Photonic Gallery Plugin

Following the transition of Flickr’s ownership to Smugmug and the demise of their 1TB storage tier which was mentioned here, a decision was made to switch services to 500px and also Google Photos. 500px is alike to Flickr as both are social media websites for the photographers community, while Google Photos offers unlimited storage at the expense of compressed images and inferior image quality.

Truth be told, the differences are supposedly indistinguishable to the eye unless you pixel peep both copies side by side, which deviates from the spirit of photography. A well composed photo with a story to tell, taken with a 8MP compact camera triumphs over a over-exposed photo of a misfocused wall taken with a medium format camera.  

Search for a Google Photos Plugin

Typically, a plugin is used to display images which is already curated and organised into albums. With Flickr, there were multiple options which could leverage on Flickr’s sharing APIs for a fuss free method to display images.

In the case of Google Photos, my initial approach was to manually curate selected photos from within an album and insert them into the blog posts via their linked URL. This method seemed to work, till it didn’t. Upon further digging, the URLs appear to have a shelf life and cease to be valid after a certain period of time. Thus, hot linking to the fixed URL leads to a 404. Thus, I abandoned the idea of further expanding the Gallery page seeing no further feasible workaround or alternative except for switching back to Flickr and forking out for a permanent PRO account.

Photonic, Jetpack & Google Photos Gallery with Shortcodes

While I was in the process of fixing the incompatibilities and bugs arising from the porting process for the blog, I came across the Gallery page once again. That sparked this fateful search journey for a worthy plugin once again.

From the 3 top choices available, Jetpack was the first to be struck out since Jetpack was the plugin which was causing the “DDOS” attacks from within my site. Such a pity, since Jetpack is the best option on paper amongst the 3 plugins. Google Photos Gallery with Shortcodes looked promising, but didn’t seem to offer as many customisation options as the last option, Photonic. Although I usually opt for simplicity and avoid extensive customisation, a little flexibility and freedom in dictating the aesthetics of my blog content is always welcomed.

Installation and Configuration

The installation process is fairly standard as per the usual WordPress plugin. Post installation, the setting up of the plugin for access to Google Photos requires a fair bit of tinkering but nothing overly complex if you follow the instructions written in the documentation provided. Once all the backend has been settled, I uploaded two sets of photos taken in December 2019 to test the plugin: Gardens By the Bay and Food photos!

The photos take a while to be retrieved from Google’s servers. They may appear compressed in a lateral sense if you are visiting this blog for the first time and the images are not cached in your browser. However, once the images have been fully loaded (a few seconds delay), the algorithms of the plugin will nicely sort the photos into grids of different size and display them in the original aspect ratio.

The speed of which the images load and display in the right format largely depends on the latency and performance of the server webhost the blog is currently on. The algorithms run native on the blog instead of being pre-processed and sent to the client browser, thus some delay is expected.

Grid Justified Layout

There is a variety of display layout options to choose from, with the Mosaic option seen in the first example and the Justified Gid layout seen for the Gardens by the Bay album set. I intend to include more photos progressively, mainly those from my heavily backlogged travel series which are uniquely fascinating or contain an interesting anecdote. Stay tuned for further updates!

March 2020: Escalation in Global Affairs

2020 will be an unforgettable year, for both the quantity of major global events and the far-reaching scale and consequences of such events. Uncontrollable wildfires, assassination of a key political figure, shooting down of a civilian aircraft, the actual Brexit(no more delays!) as well as the impeachment and acquittal of a controversial president. With all the above occurring in just the first quarter of the year, who could have known or foresaw the biggest event of them all: a health pandemic of such epic proportions? Certainly not me, I do not possess 20/20 vision (actually I do, physically speaking).  

I cracked the same joke 4 years back as I entered freshman year in university as I pondered on what I will be doing in 4 years time upon graduation. 4 years on since that day, I have found my answer. It appears that I will be stuck at home, partly due to the imbalance in the supply and demand of labor and recommended social restrictions implemented to curb the spread of this virus. 

New Domain (Goodbye OfBlue)

First off, let’s address the change in address (no pun intended) of this site. Due to changes in the cPanel licensing structure, my previous webhost was unable to continue supporting free accounts starting from March 1. If you happened to scroll to the next post, you will see that it is dated 17 February. In the duration between then and 1 March, I had not logged on to my webhost and also missed out the email reminders send to my strangely deactivated alternate email account. It’s hard to believe the coincidence of it all, but such things do happen. In the grand scheme of things, the site was destined to reach its premature death regardless of my decisions, unless I forked out abit of dollars each month to keep it on life support.

Imagine my confusion when I received an email from a third party app informing me my site has been offline for some time and is currently uncontactable. Upon verification, my suspicions were confirmed. For the third (fourth?) time counting, my site has once again, suffered the fate of deletion and forced scrubbed from existence by the webhost (different webhost each time). This certainly fulfills the age old adage, nothing is free in this world. Either you pay or someone else is gonna pay for it. Good old capitalism.

The Search for alternate hosts

Kicking off the search for a new home for my site, I shortlisted a couple of potential webhosts with the following features: cPanel, php support, free basic tier hosting, reasonable storage and bandwidth allowances, database support and SSL certificate issuance. Times have indeed changed, for I could not find a single webhost which fulfilled all the above requirements. My previous 2 webhosts certainly did, though they no longer do so, perhaps they too were hard pressed by the cPanel licensing issues.

