Tag Archives: websites

Thoughts

On the ephemerality of digital publishing

For all the ease of use and low cost of entry of digital publishing, there’s its inescapable ephemeral nature. I’m not talking about digital books, photographs, music and movies, although there’s a lot to be said about those things as well. That sort of distributed publishing puts a copy of your creation on someone else’s device, and is thus more buffeted against the inevitable loss or data corruption that occurs, because copies of your creation will likely survive somewhere. What I want to talk about is this very thing I’m using right now to publish this: my website.

It could be perceived as a contradiction in appearances to talk about how fleeting my website will be as it’s coming up on 20 years of existence (that’s right, my website will turn 20 later this year, after I turn 44). But I’m thinking beyond my lifetime. I’d like the things I write about, the photographs I take, the videos I make, to reach the generations of the future. I know there’s a lot of drivel out there on the web that won’t stand the test of time, because it’s made specifically for the now, to appeal to trends and other passing nonsense, but I don’t spend my time on those things. At least some of the things I write about are likely applicable or useful 50-100 years down the road, and just as I appreciate books, music and movies published 50-100 years ago, I hope my digital creations will be appreciated a century into the future. But how will it get there? How will my website survive 100 years?

In the past, articles were published on paper, books were published on paper, then we had negatives we could look at; books were scanned. Now when we publish posts and articles on websites, exactly how will this electronic (HTML + CSS + Scripts) format make it down the road? If we die and our domain name is no longer paid up, the website goes down. Should we be hosting our site on a platform like WordPress.com, when we stop paying the site domain may change back to the free WP subdomain, some site services will stop working, but the site will continue to stay up, but until when? Does WP have a plan to exist and function well in 100 years? Does any web publishing platform or social network plan to be around in 100 years? Will YouTube or Facebook be around in 100 years? What if they undergo so many changes in the way things get published and shown to the public that my content can no longer be ported onto the new versions of the software, and it gets left behind? Then there’s the basic nature of a business: it needs money to survive. The “freemium” plans of today, where you get some free services but the better ones cost money, aren’t futureproof. At some point, a company decides it’s had enough of freeloaders and switches to all paid accounts.

The thing with a book or a magazine is that once it’s printed, once it’s made, no further effort is needed to “keep it alive”, and this isn’t the case with digital publishing, where once you’ve made something digital, you still need further energy to keep the web server up and running, more energy to keep it patched up and upgraded, more energy to swap out parts that fail, more energy for the internet bandwidth, etc., energy that translates into utility bills, bandwidth bills and man hours, in perpetuity. None of this is needed with a printed book. It just sits in someone’s library and requires no effort and no energy to simply be there, storing its information for posterity, until someone takes it out, blows off the dust and stats turning its pages to read it. The act of turning a page requires little energy. The act of reading and considering the information that you’re reading consumes quite a bit of mental energy, but the same amount would go into reading something digital. So you see, digital publishing may seem easier and less expensive at the get-go, but it turns out to be mightily complicated and expensive to keep going over decades and decades.

Unless you’ve got the foresight to set up a trust with enough financial resources to keep your digital presence (websites, social media accounts, etc.) up and running, chances are you will be digitally defunct soon after you die or, depending on the circumstances of your last years, say a debilitating disease that won’t allow you to carry on your online presence, you’ll be digitally dead years before your actual death.

I know about services such as the Internet Archive. They’re well-meaning and I wish them the best of luck in storing all of the data, but they’re slow on lookups, and they tend to mess up a page’s style, which is kind of like crinkling up the printed pages in your favorite book and forcing you to read them like that from then on.

