Coppermine Installation made easy if you can’t use an autoinstaller June 29, 2009

I have previously given details on easy set up of Coppermine using a free webhost as your server platform. Today I am updating that info to give you the steps to install the album application on your own if you can’t use an autoinstaller. Actually- installing yourself is fast and easy and in many ways better as many autoinstallers manage to generate unwanted code that can make future updates difficult.

Preparation:

1. Download the latest version of Coppermine  from the Coppermine project site http://coppermine-gallery.net/ and make sure your hosting company has all of the required scripts installed on their server. You will need a newer version of PHP , GD 2.0 and the ability to add a MYSQL database. Read through the documentation provided with coppermine and make sure you have everything required available on your server. At this time- peruse the Coppermine library ( http://coppermine-gallery.net/demo/cpg14x/)of user templates if you want to use something other than one of the pre-made ones supplied with the application. You can download these from the Coppermine download resource area (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=89658 )
2. Create a MYSQL database and a database user, then assign full privileges to your user. Make sure you WRITE DOWN your database and user info so you can retrieve it at any time.
3. Unzip the coppermine installation files onto your hard disk. Also unzip your template files if you have downloaded some additional ones. I usually have a folder on my drive for COPPERMINE and have these two things in two folders within it.
4. Open your FTP client- I use Filezilla and then go to your website and choose the directory to install your gallery into. If your site is going to be just a gallery, you can install it in your root directory, otherwise make a new directory and name it. This will be the address for your Coppermine gallery. ie http://mysite.com would be your gallery address if you published to your root directory- or http://mysite.com/gallery would be the address if you were having your gallery installed in a directory on your site.
5. Load all of the files within the Coppermine installation folder to your directory. Once added, you can add the themes you downloaded and unzipped to the THEMES folder. Each theme will need to be added singly into their own folder- don’t load them into a single one within the THEMES folder.
6. Set user permissions- the program needs to be able to write to your database to install your site. I usually go ahead and go to the top level of my installation directory and right click on it in Filezilla and select FILE ATTRIBUTES. Set the value to 777 to allow install to occur.
7. Once this is done- open your gallery directory in your browser. You should get a page directing you to the installation page for Coppermine. If you do not, then ad the suffix index.php to your address- this should fix this. At your install page you will be asked to provide your database name and user info. Fill in all fields and that is it! You will then be directed to your coppermine homepage.
8. Set your coppermine settings in the config panel. You can change your theme, add links to your website or forum, set every detail on using coppermine. Some recommendations: Use GD 2 to handle images and make thumbs and make sure you have selected /usr/bin/ as your path for converting photos or the thumbnail tool won’t work. Also- don’t use the random photo display option- it is a resource hog. Instead replace the breadcrum list with  breadcrumb/lastalb,2/catlist/alblist/lastup,2
9. I recommend not allowing people to register and making albums public to eliminate SPAMMERs from accessing your gallery.
10. If you load pics using the FTP tools, you will want to make sure you go in and set the file attributes to 777 before you try to add them to your gallery using the bulk loader.

HAVE FUN! Coppermine is a flexible tool and ideal for adding photos over time. Now you know how to install it on any PHP/MYSQL server.

For 1.5GB of free server space I recommend 000webhost.com

This will allow you to load about 1000 photos without any problems- make sure images are sized to about 1600px as maximum size for easy viewing and loading.

Free album hosting for fansites! June 29, 2009

I have previously talked about using my favorite webhosting service for hosting Coppermine galleries for your fansite or collections of photos. Today I want to talk about an alternate type of gallery you can load that is really easy to use and does not require any database programming.

How to set up a gallery

1. Sign up for an account on a webhosting site- click on the banner above to get 1.5 GB of free space from 000webhost.com
2. Download the web-album application J-Album from http://j-album.net/
3. Organize your photos on your hard drive into folders as you would like to display them in an album
4. Open j-album , pick a layout theme and start to build an album. Once you have all of your photos in the order you like in folders and you have added any links you would like in the settings area, click on the make album link. This will generate all of the html you need to link your photos into a nice album that is ready to publish to the web. I recommend choosing the option to copy originals so that all photos are in your album file for easy loading purposes. This is also helpful later. MAKE SURE THAT YOU NEVER CHOOSE TO REMOVE a folder from your album projects- just exclude them as one of the quirks of J-album is that it will remove your files from your harddrive erasing  your photos!
5. Once the album is made, you can choose to publish it directly from your J-album interface. It will first try to publish to the j-album site- you want to make sure you select the option to publish to an alternate site. At this point enter your ftp info. You will be asked if you want to load to the main directory- if your site is to be used just as an album- say ok and proceed. The program will run until your album is loaded. You can add additional photos later by updating your album project and adding more pics, then repeating the publishing protocol. You can load a j-album with up to about 500 HQ photos to your free 000webhost.com account without any problems. You can load many more photos if they are not HQs. To conserve space- I recommend not making slides and using intermediate pictures, just link the thumbs directly to your originals. This will speed up the time taken to make the album and publish it both.

