Piwigo Showcase reaches its first 50 galleries

The Piwigo Showcase is under active preparation. To make it short, the Showcase is a Live Piwigo Galleries Directory. Each Piwigo live gallery is shown as a screenshot, a description, some tags and a link to see the gallery in action.

I have just validated registration #50. I hope we’ll have several hundreds galleries before the end of summer 2011.

Latest additions on Piwigo Showcase

How to register ?

• either you have Piwigo 2.1+ and you install plugin Showcase Register which will prefill the registration form, see forum topic Register on Piwigo Showcase
• or you simply use Piwigo.org contact form and give your gallery address, your name, a description and some tags (keywords)

Discover Piwigo Showcase →

Dropbox, data ownership, who cares?

Dropbox, the famous storage solution in the cloud, has announced this week-end a change in their Terms Of Use. I hope I understood correctly: by signing up on dropbox.com, Dropbox gets the right to use content uploaded by users. Dropbox doesn’t own your files, they just can “use” it. It doesn’t mean that Dropbox will start to sell your photos, videos and confidential documents you have sent on their server, it just means they can “use” them. Facebook, Picasa Web Albums by Google, Flickr by Yahoo… they all have the same kind of conditions in their Terms Of Use.

I work in the “hosting content” business and maybe what’s obvious for me is not that obvious for the average user: nothing is free. If you don’t pay for your 2GB of storage, you have to wonder how the provider pays his own bills! So when a provider doesn’t ask you for money, he asks for something else. The right to use your data the way they want, for example. Displaying targetted advertisements is another example.

So who cares? I thought that “nearly nobody” was the right answer, until I saw a huge number of messages on Twitter saying “today I close my Dropbox account, I disagree with their new TOS”. Actually, it seems that “a few people” care. See also blog posts Put it in the Cloud? Are You Nuts?, Oh Dropbox, We Loved You Once…, I’ve deleted my Dropbox account or the  less “panic” style Dropbox, cloud storage, and who owns your files?

For example, if you want to share your photos, publicly or privately, what’s the solution if you want to keep your full right of use on your own photos?

1. host it by yourself. You can use a software like Piwigo: download it from Piwigo.org (Zenphoto or Menalto Gallery are also fine)
2. if you don’t want to host it by yourself, you can open an account on Piwigo.com: this is not free, that’s €39/year, but we don’t use your data.

In the end I think that “no so many people” care, but we hear them on Twitter, and it’s good to know that some solutions exist for them.

WordPress.org and PHP & MySQL statistics

7 months ago, in post Phone Home or when an application sends data back to mothership, I said:

If WordPress could make its PHP/MySQL statistics public, then Piwigo wouldn’t need to create its own phoning home feature!

And it seems that my wish has now come true! WordPress.org has recently added a Statistics page with the versions of WordPress, PHP and MySQL.

PHP & MySQL statistics, published by WordPress.org

This is really interesting to me. We have a clear idea of how many web application users are still using old versions of PHP (ie 92.8% are using PHP 5.2+)  or MySQL (ie 96.3% are using MySQL 5.0+). It shows that not so many users are still under very old PHP versions!

Thank you WordPress for doing the dirty work of collecting this data, and thank you WordPress.org for publishing the info!