The reason we cannot use BloggerBot to upload our profile picture

I earlier began using Hello to post pictures to my blog. I learned that it publishes pictures in a Blogger owned server, in my case at least, photo1.blogger.com. Then I found that even if you delete the post in which you included the picture, the picture stays in the server. I cannot find as of yet a way to delete it.

Then, and because I am not satisfied with my free Brinkster account (it fails to download at least 20% of the times), I though photo1.blogger.com would be the best place to host my profile picture, but it didn't work.

This is what I think it is happening:

1. When I try to update my profile, Profile Manager changes case of the URL field before testing if it can download the picture. I think it converts the URL to upper case.
2. It tests the URL against the server which is running thttpd which in turns is "extremely case sensitive".

If I am right, you cannot solve the problem by changing the picture name yourself to upper case because Profile Manager changes even the /img directory the URL to upper case.

Updated on Friday, May 14, 2004, 9:40 AM:

Mike, from the Picasa support forums answers me:

Yes, in fact all UNIX-based webservers are case-sensitive (because the filesystem is!) In a URL, the only thing you should rely on to not be case sensitive is the domain name. It doesn't have much to do with thttpd; you'd find the same thing with Apache.

We'll look into this bug and see if there's a fix on our end...we've been talking about forcing all extensions to ".jpg" to avoid these kinds of problems.

mike

How embarrassing it is to have to admit I have no experience in UNIX-based HTTP servers! Anyway, I know UNIX file systems are case sesitive, and I know UNIX-based web servers are case sensitive. I just failed to use my knowdledge because I don't have to deal with this stuff everyday.

I don't think Mike will find a solution on the Picasa side, as Blogger's Profile Manager is also uppercasing the /IMG part or the URL, which Picassa cannot change.

Blogger should solve this, as it is also failing on other UNIX-based web servers out there. I know because I tried uploading my profile picture to my old web server before opening my account in Brinkster.com.

Updated on Thursday, May 20, 2004, 10:05 AM:

It is working normaly now. My profile picture is hosted in Blogger, and published trough Hello.