Have been working on a refresh of the willow site and could not work out why the majority of thumbnail images were 20K yet others were 2K. I stumbled on the issue when a bug with the handling on EXIF data presented itself.

When ImageMagick scales images it will copy any EXIF data unless told not to. The images on the willow site contained approximately 18K of EXIF data and this was being copied into the thumbnail variations.

eZ publish makes it easy to add filters for image variations. Simply add the following line to image.ini.append.php in your siteaccess file:

[ImageMagick]
Filters[]=strip=+profile "*" +comment

[small]
Filters[]=strip=

This will strip EXIF information for "small" image variations and can be added to others by simply adding the Filters[] line to the variations definition.

Newer versions of ImageMagick have a -strip flag that will also remove EXIF data. To use this replace the [ImageMagick] section with:

[ImageMagick]
Filters[]=strip=-strip

This will work on all versions of eZ publish 3 that are using ImageMagick to create image variations.

This has reduced the page size of some of the willow collection pages from 856 kb to 168 kb !

In this week's newsletter, we bring you news about newly released beta versions of both eZ publish and eZ components, the announcement of a new tutorial, and a brief description of the Grenland IT Expo 2006.

Tobias Schlitt informs us today about the posting of a new tutorial for ez Components they've created over on the eZ community section of the site.

We finally got a tutorial about eZ components online. I wrote a little example application for that, which realizes a very basic image gallery on basis of the eZ components. It explains how to use a lot of our components in the real world, like Database, PersistentObject, ImageConversion, and some more.

Obviously the source code for the tutorial is available right along side and any feedback you have for them is always welcome (maybe a suggestion for future tutorials?)

We finally got a tutorial about eZ components online. I wrote a little example application for that, which realizes a very basic image gallery on basis of the eZ components. It explains how to use a lot of our components in the real world, like Database, PersistentObject?, ImageConversion?, and some more. You can directly view it online and download it's source code here. Would be great to get some feedback on it!

The team behind the Symfony Project have updated their distribution today with the release of version 0.6.2 of the framework. Along with this, they've updated the site with a lot more content, both about their framework (documentation updates) and some samples showing how to use it (new tutorials).

First off, there's a new tutorial covering the use of sortable lists with the framework - comapring and contrasting it to the normal Ajax methods of creating these lists.

Secondly, they've published new extensive documentation about the Ajax helpers the framework uses to speed coding time and make advanced functionality simple to add. Several of them are even based on the Rails+script.aculo.us features so many developers look for.

Lastly, the askeet tutorial series has been updated to make it a bit more "newbie friendly", taking some of the things down a level furhter for those just diving into the wild world of Ajax.

It's great to see this quickly maturing framework keep its push going - past the 6 month mark now - and just keeps getting better with each version.

Justin Silverton has a new tutorial today demonstrating the use of a script, FeedForAll, to automatically grab and display RSS feeds from a remote site.

First, he tackles the templates for the incoming feeds, listing out the variables that can be customized for each of the feeds you're using, making it a very flexible tool. He follows that up with a look at actually executing the script, both off of their servers (rss2html.com) and on a local system with the feed of your choice.

You can check out their site for all of the details on the script, or some examples of it in action.

In his latest post, Tobias Schlitt mentions a first step they've made towards eZ components version 1.1 - a release of the 1.1beta1 version yesterday.

Included in the release are enhancements like sub-select and multi-join support for the query builder, parsing emails easily with the Mail component, and automatic help text generation via the ConsoleTools.

Two new components were also added - File (for dealing with all things filesystem) and SystemInformation (providing a wealth of knowledge about the system the scripts are on).

Yesterday we released eZ components version 1.1beta1, a first step to the next feature release of eZ components. The first release does not contain all enhancements, yet, so a 2nd beta will definitely follow. Beside that, the Template engine will be released in about a week, which is IMHO the most awaited component for 1.1. Several great enhancements are already included in 1.1beta1, like sub-select and multi-join support for the query builder in our Database component, parsing mails with the Mail component and automatic help text generation for the ConsoleTools?. We also have 2 new components: File - which provides a lot of convenience methods for dealing with files in PHP - and SystemInformation?, which can be used to determine information about the underlying system, an application gets installed on.

You should read more about 1.1beta1 and download the new package for testing.

Google Calendar displayed in Mozilla Firefox.

The calendar events are fetched via the Evolution Data Server and available, for instance, in the GNOME Date & Time panel applet.

New in GNOME 2.14 is the Deskbar. Power users, keyboard enthusiasts and users of the old panel command line will find this replacement incredibly powerful and easy to use. Deskbar uses plugins (written in Python) to provide search functionality for programs, files, folders, bookmarks, contacts and much more. Deskbar can also use the live search functionality of Google Live, Yahoo and Beagle.