So why is it so hard to make, store and share animated gifs from your camera phone? And since I have an iPhone 4, specifically the iPhone.

Here’s a brief review of the apps I tried in my hunt for the perfect animated gif app along with the moment that re-inspired it all. Chris dunking his head in Falls Creek.

Chris dunks his head in Falls Creek Falls – GifMill

• GifMill – Free. While it touts some great features like ability to use existing photos, tweak speed, size and quality – it had some sharing quirks that made it usable but difficult for me to post directly to Tumblr or my self-hosted WordPress blog. After my brief round of tests for today, this came out the winner.
  • Albums – Saving to albums kills the animation, so I’m not sure why this is offered.
  • Email & MMS Message – Works as advertised (tested from iPhone to iPhone)
  • Tumblr – Uses the web interface, so requires you to login separately even if you’re logged into your phone’s Tumblr app. This is typically a deal breaker for me, but I had my external keyboard all bluetooth-sync’d to my phone so having to enter login credentials wasn’t a barrier.
  • Twitter – There was a problem uploading the image. I had low res, small size selected so if it was rejected for size reasons then no GifMill settings would work. I really didn’t want to keep trying, however, so inconclusive.
• GifBoom – Free. While the features sound great, the “social media” sharing is GifBoom’s own community overflowing with narcissistic teenagers showing their duck faces and grills. Sigh. (Or at least I hope they’re teenagers … most of them look so young I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a lure for underage sex trafficking offenders.)
• GIF SHOP – $0.99 Once I realized that I couldn’t use this for existing photos, this was a no go for me for today’s project. It only allows you to create gifs from pictures you take within the app. Still, I’ll keep it around for future gif play.
• Flixel – Free. I used this one last year and had fun making Julie playing the accordion come alive. The challenge then, as it was today, is getting the image off of my phone. While I use my phone’s WordPress app to draft my blogs, I wasn’t able to upload “my flixel” since there was no way to save the animated gif to my phone’s albums. Seeing as how I had the same

Julie plays the accordion – Flixel

(There were others I don’t feel like taking the time to detail.) Ultimately, I’ve learned that the best animated gif app is one that allows you to email the photo. Simply email it to yourself and you now have it in an easy-to-access place where you can then post on the blog or site of your choice or load onto an electronic frame for some real Harry Potterlike fun.

Extra: Today is Day 8 of my 30 day blog challenge. Click ‘Follow’ at the bottom of the page to receive weekly updates in your inbox or follow me on Tumblr if that’s your scene.

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So I set out to optimize my site for speed and decided to share that as today’s #30dc post.

First, a bit about my environment:

• Basic GS hosting account on MediaTemple.
• A free Cloud Flare account that I really know very little about. I clicked through a promotion one time a long time ago when I was in my Media Temple control panel.
• WordPress 3.5.2 with wp-cache plugin active.

To start with the problem of performance on the admin side, I read somewhere that the primary culprits for slowness are plugins and themes. So I went to Plugins > Active Plugins to see the full list of plugins active. I then de-activated all of my plugins via the database. In a new browser window, I loaded my admin and browsed a bit. The interactions felt faster, though not quite as zippy as I would have liked. I then went to Plugins in this new window and went through activating each of my previously active plugins taking the time to browse a bit in-between to gauge whether or not I felt that plugin was the cause of tardiness.

NOTE: I wouldn’t typically do this in production for any client site, nor would I recommend it. However, I wasn’t worried about the random, midnight visitor seeing something ‘funky’ so proceeded to test as if I were on a development or staging or otherwise private version of the site.

While this was highly unscientific, I decided not to re-active a few plugins including Feed Statistics. This was the first one that brought my admin to a crawl when it was activated. Since I wasn’t using it anyway, I recorded the few stats I had and killed it. In addition to the perceived performance gain on the admin side, I knew that my feed URLs were my most frequented URLs so I figured this could reduce the load on my server in general. From there I chose not to reactivate plugins I knew I was no longer using anyway.

Since the public portion of the site can be accessed without a login, I proceeded to benchmark my site’s current performance at Pingdom.

• Performance Grade: 87/100
  • Leverage Browser Caching – 15/100
  • Remove query strings from static resources – 90/100
  • Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding header – 96/100
  • Specify a cache validator – 93/100
• Requests: 64
• Load Time: 4.79s (from the Netherlands)
• Page Size: 2.8mb

Yikes. It was as bad as I thought thought, even with wp-cache enabled and running. This got me on the hunt for a better cache plugin where I then landed on W3 Total Cache. I remembered this from my time at Substance, so considered it safe to begin playing with immediately.

Knowing that it can take some trial and error to get the settings right in that they both boost performance and don’t break the site, I proceeded to test each general option out individually. For tonight, I’ve settled on the following:

• Page – enabled (Disk:Enhanced)
• Minify – disabled (when it was enabled, my theme could no longer dish up thumbnails and I wasn’t about to dive into troubleshooting that at this hour)
• Database – disabled
• Object – enabled (Disk)
• Browser – enabled
  • All options except “w3 cache header” and “disable cookies for static files” are checked
• CDN – disabled
• Reverse Proxy – disabled
• CloudFlare – enabled
• Monitoring – disabled (while I’ve heard that NewRelic may now run on MT, I didn’t have the time to go through trying to get this setup again)
• Miscellaneous – Enabled Google Page Speed dashboard & “verify rewrite rules”
• Debug – Off

As I poked around to make sure stuff worked, I also ran my site through Pingdom again and again. When I first activated W3 Total Cache – before I had any settings enabled – the performance plummeted. So that showed me that wp-cache was doing some good.

