Decaffeinated, Chris Clark’s defunct weblog

Photon

Some eight months ago I opened the photolog up for business under the disclaimer of it being “heavily beta”… and it really didn’t progress much further than that. The process of exporting photos from iPhoto, exporting thumbnails from iPhoto, uploading them all to the server, creating each and every individual entry for each and every individual photo by hand, and editing the post date to match the date the photo was actually taken was kinda really bloody terribly horrible. As you might’ve noticed… the photolog didn’t get updated very often.

Flash forward a few months and I see Anil linklogging something called PhotoToTypePad… an iPhoto plugin for exporting directly to TypePad photo albums. I was excited about it until I realized it was for TypePad Plus and Pro customers only; and the prospect of ponying up $8.95 a month in addition to my other hosting expenses —just so I could photo–blog in relative luxury— suddenly didn’t seem so appealing.

So I did what any self–respecting lazy–ass blogger would do: I emailed the developer, Jonathan Younger, and asked him when a Movable–Type–compatible version was being released. He said “some time soon” and that a lot of people had asked him that question, and then he said he’d drop me a line when the first betas were ready to be played with. He kept his word and flew a beta out to me, but probably wasn’t expecting to have an opinionated know–it–all on his squad; constantly badgering him about little UI details and sending him mockups without doing any actual beta testing at all.

That’ll learn ‘im.

The months flew by like email–filled, highly–productive months; the kind of months I haven’t really had in, well… months. The new Movable–Type–compatible–photo–blogging–iPhoto–plugin–software took shape quickly, and eventually hit one–point–oh.

And by “eventually” I mean “today”: we released Photon version 1.0 today to a seething throng of hungry product–wanters. And by “we” I don’t just mean the social “we” or even the royal “we”, I mean we: Daikini Software.

Yes, it would appear that Jon and I were a perfect match, two lonesome souls crying out for companionship and a good kick in the teeth from a balancing partner; one a mighty–talented programmer with a heart of gold, the other an incessantly–nagging UI guy with a knack for writing long and inflammatory diatribes concerning the state of software design. We’ve joined forces, with the obvious aim of fashioning ourselves a fancy shop–load of great products in the time–honored tradition of boy–meets–boy teams like Jobs and Wozniak… or Frank and Sasser… or like two other guys in a similar situation whose names aren’t quite with me right now.

So if you photo–blog with Movable Type or TypePad and are looking for a hell of an easy way to handle it, do me a favor and head on down to Daikini.com to grab a copy, and keep an eye out for more of this kind of thing in the future. Photon 1.0 will plug in to iPhoto 2.0 or higher (including iPhoto 4, yes) for Mac OS X 10.3 and above. The free trial version isn’t time–limited or featureless (batch export is the key difference between a trial copy and a registered copy), and right now we’re flogging this puppy for the handsome introductory price of $9.95.

And yeah, if the hundred and fifty photos I posted this morning at the click of a button are any indicator… I really dig Photon, too.

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Playing nice with WordPress

One of the big problems we faced with Photon was platform support: simply stated, there are too few that support the MetaWeblog API wholly enough for us to use. Sure it might look a little sappy to support Six Apart products exclusively, but when you’re trying to call metaWeblog.newMediaObject and you’re getting precisely dick from the competition it doesn’t leave you with too many options. The downer goes double when one of the platforms you just can’t support is also the second most popular platform of the day (according to Adriaan’s latest poll, at least), whose popularity has skyrocketed in the wake of the Movable Type 3.0 licensing scandal.

Yes, for WordPress —as Colin pointed out— it’s a 1.3 waiting game. The appropriate fixes to WP’s XML–RPC server will be released with WordPress 1.3, and Photon 1.1 should follow soon after with a few new features for everyone to play with, too. But in the mean time, if you’re fond of a little hackery, Johann Richard has released a patch for WP1.2’s xmlrpc.php file that fixes a whole assload of things… some of which meaning that Photon can do the nasty with WordPress.

Like most things that are any fun, the patch is officially unsupported by both WordPress and Daikini… but if you’re an “open ‘er up and fiddle with ‘er guts” kinda guy it might just be the thing for you. There are a few caveats that come with this process, of course:

1. You need to tell Photon that it’s dealing with Movable Type, since WordPress isn’t available in Photon’s “Platform” menu just yet.
2. You can’t create new categories, nor should you try.
3. Export will fail if there’s a full moon out, or if you’ve eaten Caramel Fudge lately.
4. There is no fourth caveat… yet.

I’d be very interested to hear how things turn out for people who try it this way, but remember: the words to keep in the back of your mind are “at your own risk”.

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