The CMS that I am using for the website is Joomla, and i am using the K2 extension. With K2 comes a module called K2 Tools (mod_k2_tools) and you can use it to make a list of categories or a drop-down menu for choosing the category among other things.

The category listing has a setting in the control panel to decide how to sort it. But if you choose category drop-down, you do not get any options for sorting at all.

After searching a lot, it appears that nobody knows how to do this, but at least I got a suggestion from Simon aka. k2joom to see if it would be possible to use the code from the listing option.

As I am not a programmer, this would not be an easy thing to do, but I started to look at the code. In mod_k2_tools.php there was nothing that looked like sorting, but it called another file, helper.php, so I opened this one and found this piece of code in a section that looked like it could belong to the category listing:

switch ($params->get('categoriesListOrdering')) {

case 'alpha':
$orderby = 'name';
break;

case 'ralpha':
$orderby = 'name DESC';
break;

case 'order':
$orderby = 'ordering';
break;

case 'reversedefault':
$orderby = 'id DESC';
break;

default:
$orderby = 'id ASC';
break;
}

As the category drop-down menu is the next in the settings I looked a bit further and found this code:

function treeselectbox(&$params, $id = 0, $level = 0) {

$root_id = (int) $params->get('root_id2');
$option = JRequest::getCmd('option');
$view = JRequest::getCmd('view');
$category = JRequest::getInt('id');
$id = (int) $id;
$user = &JFactory::getUser();
$aid = (int) $user->get('aid');
$db = &JFactory::getDBO();
if (($root_id != 0) && ($level == 0)) {
$query = "SELECT * FROM #__k2_categories WHERE parent={$root_id} AND published=1 AND trash=0 AND access< ={$aid} ORDER BY ordering ";
} else {
$query = "SELECT * FROM #__k2_categories WHERE parent={$id} AND published=1 AND trash=0 AND access<={$aid} ORDER BY ordering ";
}

Comparing the last couple of lines to the first block seemed to indicate that there indeed was some ordering going on in there. So I tried changing the order in the categories, and the drop-down menu immediately reflected the change!

As I needed reverse sort by ID, I would rather not sit and redo the order by hand every time something got added. So I looked at the first block of code and decided to try to replace “ordering” with “id DESC” in the last couple of lines. They would then look like this:

if (($root_id != 0) && ($level == 0)) {
$query = "SELECT * FROM #__k2_categories WHERE parent={$root_id} AND published=1 AND trash=0 AND access< ={$aid} ORDER BY id DESC ";
} else {
$query = "SELECT * FROM #__k2_categories WHERE parent={$id} AND published=1 AND trash=0 AND access<={$aid} ORDER BY id DESC ";
}

And the miracle happened! The drop-down menu is now prefectly sorted by ID in descending order!

Of course, this change will be overwritten in the next upgrade, which is part of the reason why I document it here. But I also hope that someone that knows a little bit about programming could add sort order as a setting in this module. It would certainly be welcome by me!

Joomla: http://www.joomla.org/
K2: http://getk2.org/

-Svein

One of the things that got my attention in the new version is that it should load any EXIF info into special fields so that it can be used by templates to post caption, credits etc. I am really curious how to get this working and it seems more of this is coming in version 2.6 that is close to being released.

Of course, by using Windows Live Writer, one more step and possible error source is added between the original picture and the web page you see now. I added several IPTC fields to the picture just to see how it turned out and if it came up as useful data.

Do you have any experience in using these new data fields? Leave a comment and tell about how you did it. I will add to this article as I find out more.

Update: First of all, there is a bug in Windows Live Writer that strips out all EXIF/IPTC info. So it does not help using it if you want to have caption to the pictures. Version 2.5 of WordPress was supposed to add a better way to handle pictures, but for me the picture

The blue hour at Karmøy, Norway. (Photographer: Svein Wisnaes)

inserter/uploader never worked. But after upgrading to WordPress 2.6 things seem to work great. At least everything looks ok while I am in the editor. But for some reason the align tag does not work correct. So it ends up breaking the design.

