feature complete for now.  There’s more stuff I’d like to do, but between work and life I just can’t right now.  I’ll still do bugfixes and support (as I’ve been doing), but all out new features are on hold.

I’ve started a web design firm aimed at churches and other religious organizations that could use facelifts.  It’s eating my spare time at home, as I’m doing this while still working my 9 to 5.  At some point in the future, the firm will take over Katana maintaince, but again, for now it’s on hold.

I noticed that somehow one of our users was mapped as being way out in the middle of the Pacific.  As Katana is only loaded with US Zipcode data right now, this should have been impossible.  I then discovered a truncation issue in the database affecting about 3000 zipcodes.  Everything has been restored, and Nathaniel is now in Washington.

I also got a suggestion to make the picture detail editor bigger.  I can agree that this is a good idea, as I rarely use the thing because it’s so hard to.  I made the picture bigger, gave it bigger fonts, and overall it feels nicer.  I still wish I knew of a faster way to have it load though.

Ok, so I didn’t feel like doing protected groups just yet.

I had some fun today with the Google Maps API and built us a map to show where everyone’s at.  You can view an example of this here.  It’s pretty slick, and yes, I made it work even for those of you with Internet Explorer.

For the technically inclined:
This actually wasn’t as easy as it may look.

• The first step was gathering zipcodes from the userbase. Unfortunately only three people, myself included, have since done this.  It’s a start at least.
• I then set about placing the map object itself on the page.  It loaded and worked fine in Firefox, but IE was complaining.  30m later and I had it working just fine.
• At this point I realized that Google Maps was unable to map points directly from zip codes.  No, it wanted straight-up latitude and longitude.  I had to find this data.
• I eventually found a cryptic datafile on the US Census site that had the pieces of data I wanted and then some.  I spent probably about an hour formatting and filtering this dataset, prior to uploading it into Katana’s database system.  I was then able to generate Lat/Lng from zipcodes.
• Next I had to write an XML interface to provide user’s coordinates.  Click here for the XML gateway I wrote.
• And inbetween all this, many headaches with the actual Javascript code.  It was a pain.

But I hope you enjoy it.  I’m looking forward to seeing it fill in.