We need some way to make a site future-proof, to either make the individual articles or posts digitally distributable, or to come up with ways to make web servers consume less resources, much less resources, so that it’s economically feasible to keep a lot of data up and available in the future at much lower costs than today. I know about printing web pages as PDFs, and that’s something, but how many people do that? I want a clean, ad free, well-formatted, digital copy of a post or article made available to me, automatically. Perhaps solid state storage, on optical non-moving media of sorts, is the way that computers might work, so that the data, once written to that media, consumes no power while it’s not accessed, and the power needed to read it from them is insignificant. This way we could afford to prepay to keep our website up for the next 100 years, and it wouldn’t cost a ridiculous amount.

The current model, of paying yearly for a domain name and monthly or yearly for a web hosting package and a site publishing platform that you need to keep upgrading and updating, or else it’s subject to hacking, isn’t futureproof. It costs a lot and it needs a lot of attention — attention and money that it won’t get once someone’s gone.

We need to make it easier, or as digital information inevitably gets wiped out with time, the valuable sites and articles, that ones that might have made a difference in someone’s future life, if only they’d been available to them, do remain available to them, just like a book or a magazine on a shelf.

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Thoughts

Photography and social media: still a recipe for copyright issues

I think I started posting my own photos online sometime in 2002-2003. During all this time, two things have remained the same: the overall ignorance of most web users about photographic copyright and the duplicity of some social media websites in keeping their users ignorant about the topic. Most images uploaded to social media are immediately resized and stripped of their metadata and copyright information, rendering them into multiple pieces of “media” ready for the consumption of the public unaware of their origin. This is strangely similar to food processing when you think about it. You probably don’t want to know where your hot dog’s from, and the vendor is more than happy not to tell you. But back to photos…

It started innocently enough: in a period of much slower internet than today, there was a need to compress images uploaded to websites, in order to serve up smaller, “optimized” versions to those with slower connections. The argument photographers heard then went along the line of, “We need to strip every piece of data except for the visual part, which we also compress, in order to save size and also to optimize the use of space on our servers, but we’ll continue to work on this and see what our options are down the road.” Well, we’re 15 years down that road now, so I thought I’d stop and look around to see where we’ve arrived.

The short of it is this: not far. It’s hard to believe that an ethical solution couldn’t be found in this past decade and a half, as online tech has advanced so much in other ways. A simple, workable solution is surely within grasp for a determined engineer in the land of tech. A pessimistic person could make the case that it’s to the advantage of social media websites for the copyright information to be lost along the way. From a legal point of view, not being able to assign the blame to anyone is better than being able to assign it to someone while it also turns out that you were an accomplice. Say someone reuploads an original photo created by someone else to social media, and that photo gets reposted over and over and over, either through reshares or reuploads. Say the original photographer gets mad and wants to do something about it. We all wish him or her good luck in hunting down all of the unauthorized uses of his or her photograph and trying to get recompense out of anyone. Blame can’t be currently assigned; there is no easy-to-access “chain of custody” for photographs that get used without being licensed or even credited. The media company might say, “But we resize and compress images on upload, we don’t keep any metadata, how are we to know whose image it is?” and the users will say, “But I saw no copyright information, no source, no photographer’s name, how was I to know?” or “It was a popular photo, everyone was posting it, I just wanted to post it for my followers, too.” Works out great, doesn’t it? Guess what? Most people have done it. I’m guilty of it as well. I save photos from all over the web. Then, when I look at them weeks, months and years down the road, I have no idea who took them. I mean I know my own photos, and I know the photos of a few photographers whose style is familiar to me, but good luck with everything else. When I look at the metadata, most of the time, there’s nothing there.

