Mobile photo galleries
I'm experimenting with ideas for photo galleries in the mobile space. As we move more and more into the mobile world it will be important to come up with new ways of doing old things.
How should a photo gallery look on a cell phone?
This is just one idea. All the pictures are owned by me. Chichen Itza is copyright of the Mayan empire :)
#1 at the OCNA awards!
WawatayNews.ca just won first place at the Ontario Community Newspaper Awards for Best Community Newspaper Web Site.
This is the one I've been working towards for a long time. The competition is stiff. There are two papers in particular which continually push the boundaries and have phenominal websites.
They are the Elmira Woolwich Observer and Vaughan Today. This year saw them in competition with Wawatay News.
I've been hoping and crossing my fingers that we would win first place, but it's an honour to even be nominated in the same category as these publications. They are some of the finest the industry has to offer and I couldn't be happier that we were considered in the same class. Winning first is the icing on the cake.
Optimizing MySQL Databases
You can quickly optimize an entire MySQL database using the mysqlcheck command. To accomplish this you need only invoke the -o flag. For instance a command I use as a cron job is:
This command, if run as root, will optimize all the tables across all databases. The optimize command in mysql is similar to defragging a hard drive. It can speed up operations by putting things in order, and performing other maintenance operations on the tables.
It should be noted that running this command can use a lot of system resources and may even start a server thrashing. It is not necessary to run the command too often either. I usually set the cron job to run no more than every few days even on a very active database server.