Hey everyone, I wanted to let you guys know that the next Beta of AWSOM Pixgallery 4.4.4 will be available in a few days with a full stable release shortly after–all thanks to Nathan Moinvaziri, the original Pixgallery engine designer. We’ve managed to get back on track and get many new fixes and enhancements in place, most notably the new custom folder image system is now working. So hang in there just a little while longer while I do some testing and rewrite some other areas of the code to work with our new engine system.

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I’ve come across an interesting service that might be of interest to artists. Stanford University has a website up at http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/ that claims to be able to convert static images (raster pixel based) into vector based images (mathematics based, scalable) in a manner that loses very little of the original look. Why is this important? Well, to print or make merchandise out of artwork it is often important to resize the image to different sizes, which raster based images often times do very poorly–especially if an increase in size is necessary (think poster printing). A vector based image is based on a mathematical formula that can be increased or decreased and retain the exact same look and information (you are basically just adding or subtracting numbers), so you can scale a vector image to any size.

The best part of this new service is that it’s currently free. It is semi-limited right now though in that it claims to be optimized more for logos–so scaling your aunt Bertha’s birthday party photo probably won’t work well–but for most people getting their logo or other artwork into vector form for free in a high quality form is a no-brainer.

I’d be curious to hear from anyone who uses the service if it worked well for them. I’m not an artist so I can’t really judge these things. Feel free to send me an email or post on the Harknell.com forums about it.

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I just wanted to let everyone know that the AWSOM Pixgallery 4.4.4 Beta has an issue in regard to one of it’s new features: Custom Gallery thumbnail images. Basically I didn’t add in the correct code to enable this properly, so if you use the “pxggalleryimage” image file name using the same image type (jpg, png, gif) in multiple folders you will get the same image as the thumbnail in all of them. (but, if you use 3 different file types, one gif, one png, and one jpg you will get different images and it will work right for 3 folders).

DOH! I left out the code to select the correct image for each folder to be different. Nothing else is affected though, so if you weren’t trying to use this feature there aren’t any issues and you won’t have any thumbnail problems. So hold off on using this feature (unless you only want to set 1-3 folders with custom images) until I get the corrected code into a new Beta. I’ll post here when it’s updated.

Sorry about that, just another reminder of how Beta means exactly what it is, unfinished.

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A news version of the AWSOM News Announcement plugin for Wordpress (version 1.3.3) is now available for download from it’s AWSOM.org product page. This new version features a usability upgrade: When an admin or “Manage Options” level user is logged into the site they will see an “Edit News Post” link on the page that will allow them to go directly to the Manage AWSOM News admin page to edit the news post.

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The newest Beta of the upcoming AWSOM Pixgallery version 4.4.4 has been released and is available for download from the Pixgallery product page. This version adds in a very requested feature to allow editing of image captions directly through the single image view page. Admins or users with the “Manage Options” level role capability can now click a link under any image on the single image view page to go directly to the edit captions page for that image. This enhancement makes it much easier to add in captions and update them when needed.

An additional bug fix is also included in this release to correct an issue that had certain themes mis-place the name/caption text on the single image page.

You can get a full rundown on the additions in this Beta version by reading the Beta release information page.

As is usual with Beta software, while I believe this version is stable, please be aware that issues could arise in a production setting and it is best to test this version in a test environment before using live.

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