There is also a nice and very tiny border around the picture that disappear on the way from the editor to the article that shows on the page, as well as some formatting I put on the caption. I wanted the Photographer to be in italics. It might be possible to fix this through the theme that is used. I will check if there is a more general fix for it.

-Svein

I am using Windows Live Writer to publish this article to my Word Press powered blog. But neither Windows Live Writer, neither Word Press has any mechanism to add a copyright (or Creative Commons), the name of the photographer and a caption (the description) to each picture.

I would like to see the possibility to add this for each picture I use in my article. For me, this is a no brainer. The photographer deserves credit just as much as the article writer. So why is it not there?

The group of websites that actually uses some form of this best are the online newspapers. I guess that stems from the photographers there knowing a lot more about their rights. But we really need this on even small blogs today.

A very good source for illustrations for a blog today are the photosharing sites like Flickr. On Flickr, you can do a search only among the Creative Commons pictures to find something that you can use. Bust most of the CC marked pictures require that you give the photographer due credit and maybe also link back to both her/him and to the correct CC webpage. Today, there is no way to do this easily and I am trying to get some attention to this.

One way that has been suggested is to use the watermark feature in some editors to add the text inside the picture itself. But this means altering the picture and a lot of photographers do not want you to do that. Also, take a look at my picture above and think about placing the caption over the picture. First of all, it would look extremely odd. Second, it would hardly be readable. Sure, I could set the text color to white. But next picture might be a high key picture that requires me to set it to black.. No, forget about putting anything inside the picture. And by the way – why use a workaround that is clearly not meant for this? What we need is a real solution.

The first way to handle it would be to ask the creators of different WYSIWYG editors and off-line editors to add this functionality. It should not be too difficult. The second step would be to get it into the core of the different CMS’es like WordPress and Joomla. That is where it really belongs.

I want to add one more thing to the list. Microsoft has made available a nice plugin or addition to Windows XP. It is called Photo Info and it allows you to add the required text to the IPTC fields of pictures. Most of the higher end photo editing programs can do the same, and as I do not like doing the same thing twice, I would love to see Windows Live Writer and WordPress being able to load the IPTC info into the correct fields for each picture when I publish them on my blog. I consider this to be the ultimate and most elegant solution, but for now I will settle for one that just let me enter and display the needed info in a nice manner.

There are several ways to display it, and here the template designers might come in with some styling. The name and copyright could be added under the picture as I have done. But I have also seen it displayed up along the right side of the picture. The caption could either be under or over. For my own blog, I would prefer something more or less the way I made the mockup in this article. I am not totally sure about the 5% grey behind the caption, but I need to make sure it is easy to separate it from the article itself.

How would you like to display photo credits and captions? Do you do it today? As far as I know, copyright laws in most countries requires us to put a credit for pictures we use. Why has this been omitted in most CMS systems?

UPDATE: I have now posted an idea on WordPress.org to try to gather support for this. Add your vote on the idea! I have also put the idea into a forum for Windows Live Writer and someone replied that he could probably make something like this. Sounds like Windows Live Writer might be the first one to get something usable. This will of course be good news for more than WordPress users. You can add your support for it here.

UPDATE2: I tried to make an example of what it could look like in Windows Live Writer. Take a look at it here.

-Svein

Or you could head over to http://www.dvdflick.net/ and download DVDFlick. It is probably the easiest tool I have come across to make DVD’s. From their own description:

DVD Flick aims to be a simple but at the same time powerful DVD Authoring tool. It can take a number of video files stored on your computer and turn them into a DVD that will play back on your DVD player, Media Center or Home Cinema Set. You can add additional custom audio tracks as well as subtitles of your choice.

And here is a short list of some features:

• Burn near any video file to DVD
• Support for over 45 file formats
• Support for over 60 video codecs
• Support for over 40 audio codecs
• Add your own subtitles
• Easy to use interface
• Burn your project to disc after encoding
• Completely free without any adware, spyware or limitations

I can really recommend this program. And for the price of it, you can hardly go wrong – it is free. But if you like it and become a user, you should consider donating something. These programmers that make software and then give it out for free really deserve our support.