After getting all of these options set, I was still only getting a Performance Grade of 88 and load time > 2s. Pingdom was still recommending that I “Leverage Browser Caching” so I went into my Performance > Browser Cache settings and checked all the boxes I could. When I ran the Pingdom tests this time, I got a B+ if I use my old high school’s grading scale. And while I ‘d like to edge that up even higher over time, I decided tonight wasn’t that time. Sleep is far too exciting!

So for now, I’ve settled on the following report:

• Performance Grade: 93/100
  • Leverage Browser Caching – 90/100
  • Remove query strings from static resources – 61/100 (down from 90)
  • Specify a cache validator – 95/100
  • Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding header – 100/100
• Requests: 61 (down from 64)
• Load Time: 1.22s from the Netherlands, 1.11s from Dallas
• Page Size: 2.6mb  (down from 2.8mb)

As for what’s next, I’d like to look into better optimizing my images and consolidating some of the asset requests. (That doesn’t include the rest of the interface and IA changes in the hopper.) I’d love to see it come in under 2mb and load in < 1s. I have a feeling I’ll be racing something in my dreams tonight.

Extra: Today is Day 3 of my 30 day blog challenge. Click ‘Follow’ at the bottom of the page to receive weekly updates in your inbox or follow me on Tumblr if that’s your scene.

The post A Need for Speed: How I sped up my WordPress Admin and WordPress (.org) Blog appeared first on Jewels.

It’s been a long month recovering from a corrupt hard drive and many lessons have been learned. Since my track record is 1 computer corruption/data-loss/water-spill/theft per year, I’ve decided to document so next time I’m only out a few hours.

(1) INSTALL PHP & MySQL: Followed the incredibly easy steps at http://maestric.com/doc/mac/apache_php_mysql_snow_leopard

(SNAG) Ran into a snag with MySQL, as I kept getting an error when trying to start it. It wouldn’t start in the preference pane, nor at the command line.

(SOLUTION) Download the correct version for my Airbook. Intel Macs (AirBook, PowerBook, etc.) are x86

(2) Fix php.ini: I still had to fix the socket locations as defined in php.ini – but that was easy, thanks to maestric (see link above)

(3) Install MacPorts: Followed the instructions @ http://www.macports.org/install.php

(4) Install McCrypt: Pretty sure I skipped this the second time around. If I have to do another one of these fresh installs again, I’ll try better to update this list.

(5) Apache Mod_Rewrite: Lastly, I’m still struggling with getting Apache’s mod_rewrite to work correctly. That is, even though I have it installed and activated, my local WordPress sites don’t work unless I turn the permalinks off. Which is a bit of  a pain since I then have to remember to update those settings when I upload to the server.

(6) Database Backups: Unfortunately, I found out that my TimeMachine backups had already deleted the last full backup of my machine pre-wipe out by the time I realized that I’d forgotten to load in all my old databases. This meant that I lost all of the work that I’d only done locally and hadn’t yet uploaded to any dev/stage/production server. So note for the future: treat your local machine like a server and do mysqldumps that you can be easily backed up via your current backup routine and then easily loaded when needed.

Happy Instals.

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After several weeks of no working printer, I finally sucked it up and decided it was time to fix it. The error message “Ink System Failure” had me thinking that I’d installed a faulty ink cartridge. (I have them refilled at the awesome Inkwell Xpress in downtown NE Portland, where Good Dog Bad Dog used to live.)

I went out and bought brand new ink cartridges, to rule out the ink-replacements as a problem. And still, no matter what I did, I kept getting the nasty Error: 0xc18a0001. HP’s support site instructed me to remove all the cartridges, turn off the printer and unplug it for 2 minutes. Then plug it in, power it up and voila! it would magically work. Only it didn’t. Then it instructed me to take it in for servicing.

Servicing? Apparently what they meant to say was “scour the web for tips from other people who have suffered from the same problem. We know about the issue and how to fix but we don’t have to care about you.”

The biggest obstacle was wading through the heaps and heaps of irrelevant posts, sketchy solutions and various rants and raves. But an hour or so later, I found it. The solution that worked. Sweet Jesus!

ANSWER (to most of life’s questions): hard reset

HP C5180 All-In-One Printer HARD RESET:

1. Hold down HELP + OK button and unplug printer (could experiment with regular power-off, but I opted for brute force)
2. Hold down HELP + OK button again as you plug the printer back in. Then power it on, if it doesn’t power on automatically. Be Safe: keep holding the buttons until the printer turns itself off. (It took mine less than a minute.)
3. Now you can release the buttons and simply power it back on. (I held my breath, but that’s not required.)
   • I got an error message about “improper shut down” since I unplugged it w/out powering down. After I clicked “OK” the printer was just fine and didn’t mind anymore. And now I can print.

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