Photogabble » Website Update

More Gooimaging and an update on Photogabble.

simon — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 23:00:40 +0000

Wow, so photogabble hasn’t been updated properly in over a year – February 21st 2011 was the last time I really made much notice of this website and it has fallen into disuse ever since. This is something of a shame as, so far as hobbies go: photogabble has been a nice distraction and a great documentation of the harsh realities of the modern world and my existence in it.

As it is an Easter weekend and I am in-between projects I decided to sort out the nagging issues with this website, take off the dust covers and tidy up. In doing so I have reinstated an older wordpress theme I designed over two years ago that I love and both updated it and as many posts as I can find with problems (missing images, broken links, poorly written content… the list goes on.)

One post that did take my fancy during this clean up is simply titled Gooimaging and depicts an interesting little boredom breaker that I came up with after watching David Gorman’s Google-whacking adventures. I have decided to revive that game as its 8:59am and I need to wake up properly before getting on with work. As the old rules were written for a google image search that has since been vastly updated and improved upon, I have revised the rules and listed them below:

You must image search for a name, male or female. It must be a name that is associated with a person such as “Sam”, “Jamie”, “Keith” or “Max.”
Scroll down the equal page number to your birth-date-month and then count along the images until you rest upon the image equal to your birth-date-day. This is your selected image.
The image must not be pornographic or non-human (play with safe-search off for increased difficulty,) if it is then you have to go back one link. If at the beginning then start again with a different name.
Click on the image in question and open the webpage, you are looking for other names that meet rule one. You then repeat the rules for that name and continue doing so until you come to a dead end or you discover better things to be spending you time doing.

My Game

I began with a search for “Bronwyn” and it returned 2,260,000 results of very similar looking people, this was however not a very good start as I landed on the only non human picture in the search: a pair of dogs from romanycollies.com. Taking this early defeat in hand I rolled again and searched this time for “Jamie” which amongst 810,000,000 results returned a photo of Jamie Foxx at thecinemasource.com a distinctively human image which has been linked to an article written by Andrea Tuccillo.

After rolling again with “Andrea” google returned 487,000,000 results and I hit upon the below desktop wallpaper image of Andrea Parker hosted at a blogspot blog titled filmovizia. Once again I looked for an attractive name prospect and chose “Alicia“.

Rolling with “Alicia” returned 203,000,000 results with my result in question being the Alicia Keys Wikipedia page and a shamefully small photo at that. Thanks to both google similar image search and Tineye plus a generous slapping of photoshop skills I have been able to recreate the image big enough to include below.

As Alicia’s manager is called Jeff Robinson I have decided to roll again with the name “Jeff“, this returned 2,040,000,000 results and landed me on another Wikipedia page. This time the page in question was that describing the professional wrestler Jeffrey Leonard Jarrett pictured below.

Wiki pages make finding names for this game too easy so in an attempt to make things more difficult I scourer the Jeff Jarrett wiki page for the most obscure name that I could find – the best I could do was “Dixie“. This roll returned about 86,900,000 results, the least amount so far so I was going in the right direction. However the first page of results had plenty of non human images and I was only four rounds in, this was not the time to play Russian Roulette with my results. I got lucky and landed on the below picture hosted at impawards.com of an 1976 poster for Dixie Dynamite!

The page in question only had two choices for names “James Bond” and “Drew Struzan,” as I am going down the obscure path I chose “Drew” for my next roll as I haven’t heard of Drew Stuzan, but every ones grandmother has heard of James Bond. In a search full of pictures of Drew Barrymore I landed on the only male photo in the list – just my luck. My sixth round search gave me a photo of Drew Brees amongst 676,000,000 other results of mostly Miss Barrymore. The photo in question pictured below is hosted at athline.com and a very quick look of that webpage lead me to quickly roll again, this time using the name “Eli.”

Rolling with Eli returned 184,000,000 results not as little as Dixie, but few enough to bring some interest back into the game as up until now the rolls I have made have brought mostly boring webpages. Unfortunately I have to say this my seventh roll was just as disappointing as I landed on a paparazzi family shot of Eli Manning hosted at tmz.com.

After a disappointing couple of rolls I decided a more mainstream name might help and Rolls with “Kourtney” from Kim & Kourtney Kardashian on the Tmz webpage. This roll returned the least amount of results so far, totalling about 44,500,000 and having to click “Click to view more results” for page nine meant I was going in the right direction so far as reducing the number of results. Rather disappointingly and at the same time unsurprisingly I landed on the below photo of the Kardashian’s.

I quickly chose “Lauren” for my next roll and at 696,000,000 results I had managed to shoot away from my previous low record. This time I landed on the below photo of Lauren Conrad hosted at hairstylespics.net and a page full of names to select from.