The interface is very easy. You add movies to a list and then you create the DVD. But before you start creating, make sure you have gone through the project settings and set the target size, target format etc. You can also decide to make an ISO-file instead of burning direct to DVD.

For each video that you add to the list, you can click on edit and adjust a number of settings. One thing to look out for here is the aspect ration. Check that it is set correct. This is also where you can add extra video sources, audio tracks and subtitles.

If you are new to making DVD’s, there is a nice tutorial online that you can get to by clicking on the guide button. It is a very easy step-by-step guide that should answer most questions.

I only have one thing to complain about. My main video editing program is Avid MediaComposer, and I have had some reports of problems with the Avid DV codec. So if you are using any of the Avid editing programs, you might want to make sure you are exporting with a more generic codec. But of course, try it out once with a couple of small videos. I have sent a mail to the author to tell him about the problem, so it might get solved in the near future.

Have you tried this program? Did you experience any problems? Let us know how it worked for you by leaving a comment. Is this the solution to all DVD authoring problems?

-Svein

-Svein

We all love free stuff. Especially when it is something we otherwise would have to pay for. The fine people behind Divx has decided to give out a gift this holiday season. It is unsure how long it will run, so hurry over there and get your copy of a totally free Divx Pro.

What does this give you over the free version of Divx? Here is their own explanation:

So, the primary reason to buy DivX Pro for Windows is to get full
versions of the DivX Converter and the DivX Pro Codec, two things that
let you easily create DivX videos. What are these two things, you ask,
and why should you care? Read on, kind friend, read on…

DivX Converter

The DivX Converter is the official DivX video creation software application. It lets you:

• Drag-and-drop nearly any video format to create a high-quality, highly compressed DivX video
• Merge and convert multiple videos into a single DivX file with an automatically generated menu
• Back
  up your home-made DVDs, compress a full movie to fit onto one regular
  CD (requires the optional $4.99 DivX Converter MPEG-2/DVD Plug-in)

DivX Pro Codec

The DivX Pro Codec is the top of the food chain, codec-wise. It
includes the most advanced version of the DivX video encoder so you can
create the highest-quality DivX files in combination with DivX
Converter or another third-party encoding application. DivX Pro gives
you:

• Higher performance, including multi-threaded support
  for better performance on all HyperThreaded, dual core and dual CPU
  (SMP) systems
• More encoding options, including six
  carefully optimized encoding modes that balance visual quality and
  performance for virtually any application 

What are you waiting for?

-Svein

I used it back in the days of Photoshop 5 and really loved the way you could lift out any object from the white background with a click. If any pixel was not completely black, it would be partially transparent. This meant that soft shadows could be lifted off as well, something I have not been able to do with any other method so far.

But this plug-in does not work with Photoshop CS2 and I have been trying to find a newer version for a long time. Until recently when I stumbled across a way to run older plugins on newer version of Photoshop.

First of all – the Remove White plugin is as far as I know, made by Mark McLaren and you can find it here (scroll down and click on Remove White under Mark McLaren). Unpack the filter and put it in your filter folder.

But since it is an older type filter, you need an extra file to make it work. You need to add msvcrt10.dll (click here to download it) to the same folder as the Photoshop program. Do not add it to the system32 folder or anywhere else in the main Windows folder as it might interfere with how other programs work.

Reboot Photoshop, and it should start with no problems. You should now have a new category of plug-ins at the bottom of your filter list called Mac’s with a single filter called Remove White.

To apply this filter to an image, you first have to either duplicate the background layer and do it on the copy, or double-click on the background layer and turn it into a regular layer. If you want to apply this to just a portion of your image, you have to make a selection first, otherwise just choose the Remove White filter and you are done. You should now see the checkered background through the parts of your image that is not completely black.

To verify that the extraction is ok, make a new layer and fill it with white. Then place this layer under the image layer. You image should now look like it was before you removed the white background.