That is it! Photo albums in a jiff! Make sure you register with J-album and get an account there. You can add your albums to your account and add counters and stats using thier album gadgets once your album has been published.

You can check out my most recent webalbum which has a collection of HQ promo photos for the defunct CBS vampire series Moonlight as an example:

I have a j-album address which will allow you to browse my other j-albums as well

http://jalbum.net/browse/user/album/240106/

You can access the album direct as well without the navigation panel

http://moonlight.hostei.com/

If you have more photos- you can use your paid hosting service and publish your albums to directories. To do this, instead of using the j-album publishing tool, use a ftp tool ( I recommend filezilla) and open your album project. You will see a variet of files, you want the album files. Open the album files up and then load all of the files in the folder to your hard drive in the directory you want to have your album appear on. That is it. Nothing else to do.

One tip for making a gallery with any application- make sure your photo and gallery names are not too long. Many hosting companies have limits on file names. Also- make sure your photos are sized to fit on your host. Usually I try to have my photos under 4MB in size. You can use a program like Easy Thumbnails or VSO Image Resizer to shrink the size of your UHQ images to ones more hosting friendly with ease.

Fixing XML Queue problem with Filezilla June 29, 2009

This is a quick tech tip that will take care of a really annoying problem.

The upgrade to Filezilla that I installed earlier this spring suddenly started giving me an error everytime I opened and closed the program- it said “XML queue document not formed well- queue will not be saved upon exit” and gave me a path to the document. After upgrading and reinstalling the software- which did not fix the problem I took care of it with this simple solution.

Follow the path to the file that has the error- on my PC it was in my ApsData Roaming folder- remove the file. I had two files titled queue – I removed both.

Shut down filezilla and then re-install the program. The missing file which had become corrupted is replaced with a clean working file and your program is restored to working order.

See- I told you this was a simple one!

84 Lost Wallpapers in Zip file June 8, 2009

LOST Official Wallpapers Collection from 1024×768 to 1920 widescreen size

DL

http://rapidshare.com/files/242475653/LostWallpapers_Multipleverses.com.zip

Gallery View:

http://multipleverses.iimmgg.com/gallery/g33c5d0d4870354d90cdb1869febdea79/

All of these are from ABC or other affiliates airing Lost

I HAVE A HUGE HQ collection of UNMARKED LOST promo photos in our forums – all in rar files for easy downloading! Close to 2000 HQ and UHQ images. LOST fans- come on by and grab some great stuff!

HQ Photos and Screencaps in the Multipleverses TV & Movie Talk Forums

Smallville, Supernatural and much more!

Free Fan Site Resources ! More space now for your site October 31, 2008

I have previously reported that I use 000webhost for some small galleries because they have awesome fully featured hosting for free. In the past they offered 350 MB which isn’t that much for hosting a gallery- but now they have increased their storage for their standard free sites to 1.5GB which is plenty for a starter Coppermine gallery or to get your blog going!

Have fan fic of your own? How about using one of their templates to design you own site you can archive your work on?

I think it is great that 000webhost offers this ad free- you don’t have to worry about your readers being annoyed by pop-ups and viruses.

Click on the banner above to learn more and sign up!

Free cPanel Web Hosting with PHP5/Mysql – no advertising! August 19, 2008

This is part of my ongoing thread about free fan-site resources.

Register now: http://www.000webhost.com/57809.html

They can offer you a free web hosting package packed with advanced features for hosting & building professional dynamic websites. They provide secure free web space with all the web hosting tools you could possibly ever need.

Our package includes:
- 350 MB of Disk Space, 100 GB Bandwidth
- Host your own domain (http://www.yourdomain.com)
- cPanel Powered Hosting (you will love it)
- Over 500 website templates ready to download
- Easy to use website builder
- Free POP3 Email Box with Webmail access
- FTP and Web based File Manager
- PHP, MySQL, Perl, CGI, Ruby.
- And many more..

Click here to visit : http://www.000webhost.com/57809.html

Free Website Template Builders July 29, 2008

General Website Design Tool:

Sharing another cool website design tool- dotemplate.com has a really nifty tool. You can take your header banner if you have one, your custom background, and build a web page template using your specs online!

As an example of a page built using their system- check out my .info page which goes with my Multipleverses sites

http://multipleverses.info/

As you can see I used my standard header then matched the background and font colors to go with my main site http://multipleverses.com/

I edited the html then using notepad adding in my text, links and widget codes. This is basic html at its most basic- believe me! I am no programmer. To load your page you sill select a directory you are installing the page into, then use your FTP client to load it. If you are loading your home page this will go into your public html directory in your main directory which should be yousitename.com/ and then when you have uploaded your template it will appear as your front page.

To load another page, make a directory and then load to the directory. I have my MV info loaded on my main site here http://multipleverses.com/info/ in my /info/ directory.

WordPress Blog Custom Template Design Tool:

For wordpress.org installations like the one on my multipleverses.com site I used the WordPress Theme Generator

This free tool is a must for the non-coding types among us. You again do your layout as you please and then simply install the theme into your themes folder on your server using your FTP client.