For my tenth, and for the sake of this blog post final roll. I chose the name “Evangeline” to which google responded with about 11,500,000 results and the following desktop wallpaper of Evangeline Lilly hosted at phombo.com.

By my own admittance, this wasn’t the most interesting series of web-searches (or blog post) and had I not been writing this blog post as I went along I would probably have gone through 100 rolls in the same time its taken me to roll and write this at the same time. Attached below is the timeline of my little adventure. I hope I have at least reduced your boredom levels a little bit.

When life gives you a sword.

simon — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:39:13 +0000

Aside from the obvious humour in the above picture-gram it does sum up in a nice way the reason for a shameful lack of articles in recent months, by me, on photogabble. I have not to my greatest knowledge been too busy to post and while I had a bout of illness for the later part of last year; it did not stop me from working. Indeed during my short but notable absence from blogging I have managed to collect over 1000 items of interest to blog about, over 300 of which have been noted as important and even fewer of those I have already written a draft for. This is where I come back to the Microsoft paper-clip and his offer of help, while I may not have a sword with which to fend off a Moblin with, I do have a huge amount of content to write about and very little inclination to do so.

Quite possibly having a “paper-clip” there to give inspiration would do a world of good, it may be considered silly by some but that very idea has been inspiration enough for me to get the 2010 reboot of photogabble finished and a couple of months worth of content scratched out. For a short while I felt what it would be like to be someone with no aspirations and I did not like it, for the past three weeks things have begun to turn around and I have finally begun digging myself out of the rut caused by beings or events unknown, it is scary to think that such a rut can be fallen into rather quickly simply by loosing sight of what you want to become; that is something that I shall endeavour not to enable again.

Look a "new" design.

simon — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:49:49 +0000

For those of you whom this is your first visit then you wont have noticed the huge lack of regular content normally seen here, I have for the most part been completely consumed with work both at university and within the hospital. The gaps inbetween have been filled by spending time with Judy and Brummy trips with Joey*, I have the odd spare hour to play eve online and carry out some other projects but all of these tend to be done in the spare time between lectures or when I am bored of writing three and a half thousand word essays. I had been working on my own design for photogabble and it had been coming along well, however with all my other comitments a redesign began to sink to the bottom of my to do list especially seeing I have a few freelance projects which demand time I would usualy spend designing for photogabble. For this reason I have decided to give photogabble a new lease of life with a brand new theme, it contains all the functionality I wanted to put into my own design however it only took me a couple of hours to set up this one; which means it wins. I shall probabbly work on modifying it over the next few months as it needs a lot of customisation, however for the time being it means one less thing to worry about which enables me to begin writing again rather than spending that time on a design that was just getting bigger and bigger with no real end in sight.

A slight redesign.

simon — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:12:13 +0000

The slight in my original posting has turned into a full website redesign, I haven’t had enough time as of late to produce a brand new website design for photogabble therefore I have chosen to go with one already built and edit it to my own ends.

Merry Christmas

simon — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:25:25 +0000

Once again this blog has survived another year, and again you can notice from my lack of postings that I have very little time for writing at the moment. That time is instead being taken up by my masters research project, redesigning photogabble for a 2009 reboot, editing for public release two wordpress templates based on those used on photogabble in the past and working on some client projects with a friend. For the time being I am going to have to keep my head down and work on those for the remainder of this month. A lot of suprises are happening here in the new year. So keep posted. With that all said, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and hope you have a really nice one, what ever you do and where ever you are.

See you all in 2009!

Brand New Theme.

simon — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:42:03 +0000

Right, so this is about a week early, the reason for which is because I accidentally erased the live copy of photogabble. Instead of keeping just a blank page up for the next seven days I have put off work I should be doing to fix things. I have been working on and off on this new theme for a few weeks now meaning that it has had a lot more work done on it than all my other themes previsouly and each section has had personal touches added. As it wasn’t supposed to be published until next week at the earliest it is a little rough around the edges, the photography gallery is missing and half the portfolio needs writing up as well as the contact form adding. Other than that it should be all there, I would like some feed back on the new design if you could add comments to this post I would appreciate it

[EDIT]

Right, due to the nature of the backup I used a lot of the database was scrambled, I have just finished running custom scripts to de-scramble it and things should be running smoothly once again.

WordPress 2.5 and my Zenphotos Plugin.

simon — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:31:52 +0000

I have had quite a few people asking me about the zenphotos plugin I developed a while back which is nice, as it appears mine is the only plugin to do the job that a great many people running both publishing platforms need I have taken on the responsibility of ensuring that it is up to date. I have yet to test it with the latest version of WordPress 2.5 but I see no reason why it wouldn’t work being that the wordpress dev team don’t appear to have moved about any of the things the plugin uses, it should also work with the latest zenphotos update but again I have been so busy of late that I haven’t had time to get it updated. There is going to be a new version coming out soon for wordpress 2.5 which will have a lot more functionality I have built in for use with a new template, more information on that will come later once I get things in order.