The only one getting screwed here is the photographer who took that photo. Probably worked hard to take it, too. Had to take time off for his or her passion, drive somewhere, hike up a mountain, suffer wind and cold and rain, freeze his or her butt in a flimsy tent during the night, get up at an ungodly hour and find the best place to set up the equipment for the shot then wait for it — no, seriously, wait for it, like another half hour at least — nope, still waiting for it… “Hold on, the sun’s just cresting the ridge, okay, it’s go time, now, now, now… goddammit… wtf, now the card malfunctions?!” After more trials like this, the fellow or damsel goes home, processes that photo to perfection, uploads it to his or her social media account and gets about 2 likes. But someone else sees it in a friend’s feed and goes, “Wow, that’s a nice photo, hold on, let me download it.” Easy enough, right? If it can’t be downloaded, you can always just take a screenshot and crop it as you like… So that someone else decides to post the photo to his feed, “Check this out, peeps!” and everyone’s like “Wow” and “Awesome shot, dude” and “One thumb, two thumbs, three thumbs up” or whatever, and the photo gets over 100 likes or faves or pluses or hearts easily; well, maybe not that many pluses… And it could be that the photographer didn’t have to go to all that trouble to get it, maybe only worked all of 2 minutes for a photo that turns out to be popular, and that’s with counting the time it took to edit it, but that shouldn’t matter. The point is, does anyone ask whose photo it is? Can they even find out out? Can anyone easily look up that information?

Shouldn’t those vital bits of information remain stored with the photo, through all its resizes and compressions, no matter what? It’s only a few bytes of data, dammit. You have (1) the photographer’s name, (2) the source (that’s typically where we put our website), (3) the title of the photo and (4) the caption. How hard would it be to keep just those bits, in every version of the photo, on all of the social media websites? Actually, that question shouldn’t even be asked. It shouldn’t even be a question. It should be a statement, as in, “Of course we’ll keep in those pieces of metadata. They’re vital information as far as photographs are concerned. Now let’s make it happen, people.”

Those four bits of information should be sacrosanct. Here’s another word for it: sacred. Here’s another: untouched. Here’s another: don’t fuck with them. What I don’t understand is why this hasn’t happened yet across the board, everywhere, especially when so many software engineers are also photographers. Yes, that’s an odd coincidence, but an ungodly number of coders and engineers of all sorts also love taking photographs and they also work at social media companies. Somehow no one’s put two and two together yet. It hasn’t clicked in their minds yet that they could be part of the solution, that they’re right there and could be advocating for this, heck, not just running their mouths but actually coding the fixes.

Let’s look at specific examples from social media websites.

Facebook

Here’s what goes on with photos uploaded to Facebook: they get renamed, compressed and resized. And they get a special identifier code written to one of the metadata fields; I think FB uses this code to track internally what happens to the photo on its platform. I don’t know how well they can identify images based on those codes when they’re downloaded and re-uploaded, but perhaps that’s one way to help photographers keep track of the images they upload to the platform in the future. Now, here’s the part that baffles me. For my own photos, the ones I upload to my page, such as this one, I see that FB keeps my copyright information. When I download it from the platform and look up its metadata, my info is right there, even when I download it from another browser and I’m not logged into FB.

However, that info isn’t there for the photos posted by other people and other pages. I don’t get it. Is it that they don’t specify it, or that it’s not kept for most? Could someone enlighten me on this? Here’s a photo I downloaded from the Olympus Europe FB page. There’s no such info available.

When I looked at a photograph uploaded by someone to a FB group, again I found no metadata. So even though the photographer identifies herself in the caption of the photo, that caption isn’t in the metadata, and should the photo be downloaded and re-uploaded, it’s easy to see, in spite of good intentions, how easy it would be to lose track of the photographer’s information.

I also looked at photos uploaded by other photographers to their FB pages. I couldn’t see any identifying metadata. Here’s one such example. That’s a beautiful photograph which I’m sure will get downloaded and possibly re-uploaded. The photographer’s placed a watermark on it, but that’s not going to be necessarily helpful if someone’s not well-intentioned. The same software that helps you place watermarks on photos can help you remove them without trace, and I’m talking about Photoshop, of course.

Can anyone tell me what’s going on with Facebook? Do they or do they not keep photographer information for the photos uploaded to their platform?

