Forums > Technical Discussion > Help! what's best free host for pic gallery, HOTLINKING to here, messageboard?

Posted: 10th Aug 2002
true, Malcolm, thanx, small free hosting first, then grow.

currently gonna use our account at exeat.com (does not offer messageboard) and see if i can link it back and forth to an ezboard board. then may still want to move the whole thing.

any recommendations, friends?

molten cheers,

~ FireMike

FireMikeZ@yahoo.com (personal messages welcome, no promo spam, please!)
Laguna, California, US

Posted: 10th Aug 2002
yep.
CGI Resources.
CGI Resources offers:
Free Hosting
NO ADS
30mb Space
heaps of other trendy doobies and doobettes.
I used to use them a lot, now I am lucky enough to be hosted by Blackglass.org which is a writers site(hosts writers for free, unlimited space pretty much...and no ads at all...yasmin is a legend

cheers,
sam

My Site

BAHOOGA! It's the penguin-people!Gertrude, get me my lollypop and we'll lick 'em to death..and?

Posted: 11th Aug 2002
sam, thanx so much, i'll check both sites out, including the writer's for other stuff of mine!

how do you pronounce lluhmas, and where would i trawl for its meaning?

hey, your site's design is slick. ever read a harlan ellison short called "i have no mouth and i must scream"?

quote:

---

e y e (and e y e t w o) excerpts:

My eye is
an animal
that stopped being omnivorous
long ago.
In the beginning
It made do with little:
a few branches, a few leaves,
a flower, a stem.
Then it moved onto essences
and only other eyes
...and now it simply won't
swallow anything.
It clenches its eyelashes like teeth
terrified by themselves
and accepts notion[s].

...It once devoured everything
in its vision,
until that one day
it saw the world
as a rotted oyster.

~ Sam

---

[ 12 August 2002, 15:01: Message edited by: FireMike ]

molten cheers,

~ FireMike

FireMikeZ@yahoo.com (personal messages welcome, no promo spam, please!)
Laguna, California, US

Posted: 16th Aug 2002
now we're using Lycos Tripod UK, which permits hotlinking (their US sites don't)

lluhmas, CGI Resources is a worthwhile referal, see there's a whole world of PHP of which i was unaware entirely... i'm an occasional crash-course tech, learn pretty fast, but not deep programmer... but while that site had a listing of sources, they don't offer service themselves, and it was still a bit hard finding services with the combo of features sought

anyone have further suggestions, now that our stuff is up and growing on a more friendly server than before, and still free, with fairly innocuous ads though visible ones on this host, please gimme what ya got. found exotic stuff too like digitalrice rumored to have 3 month waiting lists...? still open to moving stuff again.

molten cheers,

~ FireMike

FireMikeZ@yahoo.com (personal messages welcome, no promo spam, please!)
Laguna, California, US

Posted: 16th Aug 2002
Oh shit! Oh Shit Oh Shit!
Sorry Mike!!!

I screwed up the URL... its CFM-resources.com
try it out. It has evrything I said it did in the original post...sorry bout that man.

But yeah, try CFM, they are really nice guys. and you dont have to do a coldfusion page to be hosted there, they host anyone...

cheers,
sam

BAHOOGA! It's the penguin-people!Gertrude, get me my lollypop and we'll lick 'em to death..and?

Posted: 17th Aug 2002
so far, lluhmas, know that last site's down to 10 mb for free accounts, not quite sure about whether they permit hotlinking, damn, most free sites don't tell you much before you go through the whole registration and setup of an initial site page, upload something then test it yourself, not even help on much if you just register first!

molten cheers,

~ FireMike

FireMikeZ@yahoo.com (personal messages welcome, no promo spam, please!)
Laguna, California, US

Posted: 19th Aug 2002
Hey Mike

I had some problems setting up my web site too. In the end it was just easier to host it myself, so I have one PC connected to my little cable modem 24/7. This isn't an easy thing to set up and not for the faint of heart but worked out very well for me because of no size limits (we have snotloads of pics on the site) and best of all no advertising.

I registered my DNS with https://www.enameco.com/
and I have to say I was pretty disappointed with them. They're primarily for people that use web hosting services and the problems I encountered were all to do with their name servers. Every time someone went to the site the URL would never change. This was because enameco put a window around the page - you couldn't see it but it was there and so url's were all cocked up and google won't crawl sites set up like that.

So I changed my name servers to https://www.zoneedit.com
and I couldn't be happier. It's a totally free service - especially for a small site like mine that is really only for friends and family.

As for your messageboard dilemma I would recommend checking out the Front Page wizard for this. My message boards have only been up a few days and there's no way to filter crap out of them so they're wide open to abuse, but they do the trick and I don't need to depend on anyone else for them.

My suggestion is to get a good DNS provider with reasonable nameservers - like I say zoneedit is great for me, and have the frontpage server extensions enabled because it gives you a little more power for reporting and such.

Here in Houston is a company called everyone's internet - www.ev1.net, they give a free 300MB with a 9.95 a month account and might be something to consider.