In the mean time if you need any help with my plugins feel free to fire me an email.

[Update]

The next update for zenphotos 2.2 will be released as soon as I am able to spend some time on it for the time being I am implementing the following new features as required by my new theme (to launch soon) and requested by you guys:

Plug-in Panel so you can set the default settings within your dashboard rather than edit the plugin file yourself.
Adding the option to create custom output formatting, which will make it easier to design around.
Adding the option to select the latest pictures from just one album within your gallery rather that from the whole gallery.
Adding the option to show a user defined selection of random images from either one album or the whole gallery.

This being my final degree year I have a lot of work to get finished and not a lot of time to get it all done in, due to this I can’t say for sure when the new plugin will be released as I am having to work on it when I get literally a spare few minutes.

Zenphoto WordPress Plugin 1.8

simon — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:10:50 +0000

I have just updated the zenphoto to wordpress plugin so that it works with the latest version of zenphoto and wordpress. As you can see from the bottom of this page I have refreshed my photography gallery and it has at current a lot less photo within it. This is because I am slowly in the process of editing a backlog of photo shoots in anticipation of publishing them here amongst other places. In the mean time there is a small selection of test uploads I have put on here just to keep the photography area interesting. For all of those interested in combining zenphoto and wordpress in a similar way check out my zenphoto plugin page and download the plugin. I can provide support for my plugins only, not for unrelated zenphoto or wordpress issues; enjoy.

A belated update.

simon — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:48:14 +0000

It has been a good few months since I bought my mac pro and since then I have installed a 200GB hard disk and an extra 2GB of memory to bring it to a total of 3GB. To be honest I think apple should have shipped it with a minimum of 2GB because although OSX is very good at memory management and the computer as a whole is blazingly fast for the vast majority of the mac pro market 1GB RAM is tiny. With 3GB I hardly ever have to wait for things to load, I use a couple of widgets to find regular information and now I can press that middle button and see the dashboard pop up instantly rather than waiting for data to be retrieved from the scratch disk – a notable performance boost.

So is there anything I am missing from being with a pc? Well not much really, I got hold of all the applications I regularly used on my pc plus a ton of extra tools and utilities that I otherwise wouldn’t have had access to. The only thing I can really say I miss from the pc is its ability to play games without a lot of messing about. To play games with full compatibility and at full speed I need to reboot into my windows partition, I am not too happy about doing this as I prefer to follow the purist line and only run apple operating system on apple hardware; still as needs must. I bought VMWare recently and installed a copy of windows98 on it, it took a weekend of playing before I got most things working (except sound) and eventually the dos games that I love to play worked, if I could just get sound to work it would be perfect. Still I can’t believe I spent nearly fifty quid on an application just so I could play X-Com UFO enemy unknown on my mac without having to reboot into windows… did I say I was purist?

Lastly before I go off and do what I should have been doing done, I have updated the blogs’ design a little bit. Now if you scroll down on the front page you will see my five most recent twitters. These are predominantly text only as tumblr cant import images from my feed, basically I am trying to tidy up the content on this website so from now on the blog will only contain worthwhile posts and the tumblrs will be the short, spontaneous posts. They will still appear in the main feed however if it turns out that this becomes a problem for people (flooding with multiple posts a day) I shall work a way of excluding them.

Jolly good boating weather to you.

simon — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 03:35:13 +0000

Quite a few weeks have passed since I last made an attempt to write anything here, quite a lot of articles and tutorials have been left half finished waiting for me to once again pick up the pen dab it in ink and scatter the page with barely ledgeble chicken scratch waiting to be edited and posted up here for you to all marvel at. However alas I have been taken ill and only as of late have I been slowly recovering. You could probably guess at a time frame from when I posted my last real article on here as since then I have only found time for short often one line reproaches.

I do have a lot to say, but it is still a case of finding time to write it all down. I have entered my third and final year of university, which is also arguably the most gruesome so far as work load is concerned. In the coming weeks I shall upload the new photogabble theme for 2008 which itself will be modified over the coming months. I still don’t know if I shall release the pinecone theme which currently clothes this blog, that all depends on time and demand. I may release a cut down bog standard version of it around the time I change the blogs clothes. Finally I have a new endevour soon to launch, I am currently in the process of accumulating and sorting through all of its particulars and it is a pretty big step for me to take so I shall dedicate a blog post to it at a later date.

Until then, good night and have a good weekend.