I added in my hosting company’s info by adding the html tag right before the </body> tag at the end of the page- again using notepad.

I like that this WordPress tool does not insert any big ads- just a simple line about how you made your template in the footer.

If you use 000webhost.com which I recommend for personal websites both of these templates work nicely with their fantastico installer for wordpress and using their ftp client to load a simple web page.

If you are looking to build out a big blog and gallery- TMD hosting has tons of templates you can choose from as well as being able to install anything you like from these site designers. TMD is great for newbies- they have excellent support and though their services are not free- they offer tons of free support you do not get elsewhere.

Free Domain Redirect Service July 29, 2008

When I cancelled my old hosting account I had a domain name I had purchased to go with my main domain- it was the .net version of my .com

I needed to find a good service to re-direct any traffic from my one site to my other- I found a great FREE solution!

000webhost offers free websites with 350 MB storage and 100 GB bandwidth that are ideal for this purpose.

Sign up for a free account using the name of the domain you wish to re-direct, then go in and set the nameservers for the domain in the domain info area of your domain registrar site, then go in to the domain re-direct area in your control panel on 000webhost and input the site you are re-directing your traffic to.

That is it! Traffic will be flowing to your site in about 24 hours as the new re-direct is propogated over the internet.

My account that I used for this was http://multipleverses.net which I host with 000webhost and it redirects traffic to my active site http://multipleverses.com

Fan Site Resources for Novices July 8, 2008

1st recommendation- I found a nice FREE webhost that can handle Coppermine! Great for retired shows where you don’t have tons of pics, or for hosting fan art. You get 350 MB free space plus the databases and software installed automatically for you. NO ADS on the site- you can customize things nicely.

http://supernatural66.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/free-gallery-hosting-coppermine-for-dummies/

2nd recommendation- Magnify! My favorite video boards- you can customize your channels to match your website and have control over what is posted. Their new video player has a nice looking viewer when you embed videos. If your content is bigger than the 50 MB limit- try converting files to flv before loading- usually you can shrink them to fit. If they are still too big you can always load to Megavideo or Youtube or whatever else and import the links to your channel.

An example of one of my Magnify channels is my humongous Smallville and Supernatural clip library
http://tvpromosntrailers.magnify.net/

3rd recommendation Choosing a blog

If you are not a programmer and are not keen on learning a lot of coding, then Blogger or WordPress.com are for you. Blogger is part of Google, WordPress.com is a separate site, both blog set ups have some nice templates you can choose and you can either name your blog with a domain you have purchased or you can choose a name for your blog that is a sub-domain of the blog service.

My two Smallville blogs are both on WordPress.com and that is how I got comfortable using their system so that when I wanted to launch a fully customizable site I already knew the ins and outs of how to post things and how to set things up.

The OSCK Smallville Blog http://osck.wordpress.com/

I have also worked with blogger as a contributor to SpoilerTV. SpoilerTV is hosted by blogger but with a lot of extras to pay for their space needs and the ability to link in several separte blogs into one interface.

http://spoilertv.blogspot.com/

When I chose to do my own hosted website- I chose WordPress for my blog because I like the flexibility. It is not perfect though- all blogging software requires PHP and a MSQL database and the scripts which make the calls to the database tend to hog a lot of server resources . I ran into an issue with my first hosting company because they couldn’t handle the scripts even though they advertised that they could. This is one nice thing about Blogger or WordPress.com- you get unlimited bandwidth and nobody hassles you about these types of things because you can only customize so much- the coding is pretty well fixed. Best bet for a casual fan? Go with a free site , pick a template and work on customizing your header and don’t worry about the rest!

If you want to work on the coding and are planning a blog to just showcase a few things a month- maybe for your fanfic or fan art- my free website guys at 000webhost are pretty good at that too. You can install a fully customizable blog and manage it using standard webhosting tools. If you run out of space or bandwidth it is pretty easy to move a WordPress blog to another site ( back everything up once a week and make a copy of your backups on your hard drive!) or you can upgrade your hosting with them pretty reasonably.

What now?
You have a gallery, a video channel and a blog site. How do you tie this all together? How do you cross promote your sites?

If you know how to code in css you can easily add links to your channels into your blog coding. If you are not a CSS person ( I AM NOT) then you can cheat and use links and widgets!

Coppermine allows you to enter your home page url in this box in the theme set up menu entitled “custom menu link name” enter the name of your site in this field and then input your site URL in the next box. That is it! Now you have a link on your Coppermine gallery with the name of your site pointing it to your site.

Magnify allows you to link to any home page you like in the user/channel menu settings. Additionally you can add links and banners for your site as I have using simple HTML coding in the headers and footers on your site.

WordPress.com and Blogger allow you to add links using html and their widgets – I have a number of them in the sidebars on my OSCK blog. This is done with VERY simple html coding entered into a text widget box. I load a photo to my photo host ( I use imageshack- also free!) , it gives me linking code for the photo,I add a little text and the correct code to add the link to the photo pointing people to the site I want them to visit and VOILA! Linked pages.

I will post more recommendations in this category. Feel free to add your own awesome free/easy to use tools too!