Cheers
John the kiwi
www.johnthekiwi.com

Posted: 25th Aug 2002
excellent input, John, thank you very much! i'll see what i can make of these options.

sam, CFM-resources' free sites are down to 10 MB, and like most hosts, not clear what the features are. sure we're likely to move up to at least simple but decent cgi or other member user self-posting options as things develop.

molten cheers,

~ FireMike

FireMikeZ@yahoo.com (personal messages welcome, no promo spam, please!)
Laguna, California, US

Posted: 28th Aug 2002
You can get 250 megs of space with no ads and quite a nice interface for free from:

fotopic

I haven't tried it, but i know the guy who wrote/owns it.

Posted: 29th Aug 2002
flid,

is that true? it's amazing! will check it out. and lluhmas, John the Kiwi, check out this Props page. . . thanx

on the photo galleries only side of things, i did check out the host of adam rice's galleries, even set up a personal account to try it out, and admired the picture-frame borders in the Glastonbury gallery our UK HoP pyros have, still looking for something which will allow self-posting by photographers so the pix don't have to be collected by central webmaster and posted into page formats on desktop and re-uploaded, though we got a nice, fairly simple 2-frames effect, including using the thumbs frame to put icons to written reviews and to the forum for the event. still looking for all free while we're starting it all up.

any ideas on automatic photo galleries which several photographers/ members could use? censorship is not yet an issue, but good to have one where webmaster could dump out any spam later.

[ 30 August 2002, 07:27: Message edited by: FireMike ]

molten cheers,

~ FireMike

FireMikeZ@yahoo.com (personal messages welcome, no promo spam, please!)
Laguna, California, US

Posted: 30th Aug 2002
i've written one as it happens, its quite nice (auto gallery building, thumbnail creation, resizing, copyright info outputting, full stats, usercomments for each foto, admin module etc) but i haven't released it yet. It'll probably appear under the GNU GPL on sourceforge in the near future, but you need a unix box with PHP and MySQL to run it.

If you have PHP, ASP or Perl on your webserver its really quite easy (like under 20 lines of code) to let users upload their own pictures. I'm sure there are many free code examples provided you have the hosting

Posted: 30th Aug 2002
flid!

we chose UK Lycos coz they specifically support PHP and MySQL! and we'll be happy to migrate while we're yet not widely known to the other site you recommended if it will get rid of our ads!

is your code close enough to ask about getting it, or a lil help if i try to dive into how to install another? can you tell me the right sites to search for such code, and what it would be called in a search, please! wonderful to hear such a specific response.

~ flid

[ 31 August 2002, 15:58: Message edited by: FireMike ]

molten cheers,

~ FireMike

FireMikeZ@yahoo.com (personal messages welcome, no promo spam, please!)
Laguna, California, US

Posted: 31st Aug 2002
>wonderful to hear such a specific response.

I have a habit of taking perfectly non geeky forums and lowering the tone somewhat. For those normal people reading this post you'll probably want to skip it

>is your code close enough to ask about getting
>it, or a lil help if i try to dive into how to
>install another?

It's not really near finished at the moment, and i can't give an approximate time of completetion. The thing is that i wrote it primarily for myself (mainly because i couldn't find anything as nice as it online for free) and haven't written it with people in mind who don't understand the code/how it works. Whilst the main frontend looks quite nice, the admin module works but isn't exactly userfriendly - i wrote it good enough for me to understand whats going on. I have quite a lot of other projects I'm working on and want to release soon, so it's kind of at the bottom of the pile. I'm not a paid designer, and having a new addictive hobby doesn't help the amount of time i spend programming

The thing about mine which makes it suited only for people who own their own servers (ie that is they own the hardware or they know the guy who does) is this: When images are submitted and a gallery created it forks a perl script into the background to do the image manipulation (ie thumbnails, 800x600 versions etc). This is because it takes time to complete (several minutes in some cases) and php isn't designed to handle large jobs. Although i love php for web stuff, it just doesn't handle itself well enough compared to traditional languages for harder tasks. So the perl process in the background updates a temp file (filename is the session id) as it does the manipulation (via imagemagick), which a php script (in an iframe with a meta refresh) checks the progress of every 15 seconds.

I have never seen a free webhoster which allows users to fork background tasks (because if they are allowed people use them for irc bots, denial of service, spam relays etc). Also a free hoster would probably not have imagemagick libraries installed, nor a lot of commercial hosters. Its the kind of thing you can only get put on the server if you own or know who owns it.

You will find that most online gallery software that you can download the code of and is any good is designed for people who admin the machine its run on.

Although PHP has image manipulation functions of its own they are pretty slow and can't be guaranteed to complete even one large picture before the default script timeout has happened (generally 30 seconds for php). Also not all servers with PHP have the image module installed, for the simple reason that it cains CPU usage. On a machine hosting a couple of sites that's not a problem, but on free/cheap hosting the owners generally cram an obscene amount of users onto the same sickly server to maximize profits (i've seen servers without over 10,000 users), and they just can't cope with serving anything other than simple php and html.