Instagram

There’s no way to check what happens with photos uploaded to this service, because you can’t download them after you’ve put them on there. Supposedly that’s done to protect your intellectual property, but actually that’s more so the photos you see on Instagram stay on Instagram and you have to use their platform. Congratulations, you’ve just uploaded your photo to a platform that keeps it prisoner. Not that it helps you with your copyright problems, because discouraging downloads just means people take screenshots and crop out the offending information. Good luck getting copyright info from a cropped screenshot…

Clearly a much better way of doing it would be to keep all of the metadata intact and if it’s not there, to write the original uploader’s account name to the copyright field (that would be the responsible and ethical thing to do), and to allow people to dowload these photographs and to view the metadata and thus see who took the photo. It would probably be asking too much to also do a bit of education of the viewing public about the importance of knowing who is the creator of the image they’re enjoying…

Bad job, Instagram! Bad job!

Google+

G+ is a revelation when it comes to keeping photographers’ information intact. I downloaded a recent photo of mine from another G+ account (my wife’s) and was pleasantly surprised to discover that they keep all of the relevant metadata. I would have been happy if I’d seen just the four bits of data I wrote about above, but they keep everything. Bonus: they also keep your own filename for the photo. Beautiful!

A bit of an aside here: if you’re not renaming your photographs after you download them from your camera, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to store bits of data right in the name and also to organize your photographs. There are many tutorials on how to do it and multiple pieces of software that let you do it in bulk. Have a look at this tutorial from Adobe, for example.

Twitter

I typically don’t upload photos directly to Twitter. I feed my Flickr feed to it. For the purposes of this article, I uploaded a photo to test things out. I then downloaded it to see what they kept. I’ve got bad news for you. They don’t keep a damn thing when it comes to your own information. Not an iota. Not a 1 and 0, if you will.

Bad job, Twitter! Bad job!

Flickr

I’ve been using Flickr since 2004. As a matter of fact, it was one of the first websites (if not the first) to trigger discussions about the way it handled photographers’ metadata back in those days. There were also heated discussions about the way it handled filenaming and unauthorized access to original photos. I wrote about that issue back then. And yet, in spite of its flaws, I and many others continued to use the service, because we love it. I wonder how it’s doing now, so let’s have a look.

Here’s one of the photos I uploaded. I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that in about 14 years, it’s managed to make progress on this front. The bad news is that it’s very little progress.

When I look at the metadata for my original photo, after I uploaded/downloaded it from the service, I’m happy to see that it’s kept it intact. But remember, this is the original photo. It had damn well better keep it in there. Granted, 14 years ago, it used to clear the metadata from the originals as well. So that’s some progress…

The bad news is that it clears it out of every other image size, even from the large size (2048×1536).

Flickr, what kind of example are you setting here? You are the original photography sharing website. You should be standing up for photographer’s rights. And yet here you are, trampling all over them. If you don’t keep the metadata, who should? So what if it’ll add a few bytes or kilobytes to the size of each image. Isn’t it worth it?

Bad job, Flickr! Bad job!

WordPress

We may not consider WordPress a social media website, but the fact of the matter is that a great deal of us love and rely on WP to share our lives and our content, whether that be text, image or video. So how does WP handle it? I’m glad to say that they’re the most forward-thinking of the group. Not only do they preserve all of the metadata, but they also present it right off the bat to the website visitors. For example, should you click on one of my image galleries (such as this one, for example), you’ll see the copyright information right away. It’s displayed in the bottom-right corner. You see, that’s not only preserving the data, but also educating the public.

And should you want to download a photograph (which you can do, btw), it’ll have all of the metadata in it, so you’d have to be mal-intentioned in order to re-post a photo published with WP elsewhere and not even credit the photographer.

Now that we’ve made the social media rounds, so to speak, let’s talk a bit about watermarks and about not allowing people to download photographs.

