The weblog of Joshua Eichorn, AJAX, PHP and Open Source
Webthumb.bluga.net has completed its move to a new server. Everything should be running smoothly at this point, but if you run into any problems let me know.
If your dns is slow to update, you can use new.bluga.net.
Over the last couple months I had a chance to help create a great new product for Stumbleupon. Su.pr lets create short urls, publish directly to Facebook and Twitter and gives you great tracking and statistics around them. Su.pr also helps you get more traffic by making it easy to get your content in front of the Stumbleupon community.
Last week we launched our API which lets you integrate shorten and post functionality into any site or application. Today we are adding the ability to use your own domain for shortening. This lets you have urls like http://joshuaeichorn.com/9OPL so your readers can know what domain they are going too before they click on the link.
Now down to the fun part installation.
Just go to the su.pr homepage and sign up using suprjosh for the invite code (The code is good for 500 sign ups).
I’m not going go over this in detail since instructions are already available from su.pr.
Note: when installing the rewrite rule you’ll want to make sure its not catching any of your other pages, I put mine after all my custom rules and added a condition to check the given url wasn’t the name of a file or directory.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^[a-zA-Z0-9]{4}$ supr.php?supr=$0
RewriteRule ^supr_settings.json$ supr.php?check_install=$0
If your doing your URL rewriting in PHP you might want to handle the link detection there instead, but 4 character words with no extension aren’t too common.
Now that you are up and running any short url created on Su.pr for your domain will be use your domain instead of su.pr for the shortening. If you ran into any problems let me know, I will see what I can do to help.
The double redirection at the end lets us collect stats and do the required setup for showing the Javascript version of the Stumbleupon toolbar.
For the last couple weeks I’ve been working pretty heavily with Hbase. It decidedly has different usage patterns then Mysql, but since I don’t often get to use anything relational in Mysql because of performance reasons it hasn’t been to hard to wrap my head around. Of course having an Hbase committer a couple desks over has helped the process a lot.
So far the biggest issue has been getting access in PHP, we use thrift for that but the raw API leaves a lot to be desired. Luckily it wasn’t too big of a job to wrap things. Now I get joys of schema-less tables, atomic counters, great performance, and reliability. Now i just need to figure out how to get a small cluster for my own projects in a cost effective way.
Just realized enscript isn’t installed on my server anymore so all my posts with highlighted code examples were broken. Sorry about that, fixed now.
There was an Webthumb outage yesterday, the main server Kernel Panic’d and didn’t reboot properly. DNS was switched to the backup server, and for most users there was no noticable change.
However there was a bit of database skew between the 2 servers so some accounts weren’t available on the backup.
Because of this all webthumb usage on the backup server won’t be charge to your accounts. It also won’t show up in your history so if you need a thumbnail after the cut back please open a ticket and I will grab the files for you.
(You can also grab them directly by replacing http://webthumb.bluga.net with http://api1.bluga.net).
The DNS switch back to the primary server is happening within the hour, let me know if you have any problems.
On an un-related note Bluga.net now has a helpdesk, feel free to use it too notify me of any problems your having.
I haven’t been actively blogging as of late, this is not likely to change, but here is some quick Webthumb news.
The PHP apiwrapper has been updated, there have been some API updates but nothing recently. One important item is that is uses version switching in the request to improve error handling.
You can grab it from svn or from the download page.
Since webthumb is now running on 2 physical servers pricing, I’m spending less on Amazon aws services this has allowed me to reduce prices. For volume purchases you can get credits at $1.25 per 1000.
Once the dns change fully propagates Webthumb will be back up and fully running. If you had a different apikey on the backup instance you will want to switch back to your normal apikey. Your apikey is viewable on your user home page.
More news and a we’re sorry gift of credits will be coming soon.
My blog and the rest of my sites are back up again, running on new hardware.
The 2nd backup server/thumbnail processor is still waiting on some heat sinks before it can get installed but now were running on a server with next day dell support.
I’ll have more details on webthumb changes once the dns has been updated. But the biggest difference will be a full time backup API which will be available all the time and support transparent fail over.
The pear wiki, and phpdoc.org should be back as well.
Webthumb hit 5 million thumbnails some time last night. This blows away the last million time, taking just 34 days for this million.
On that note contact me if you are interested in bulk purchases of credits. For purchases of 250k credits or more the rate is $1.25 per 1000. If you will be using more then 250k credits a month additional discounts are available, depending on your usage patterns.
Error handling for Webthumb job requests has changed. Requests with bad urls are now silently ignored instead of dropping the entire request at the first error.
This will fix problems with bad urls in multi-request submissions. Let me know if you have any concerns.
For anyone using Easythumb I have good news and bad news. The good news is the rate for cached thumbnail delivery has been changed to .05 credits. The bad news is the bug where you weren’t getting charged for cached thumbnail delivery has been fixed. If you get an image that says “out of credits” that means you’ve used up your limit for the month. You can purchase more credits to continue your use.