If you plan on doing a lot of webdesign I can recomend learning PHP properly. I first came into contact with it about 3 years ago, because the server i was working on had it and i wanted to get it to paste html files together (which in php is just one command). Within a few months of using it i'd written a fully functional e-commerce system. It really is easy to pick up and you can do some neat stuff with it (esp if you have an SQL server). As for uploading pictures, you just need about 5 lines of php to handle the upload, save it to disk and create an SQL entry to the server with info about it. Then when you load the gallery you have a php script that does simple select queries on the database. There are many good books about this (ie Core PHP by Leon Atkinson) and websites such as www.devshed.com and www.weberdev.com have tutorials and code examples.

If you're not really interested in learning php (that is you are a normal sane person and want to remain that way) and you want free hosting, you'd probably be better off using the link i suggested above. I know the guy who wrote it (he also hosts the MySQL server for a site i do: www.guilfin.net) and it doesn't have a lot of users (ie its fast). The software is pretty simular to my own in terms of functionality and the server is one of his own (that's why he can offer 250 megs of space).

Hope this helps.

P.S. If you ever meet an ISP sysadmin, buy them a drink and become their friend. They may smell funny and drink half-pints, but you could end up getting free hosting on fast servers It's worked for me twice so far!

Posted: 19th Sep 2002
flid, thanx so much for advice. briefly checked out fotopic, mulling over its use now. and speaking of mulled, which i do like, half-pints? ah well, i'm a yank who loves a good Guiness, OK will shandy for light fun, and for chilled, an amber beer, a bit bitter but not hefel or too bitter, like San Francisco Anchor Steam and small-town-near-it Modesto, California's St. Stan's.

a brew for you when we meet!

thinking i'll have a go at learning PHP, not only for the gallery but it will get me out of the current business of hand-formatting and posting member pages and things, right?

molten cheers,

~ FireMike

FireMikeZ@yahoo.com (personal messages welcome, no promo spam, please!)
Laguna, California, US

Posted: 19th Sep 2002
still looking for a good free site, until end of year we put down minor $/quid/plata/scrim for one when we've used free to bang us up a quality site first.

our UK Lycos site sometimes has hidden from US viewers, and as far as we know has never been visible to anyone in New Zealand. so we want at least a mirror site, while that one's good when it does show up.

next stop: Fortune City, which ages ago i remember allowed you to put the banner ads at the bottom of your page, which is pretty unobtrusive, though who knows their policies now. did register a US Lycos site, has maybe 3 inches (8 cm) of ads at the top, leaving that alone while trying Fortune City

CURRENTLY our site's size is about 7 MB stored, medium-high graphics per page, and we may be about to use PHP if i can crash learn it, and could but have not used CGI yet - anyone know good sites for pre-writ free code for either PHP or CGI, please let me know.
~

ANY OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FREE SITES?

~
thanx so much for suggestions,

~ Mike & your pyro family at OrangeFire

molten cheers,

~ FireMike

FireMikeZ@yahoo.com (personal messages welcome, no promo spam, please!)
Laguna, California, US

Posted: 19th Sep 2002
you shouldn't need a mirror site, a hoster would have to be *extremely* poor to only offer access to certain contenants.

Dunno about free, generally you get what you pay for, and if you pay nothing 9 times out of 10 it's crap. There are many (thousands of) hosters charging a few dollars (like 5) a month for several hundred megs of space and offer php+mysql+mail+a few gigs of transfer+no ads. Don't expect tech support at that price and avoid resellers, but you should get what you want.

Ignore CGI, Perl is harder than PHP for what you want to use it for. Perl is a unix command line based language which has been adapted for web use, where as PHP was designed specifically for it. As a unix admin I do use Perl a lot, but never for web stuff. You can learn PHP in a week if you are dedicated, and get going almost straight away if you've used other languages.

Not sure about pre-written scripts, just do a google search. Generally speaking pre-written scripts for free are written by idiots looking for praise, anyone who knows the language could write a much better example in a few hours. I've seen some utter sh*te offered for free with tens of thousands of downloads.

Posted: 19th Sep 2002
thanx, flid, i'll try learning PHP, i'm a quick study, learned & forgot just the beginning of j-script, you'd totally laugh at what languages i ever learned, stuff b4 object-oriented (nobody'll understand now, so i'll tell ya: dirty cobol!. . . heh heh heh heh heh * cough *)

molten cheers,

~ FireMike

FireMikeZ@yahoo.com (personal messages welcome, no promo spam, please!)
Laguna, California, US

Posted: 19th Sep 2002
I'm sadely old enough to know what cobol is. PHP is oo by default, although you can create and use objects in it it isn't required. PHP is really a scripting language trying to be a programming language, in an effort to make the syntax as easy as possible you can create some really really sloppy, inefficient, working code.

If you want a useless language, check out brainfuck:

"Brainfuck is an incredibly easy to learn and incredibly annoying to program in language"