Jacken's Blog » wordpress

Prepare images for blogging on iPad

Jacken — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:36:21 +0000

Image editing for blogging on iPad

When I first got my iPad I thought it was great for consuming media, but not for creating it. But after a year I do most of my writing and blogging from my iPad. With a connected Bluetooth keyboard it’s an excellent tool for writing. No spinning hard drive, no fan, just comfortable silence. And with apps like Writing Kit and Blogsy, I can do all the things I need for blogging. But handling images isn’t that easy. Here’s my tips on getting your images in shape directly on your iPad.

Color correction

My favorite image editor is Snapseed, who got Apples iPad app of the year award 2011. I’m not so interested in the filters, but the image editing features. To adjust brightness, ambience, contrast, saturation and color balance, you use the Tune Image feature. You select what you want to adjust by dragging up and down, then you set the amount to adjust with a left and right swipe.

Crop

Snapseed has a crop feature that is equally easy to use. There’s also an excellent sharpening feature.

Change size

Here’s the snag. There is no resize function in Snapseed. So you need to save your corrected image to the photo library and use another app for that. There are some free apps available, but I like to use Photoforge2 for that task. It also have some great features for advanced image editing, but I think that for most of the editing, Snapseed is faster and easier to use. The apps aren’t expensive, and you do remember what you paid for Photoshop, don’t you?

Upload the image to the blog

When the image is finished, I use Blogsy to upload the image. I then export my markdown file to HTML from Writing Kit and paste it into Blogsy.Now all you have to do is to post it, and feel happy about doing it all on your iPad.

Time to try blogging from ipod

Jacken — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:57:30 +0000

Well, the iPad version seems to work ok. It’s actually quite nice to be able to write in landscape mode.

Upgrading to Nginx and getting WordPress to work

Jacken — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:27:54 +0000

So, after doing an upgrade of my Apache installation all my web content stopped working. It continued to give 403 errors. After spending hours changing permissions and checking every little detail I gave up. So I installed Nginx instead. It’s a bit scary to start using a totally new web server software, but why not live dangerously? Anyway, it’s fast! Really fast. The only problem I had was to get all the redirects to work. And I also removed my gallery2 installation and moved the blog to /

Problems

It took longer than I had anticipated, mainly because I had to learn how to set up Nginx, but also because of the trouble of getting answers when searching the net. But here’s my working config (mostly saved for me if I forget

[cc lang="apache"]
server {
    listen   80;
    servername  www.jackenhack.com
            jackenhack.com;
    keepalivetimeout  5;
    tcp_nodelay        on;

access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log;

location ~* ^.+.(xml|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js)$ { root /var/www/nginx-default;

}

location / {
    root   /var/www/nginx-default;
    index  index.php index.html index.htm;

gzip on; gziphttpversion 1.0; gzipcomplevel 2; gzipproxied any; gziptypes text/plain text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

#include /etc/nginx/wordpress_params.super_cache
#include /etc/nginx/enable_wordpress;

# rewrite old blog url
rewrite ^/blog/(.+)$ /$1 permanent;

if the requested file exists, return it immediately

if (-f $request_filename) { break; }

set $supercachefile ''; set $supercacheuri $request_uri;

if ($requestmethod = POST) { set $supercacheuri ''; }

Using pretty permalinks, so bypass the cache for any query string

if ($querystring) { set $supercacheuri ''; }

if ($httpcookie ~* "commentauthor|wordpress|wp-postpass" ) { set $supercache_uri ''; }

if we haven't bypassed the cache, specify our supercache file

if ($supercacheuri ~ ^(.+)$) { set $supercachefile /wp-content/cache/supercache/$http_host/$1index.html; }

only rewrite to the supercache file if it actually exists

if (-f $documentroot$supercachefile) { rewrite ^(.*)$ $supercache_file break; }

all other requests go to WordPress

if (!-e $request_filename) { rewrite . /index.php last; }

}

setup for jackeniax

    location /jackeniax {
        root   /var/www/nginx-default/jackeniax;
        index  index.php index.html;

        if (!-f $request_filename) {
            rewrite  ^(.*)$  /jackeniax/index.php?q=$1  last;
            break;
        }

        if (!-d $request_filename) {
            rewrite  ^(.*)$  /jackeniax/index.php?q=$1  last;
            break;
        }

    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
            fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
            fastcgi_index  index.php;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /var/www/nginx-default$fastcgi_script_name;
            include        /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
    }

# deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
    # concurs with nginx's one
    #
    location ~ /\.ht {
            deny  all;
    }

} [/cc]