New version of Keg2Smug

I recently discovered that Keg2Smug was broken. Technically, that’s not true - an astute user had emailed me a few months ago to notify me it was broken, but I didn’t get around to debugging it until this past weekend.

As it turns out, a couple of things needed fixing. First, Kodak changed their login system, so a certain cookie needed to be passed on the login call as a HTTP header instead of a query string parameter. Following the login, the login key needs to be passed in an HTTP header as well instead of a query string param.

Once I fixed this, I realised that the smugmug.images.uploadFromUrl trick was not going to work any more. Previously, Keg2Smug ‘cheated’ by giving the pre-authorized link to the high resolution picture to Smugmug’s servers, causing Smugmug’s servers to download the high-resolution picture from KodakGallery’s servers. This was the most optimal way to make the transfer, since these servers sit on very fat internet connections, and typically have a lot of available bandwidth (atleast in comparison to my piddly 512kbps DSL upload speed). However, since Kodak now requires the authentication information to be sent as a cookie on every request, this trick was not going to work any more. So I had to fix Keg2Smug to download the high-resolution pictures from Kodak first, before uploading them to Smugmug.

The updated version of Keg2Smug can be download from http://del.icious.info/software/keg2smug. Please feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions, or encounter any issues.

Communicating effectively on your website

Steven Snell over at SmashingMagazine has written a great article on effective website communication. The basic points I took away are:

1. Know who your target audience is.
2. Know your message. If you can’t express your message, your website visitors are not going to get it.
3. Ensure your message is being communicated very clearly.
4. If necessary, ensure that your message is actionable.
5. Keep it simple and relevant. An attractive website should never get in the way of communication.

The entire article is worth a read - it goes into detail on the above points. SmashingMagazine in general seems to have great stuff.

Hello world!

Ok, time to give this blogging thing one more try. This time around, I’m going to focus on building scaleable distributed applications, as well as my experiments with Ruby & Rails.

This blog is hosted at Dreamhost (I took advantage of their 1 year@$9.94 offer). So far, it’s been pretty painless getting things to work. I did consider Site5 for their Ruby emphasis, but you can’t beat the $9.94 price.

My upgrade path, should I stick with this, will probably be a VPS, followed by a colo.