Eventually, I settled on 3 webhosts and began the restoration procedure to revive my site. The first webhost was kind of shady, hence I terminated the plan instead of handing over my data. The next webhost gave a multitude of problems like short php timeouts which interfered with the scripts I was running and also unconventional propriety interfaces which was severely lacking in features, compromising on my ability to freely tweak and configure my site. The third and final host, the one I am currently on, was stuck on the verification phase post registration as the host wanted to manually verify the site, hence some delays was experienced.

Back Online….for good?

Learning from the cold hard lessons of my previous tramatic experience of sudden termination of one of my previous webhosts, I implemented a comprehensive backup plan with third party data transfer redundancy and the predecessor site. Fortunately, the plan worked and I was able to successfully recover and redeploy my site onto the new domain.

However, there were still some minor kinks to be worked out. Firstly, the restoration process was a simple copy and paste of the entire site structure onto the new domain. Everything was replaced, including the admin account and domain names, meaning I had to manually reconfigure the credentials and redirect all references pointing to the old domain back to the current host. Not a very hard task, just tedious as a single misstep would require the entire process to be repeated from scratch.

The site also experienced significant server load upon restoration. It appears to be a DDOS attack, which doesn’t make sense. Why would my site actively DDOS itself? I figured it had to be a problem with one of the plugins, perhaps a compatibility issue. After some digging, the hypothesis turned out to be true. Subsequent attempts to solve the incompatibilities failed miserably, introducing further problems which almost devastated the site once more.

Despite being the best compromise amongst the three shortlisted webhosts, there exists major shortcomings of this solution. Lack of SSL certificates, spotty access to phpmyadmin and strange unexplained failures top the list.

Nothing lasts forever, but I do hope that this site would no longer have to endure the days of eviction and living like an internet refugee anymore from this day on.

Covid19 Pandemic

Unless you have just emerged from years of meditation in a deep cave and deprived of news/current affairs, you certainly would have heard of and at least possess enough knowledge of this pandemic which plagues humankind these days. The situation has escalated dramatically since February, truly demonstrating the effects of exponential growth in real life.

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India Telecom Industry Drama Continues

For a concise understanding of the history and events leading up to post, check out this article and also this article which surmises well the potential outcomes and consequences of this spectacular drama.

With one of the highest tax rates (29% of revenue) and spectrum charges among countries coupled with low consumer prices, it is harder to turn a profit for the telecom companies. The stopgap measure necessary to continue with operations would be to rack up more and more debt, which is unsustainable without a fundamental shift in profitability. With only 3 major players in the market of which 2 are ailing with poor balance sheets, it is likely that the industry consolidates into a monopoly should there be no relief on the fees payable.   

There seems to be no winner in this three way tug of war (telecom companies, DoT and SC) and the days of cheap data for consumers will likely end when monopoly/duopoly is achieved.

In light of the above issues and India’s domestic political situation (read: here), I would refrain from further investments into the country in favor of other nations with greater stability and transparency. The addressable market in India is a huge potential upside. However the downside seems more apparent in this case. 

2020: A New Decade

Every new year presents an opportunity to reset back to the starting line and start afresh. This year, 2020, is especially meaningful – the turn on a new decade for one, as well as a major milestone in my life. It is thus worth a few minutes of my time to pen down some goals which would serve as a reminder for myself to persevere and a visible target to reach.

Review of 2019

It seemed not too long ago that I returned home from my exchange in Europe. I had finally completed the nightmare of a paper which I wasn’t sure I could pass. Somehow, miraculously, I managed to. The very next day, I was on the plane heading back home. Fun fact: that was the first time I had wifi on a flight. I could thus send word to my family that the flight was going to touch down early.

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2020: A Year of Uncertainty

Global affairs are in an unstable state, with escalating tensions in the middle east and major economies waging trade wars with each other. Economic growth is slowing globally and Hong Kong has entered a recession after months of street protests and destruction of public property. As we enter into a new decade, things are not looking too bright.

Global Elections

UK just had their elections last month with a sweeping Tory victory, winning the largest majority in decades. This gives the parliament the much needed votes to navigate through the Brexit deadlock that has plagued them for so long.

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1 Kindle 2 Countries 3 Movies

我想當一個很厲害的人 ， 讓這個世界，因為有了我，會有一點點差別

九把刀

An unconventional title with punctuation errors and seemingly unrelated terms. How is a Kindle related to 2 countries and 3 movies? Have I finally gone insane? Bear with me, this is going to be a long post. To make sense of it all, let’s go back in time to July of 2019.

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The Ironic Truth behind Lovebirds

Supposed you search for “Lovebird” on Google, Bing or whichever search engine of your preference, you are likely to come across this definition: A lovebird is a parrot under the common name of Agapornis. The lovebird is mostly native to Africa, with the exception of the grey headed lovebird which hails from Madagascar.

This Smithsonian article which lists 14 fun facts on the lovebird would tell you that lovebirds mate for life and lead a monogamous lifestyle. Perhaps that is the reason why the term “lovebirds” are also used to describe a Homo Sapien couple, in the hopes that the relationship emulates the positive and desirable traits of a lovebird bond pair.

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