Most people do not like to have a transparent main object, so you need to make a quick mask of your object, fill it with white and place it under your main image layer. But you now have the option to exclude shadows so that the shadow will fall on whatever background you choose for your picture.

This is an effect that is simply not possible by using a mask or doing a selection based on color.

If you like this post, leave a comment and consider adding it to some of the social bookmarking sites.

-Svein

But today I found a neat solution that will help a lot. If you have a GMail account, you are in luck. GMail has their SMTP servers on different ports than the usual 25. If you check this link, you can see that the ports are 465 or 587. I set this up in Thunderbird and had no problem bypassing the SMTP block in the network I was using at the time. Just remember to use SSL and authentication when you set it up. 

There are a couple of things to be aware of. GMail rewrites the from-address of your mail to your GMail address as well as the reply-to address. According to  Lifehacker it is possible to go to the settings of your GMail account and change the default address to change this. In addition, GMail stores all outgoing mail (and thus indexes it for it’s own use…). This probably does not appeal to everyone, but for many people is a minor issue.

If you really need to get that mail out and don’t have any other way of doing it, GMail might just save the day for you. 

-Svein

There has been a lot of rumors about what kind of information Google stores about us when we search. And I guess the biggest sceptics will just call this video a smoke screen. But it makes sense and is exactly what most websites store anyway.

The difference now is that Google will start to anonymise their logs a bit when they are 18 months old. Maybe you heard this already, but here is a video explaining this, made by Google. Not only is it good information, but also a good example of how to communicate in the simplest way and get your message across.

 I love the combination of internet and video and I will be looking for more examples that can serve as ideas for anyone that want to put video online. There will also be some articles in the future about how to get maximum quality on your video. Watch this space!

Do you have any examples of great online video communication? Make a comment with a link!

-Svein

The reason I got it was to move data. But I found a few programs that did not need to be installed, just double-click on them to run them. I added them to the Flash Voyager and started to search for more programs like this. I am definitely not the first one that has this idea! Several websites are dedicated to this.

One of them is PortableFreeware . On the frontpage, you find the latest updates. But if you click on All in the top menu, you will find categories with a lot of programs. At the moment this site only caters for Windows users.

The first program you should get is PStart portable. This gives you a “Startmenu” in your systray (at the bottom of your screen, next to the clock). After that, it is up to you to add the programs you find interesting.

Another site for you to check out is TinyApps.org . Here you also find programs for OSX.

As with everything else that has to do with computer, it is very important to make a backup. And Microsoft has made available an application that do exactly that. It is called Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager .

If you know any other good resources for this type of programs, or if you know any good programs that should get a mention, just leave a comment!

-Svein

This is exactly what Resize.exe is. The program is made by Peter Bone and you can download it from his website, http://www.geocities.com/peter_bone_uk/resize.html . Another great thing about the program is that it does not require any installation. So you can put it on your USB drive and bring it with you all the time.

Peter Bone has a few other programs also available for download on his website. 

-Svein

It seems like some of the former executives and middle management of Avid still keep in touch and meet regularly. The article have some interesting comments on the development of Avid and where some of the people are today.

-Svein

The term podcasting was as far as I know coined by Adam Curry, a former VJ at MTV. He started to record his ramblings and send them out as attachments to RSS2.0 feeds. His podcast is called  Adam Currys Daily Cource Code, and at iPodder.org you will find a lot about the podcast "reader" he made. There you will find a good explanation of the history behind podcasting. You could also take a look at what Wikipedia has to say about it. The idea is that the software running on your computer will download the programme and you put it on your iPod or any other player that can play the file. Then you listen to it whenever you have time. Out jogging or on the train to work.

There are still not as many podcasts as there are blogs on the net. But the number is really growing. Just take a look at  Podcast.net . And this is where I stumbled upon one of the new podcasts in my list. Avid Technology!

Avids podcast started in August and has so far produced 2 issues, but hopefully more will come. The podcast is hosted by J.C. Bouvier, Avid Marketing Programs Project Manager and contains interviews and news about different Avid products. No big surprises, but well worth to listen to  . You find the link to their page in the sidebar on this page.

-Svein