I don’t believe in watermarks. You ruin a photo’s aesthetic appeal when you watermark it. It just ends up looking like shit. I’ve experimented with all kinds of watermarks over the years and no matter how big or small they were or how good they looked, in the end I regretted putting them on my photographs, because they take away from a photograph’s artistic merit. The good-looking watermarks, the ones that I tend to tolerate visually, tend to be stylish and unobtrusive, but they’re also easy to remove, and the bad watermarks… well, you might as well crap all over your photo. The sad part is, when you look online, the people who take the shittiest photos are the ones who use the biggest and uggliest watermarks to “protect” them. You almost want to comment and say, “Dude, no one would steal this shit even if you printed it on thick glossy paper and left it on the street,” but it would be unproductive for all.

Some sites (Flickr, Instagram and others) don’t allow people to download photographs, not even the smaller, compressed versions. On Flickr, you can choose if you want to enable or disable this feature. While I think it’s a great idea to lock down access to the originals (I upload my photos at original resolution on Flickr and certainly wouldn’t want people to have access to them without my say-so), I also think it’s a great idea for people to be able to download smaller versions of my photographs. Disabling the “right-click to download” feature in browsers is lame. You can always take a screenshot. But letting someone download a smaller version of your photo, provided your identifying metadata is in it, is a great way for them to remember you down the road. But you gotta keep that metadata in there!

I believe the public needs more education on copyright and no one is better positioned to provide it than social media companies and software companies. Make it easy and obvious for people to see who took a photograph and where they can be found. Don’t ever mess with that metadata. Always keep it in the photo and make it easy for people to see it, both on the web and on the desktop/tablet/phone! It’s that simple.

And for those who still favor watermarks, I would propose an alternative that doesn’t visually alter the image but lets the viewer know who took it right away. I’ve been asking the people at Lightroom to make it easy and automatic to do this as an export preset with their software for years, but they haven’t been listening. You still need Photoshop to do it at the moment. It’s this: a simple, white border at the bottom of the photograph, where you can put your name and website.

It’s not rocket science, it’s not glitzy, but you’re also not crapping on the image and it’s very easy to see whose photo it is. Yes, you can crop it out, but you can also wipe out the metadata and you can also get rid of watermarks. Those with bad intentions will always skirt the legalities. But good, law-abiding people will be glad to know right away who took the photo, and also to know that the information can’t be wiped away by mistake and will remain there even if the photo is resized or compressed.

I hope this has been helpful and, if you are one of the people positioned to take action, please do.

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Thoughts

Where’s the Netflix Shelf?

The more movies and shows Ligia and I watch on Netflix, the more convinced we become that Netflix lacks a vital feature. We call it the Shelf. Where is it?

The Netflix Shelf would hold titles we’ve seen and loved. It would contain two collections: a smart collection, which would automatically bring together the titles we’ve rated 4 stars or higher), but more importantly a manual collection, where we could add titles we’d like to watch again in the feature — movies and shows we really love, perennial favorites if you will.

Within the Shelf, we could sort titles by genre, keywords, actor or director (using the metadata added by Netflix staff or metadata we could add ourselves).

There were so many occasions we saw a movie, loved it, wanted to store it somewhere so we could see it again in the future, but didn’t want to leave it in the queue, cluttering up the list of titles we still haven’t seen. There was and is no place for them yet, and that’s regrettable, because it’s a lost opportunity for Netflix to create customer goodwill at a time when they need it.

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Thoughts

Where’s Google Photos in this drop-down menu?

If you use FeedBurner (which has been part of Google for a good number of years now), you probably know about the Photo Splicer feature, which allows you to merge your photo feed from services like Flickr, BuzzNet or Webshots into your site feed, providing extra content for your readers. It’s a great little option and I hope Google keeps it turned on for years to come.

My question for Googlers reading this is simple: where’s Google Photos (PicasaWeb) in that drop-down menu? Isn’t it about time for it to show up there?