Webthumb generated its 4 millionth thumbnail on monday
The official time was 2008-08-11 11:09:49.
I’ve been making good progress on the thumbnail rates lately, this million was a bit faster the last. If you want to help me hit the next million check out the site, if you want to buy 250,000 credits or more send me an email I have bulk rates available.
| Million | Time | Days |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | 2008-08-11 11:09:49 | 52 |
| 3 | 2008-06-19 11:13:45 | 58 |
| 2 | 2008-04-22 15:04:57 | 84 |
I just completed my first real fantasy football draft of the season. I think i had a better mock earlier in the day, but I was in 8th position here (out of 12), and had problems executing my plan from that position.
Here are my picks for the Evil Pigeons, I think the worst aspect is the bye week overlaps on my rb1-2 and wr1-2
I just completed my first mock draft. I messed up a the running back picks Brian Westbrook and Michael Turner have the same bye week, i also waited too long to get running back 3/4 especially since I foolishly picked up 2 players with suspensions (Steve Smith, Brandon Marshall).
The only problem with this is I am playing in 2 different leagues with live drafts (Yahoo and ESPN) and neither really match this setup, in one I would need a WR3 and neither have TE in the flex just WR or R so I would be owned with this roster until week 3 when Steve Smith returns.
Here’s what i ended up with (I was pick #3):
R1 P3 RB Brian Westbrook, PHI (7)
R2 P8 QB Tony Romo, DAL (10)
R3 P3 WR Steve Smith, CAR (9)
R4 P8 RB Michael Turner, ATL (7)
R5 P3 WR Calvin Johnson, DET (4)
R6 P8 TE Tony Gonzalez, KC (6)
R7 P3 WR Brandon Marshall, DEN (8)
R8 P8 RB DeAngelo Williams, CAR (9)
R9 P3 RB Felix Jones, DAL (10)
R10 P8 WR Javon Walker, OAK (5)
R11 P3 TE Todd Heap, BAL (10)
R12 P8 QB Matt Schaub, HOU (8)
R13 P3 WR D.J. Hackett, CAR (9)
R14 P8 RB Maurice Morris, SEA (4)
R15 P3 DEF Pittsburgh Steelers, PIT (6)
R16 P8 K Matt Stover, BAL (10)
My week 1 starters would be:
QB: Romo
RB1: Westbrook
RB2: Turner
WR1: Johnson
WR2: Walker
RB/WR/TE: Heap
TE: Gonzalez
K: Stover
DEF: Steelers
I’m now keeping a permanent list of links, so I can easily update my Fantasy Football Links.
With fantasy football season around the bend I thought I’d post some of the sites I read. Mainly so I have a list of them somewhere 
I’ve read other stuff here and there but nothing that has become a staple, post a comment if you got any suggestions.
Oh if you have a league with some room let me know, i’m only in one at the moment and I could do up to 3.
Thanks to simplificator there is now a Ruby gem for using the Webthumb API.
Its new feature time for webthumb again. Today i’m making the alpha release of video thumb.
Videothumb gives you the option of getting back a thumbnail of the video on a given url instead of that page. So if you thumbnail Simon’s Cat ‘Cat Man Do’ you can get
instead of
.
Videothumb gives you a thumbnail from the beginning of the movie (this may change) one from 1 second and one from 5 seconds, and all the normal sizes made from the first first frame snapshot.
To enable videothumb for your requests just add a videothumb tag to yours requests like:
<webthumb>
<apikey>key here</apikey>
<request>
<url>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0ffwDYo00Q</url>
<videothumb>1</videothumb>
</request>
</webthumb>
If a supported video url isn’t detected a normal thumbnail will be created, so you can easily enable videothumb for all your requests.
Videothumb currently only works with youtube but I will be adding support for a bunch of other sites over the next couple days.
Currently videothumb is only available as an addon to webthumb, but may be made available as a separate api with additional features if there is demand.
The server is back up DNS should be updated for most things. Send me email jeichorn at gmail.com and josh@bluga.net if your still having any problems.
There will be a server outage today starting around 6:30pm Arizona Time
The servers will be getting new IPs during this time so assuming we don’t run into DNS problems everything should be back up in around 2 hours.
I will twitter the status of the outage since this blog will be down too.
Services affected include:
If you are a webthumb customer and have any concerns email me at jeichorn at gmail.com
Hopefully I will have an alternate endpoint up during the outage, but I just heard about the data center problems 15 minutes ago so I’m not sure if i will get it up in time.
I got to setup 3 new projects in the PEAR2 sandbox today
Not really what I expected to be the first round of new code, but its nice to be setting up access for people. Oh and remember PEAR2 is targeted at php 5.3 but not everything is namespaced yet since not everyone wants to run snapshots of php for development.
Oh and PEAR Elections are open, 7 people ran for 7 spots so its not all that exciting, but you should vote anyway.
Randy ties clemons