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How To

How to avoid nightmares when upgrading your Drupal install

I had some real “fun” today (about a full day’s worth) after upgrading one of my Drupal installs from 7.7 to 7.8. The whole site went awry: the template no longer showed, I was only getting text, I kept getting either 404 or 500 errors when clicking on links, and nothing I did seemed to make it better. Even restoring from a backup yielded the same garbled pages. It’s fixed now and working perfectly (well, not perfectly, because some modules are still in beta and there will always be some errors, but it’s working as expected, let’s put it that way).

If you’re only here because your site is garbled after an upgrade, let me save you some time. There are two reasons (I know of ) for it:

  1. You have Clean URLs enabled and your .htaccess file got replaced. That means the RewriteBase rule is now commented out. Don’t bother to turn off Clean URLs, there’s no need to do that. Uncomment it, refresh your site and links should be working properly.
  2. If your theme is now messed up and you only see text, plus you can’t navigate around your site, you have your site cache and compression turned on, don’t you? Yeah you do, and now the new version of Drupal doesn’t know how to read the cache files, because it didn’t write them. So do yourself a favor and turn the cache files off. You’ll have to use the “dirty” URLs if you can’t navigate to the admin panel, so instead of example.com/admin you’ll need to type example.com/?q=admin, and so on and so forth. Disable the compression and the cache, and delete all the cache files. Presto-change-o, your site now looks normal again!

So, what can you do to avoid having the same crappy day I did? Let’s take it by the numbers, shall we?

1. Put your site in maintenance mode.

2. Always, always back up your site and your database before doing a core upgrade.

I would recommend doing a backup even before upgrading modules. Don’t rely on backup modules. Do the backups manually, and just so you won’t panic when something goes wrong, test your backup method by restoring from it to a separate install, to make sure you’re doing the right things. This is especially important for database backups, where it’s REALLY important for you to be able to restore from a downloaded SQL file.

Before doing the core upgrade, do a full backup of the entire site, not just the sites folder. And just to make it easier for you to restore the sites folder afterward, do a separate backup of that folder, and of the .htaccess file at the root level of your drupal install. And back up the database, that’s really important! If you do this right, you’ll only need to use the database backup.

3. Turn off all site caching and compression and clear the site cache. This is really important! If you don’t do this, it’s quite likely that your site will be just as garbled as mine after the core upgrade.

4. Create a new site folder on your server, because you’re going to do a brand new install of Drupal (whatever the latest version is). Inside that folder, wget the latest drupal tar.gz file and untar it.

Okay, now comes the fun part.

5. Delete the sites folder in the new Drupal install and copy over your old sites folder.

6. Make sure any changes done to your .htaccess and robots.txt file are reflected in their counterparts in the new Drupal install. Or, it’s quite likely that the old thing that you need to change in the .htaccess file is to uncomment the Rewrite Base line. Find it and uncomment it.

If you don’t uncomment this line and you have Clean URLs enabled, your site will either give you 404 or 500 errors when you try to access the admin interface or alias URLs, so this is quite an important step!

7. Restore your database from the SQL backup. That is, create a new database on your server and through the web interface or through SSH, restore your database backup to it, to get an exact copy of your live Drupal database.

8. Now run the database update script. Browse over to your Drupal install + /update.php and run it to make sure the database upgrade is also completed.

9. Now you have some choices to make. Once you do this, you have two working installs of Drupal: the old, reliable install, which you’ve been using, and the new install, which should be working, but who knows what bugs there might be in the code, that you’ll only discover as you begin working with it.

So now you have two choices: you can either map your domain to the new directory or rename the old directory then rename the new directory to match the old. In other words, you’ll want your domain to point to the new Drupal install. Or, you have the luxury of saying “Forget this new version for now!” and keep using your old Drupal install, until they work out all the bugs (that’ll be the day…)

That’s it! Pat yourself on the back. This should have taken about 15 minutes or less, not a whole day…

I hope this has been helpful!

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