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I’ve gotten around to validating the code, and found a few bugs in the theme code. The pages should validate now.
A friend noticed a problem [difference] between MS IE and Firefox. The banner is not a link in firefox. That was subtle anyway, so I added a link to the main page in the links section, put the links at the top and always enabled the remainder of the menu on all pages. No reason to be subtle with navigation.
cheers,
djd
At least I think they are fixed…
You may have noticed that some pictures couldn’t be displayed. Well, I deployed Coppermine with a plug-in that allows some albums to be removed from the thumbnail lists so that more revealing photos would not show up on the front page. Well, the plug-in either had a bug, or my changes to provide a user interface introduced a bug that prevented images in those albums from being displayed at all.
All fixed now, I think. If you notice something, please comment to this post and I’ll try to address it. Or check the contact page for the email address.
thanks,
djd
Woops… Coppermine is fragile. See the comments.
Photos are loaded in the gallery. Just added some new ones that I took today. Waves crashing on the rocks and a fellow flying his RC Glider in 30 knots of wind.
enjoy,
djd
The site is now live on Godaddy hosting service!!
Forums are restored and live.
The photo gallery [coppermine] is installed, and photos will be added shortly.
Enjoy.
And Merry Christmas!!
I’ve spent a couple of days studying various web gallery solutions.
Requirements
My requirements are:
- Be suitable for a single person gallery. I’m not looking to build a photo portal, just my own galleries / albums.
- Handle EXIF photo data.
- Be easy to set up.
- Be attractive, with the ability to change themes, or select themes. And to customize my own theme.
- Be free, and open source.
Candidates
I found the following candidates. I’m sure this is not an exhaustive list. But I trust google to find the most popular candidates in the first couple of pages of a search.
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Testing the IImage Browser plugin to create a link from a thumbnail to an image in another window. Click on the image below and get a full size image in another window:
Here’s what the IImage Browser Plugin interface looks like.
Again. Click on the image for a full size view. You’ll have to coax your browser to display the whole image since it’s over 3000 pixels high.
The site has been down for about a day. The hoster, when asked, said
The home partition usage became exceeded so that we had to add a new drive to fix it. Currently we are working on the server and all the issues will be fixed soon.
Seems like they are real amateurs. The hosting is linux based. And it seems that they do not have proper monitoring and safeguards in place to provide reliable hosting. I may move to another hoster sooner than I had planned.
At this point I still can’t get in to maintain the site or backup the databases and FTP does not work.
Brittnay and I have done 3 shoots so far.
Shoot 1 - She joined Hollie and Shanda for a shoot in early November.
Brittnay and Shanda posed together for some shots on the first shoot.
gmax is a version of 3ds max that was intended for development of games. It is now out of support. And autodesk is no longer providing it for download.
You can find it here. Along with a few tutorials that I have captured.
A few months ago I realized that I need a heavy duty tool to keep track of my photographs. I did a lot of research and finally came up with IMatch.
I’m not going to go through all the research here. I found an informative list of tools and reviews in the forums over at DPReview and using google turned up a few other compendium pages that were helpful.
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I can never resist tweaking a theme. The new theme for today is a Windy Weather theme created from McStars. I’ve updated the image, and changed the color scheme to more of a purple for text, and leaving yellow for links.
I’d like a graphic in the header for this theme that suggests blowing water, which I consider an ambience for the site.
These are some pictures of my makeshift studio in my living room, some costumes and some pics for my new business card.
The new WordPress version of Windy Weather is now active and public.
This site is read-only, and for discussions, go over to our forums where you can register and post your own comments on topics and discuss nonsense that Darrell and others have posted.
The old site is marked as such and will be maintained for historical purposes, for a while.
How do you like the new theme??
I’ve modified the ICE theme with a new background, 404 page and search everywhere. Minor tweaks elsewhere.
Hope you like it. You can discuss it in the Forums…
I have posted a number of photos for sale at ShutterPoint.
You may be interested in checking them out.
I have had my site up there for a few weeks now and have gotten no visits from buyers. I’m wondering if the site has any buyers at all. I’m going to try the site for 6 months and see if I get any buyer visits and any sales. It’s costing me about $75 for 6 months for 500MB or space for about 200 photos. Very expensive if all I’m going to do is share photos.
I have a site on Model Mayhem.
I have a few pictures there and correspond with models and photographers in Oregon and elsewhere. You may be interested in checking the site if you are interested in photography and models. The site is free.
I’ve had my website for maybe 10 years. I’ve gone through several stages in building my site over those years.
DreamWeaver and Netload
I began to build it with Macromedia DreamWeaver 2 once upon a time and at that time FTP in DW was a mess, so I used netload to update the site. Netload is out of print now, but it was a fine shareware program built by an aussie that kept track of the file dates on a site and only uploaded the files that had changed on your local drive.
Enter Frames
Over the years DW MX has gotten better and FTP functions now work.
In an effort to update the site, I rebuilt everything using frames and style sheets to attempt to separate style from content. I found that this worked ok, but didn’t really change anything. Not very much style could be changed – colors and fonts only. And there are no real modern features that are available with this method. No site wide search and no scanning of articles by date or cross referencing based on content. And no easy way to add an article without using FTP. So it’s still a dead, static website.
phpBB Forums
The tyranny of FTP has been a drag and over the last couple of years I’ve studied and used some new tools. Of course, separating content from presentation is all the rage, and this is usually termed content management. My first foray into the world of content management was installing and using phpBB, the free bulletin board software based on php scripting. I developed several themes and learned about adding the extensions, especially for uploading attachments. And along the way I learned to keep content management software up to date so that script kitties couldn’t break into my site and either destroy it or add users and spam posts.
But I found that my friends weren’t really interested in participating in discussions. So after about two years, essentially the only posts on the site are mine and the forums are separate from the main site, which is unnecessary and cumbersome.
Power Tools
About 6 months ago I took another trek into the world of content management tools and studied PostNuke and WordPress. At that time I tried to run these tools on a local apache webserver with a MySQL database.
PostNuke
I was very successful running PostNuke. I added some themes and found that it’s installation and customizaton was even easier than phpBB in many ways. But I also found that PostNuke was not what I wanted to use to build a private site. PostNuke, and it’s cousin phpNuke, are suited to build portals for fan sites, for games, or other areas of interest where file and picture uploading and discussions are the intended activity. The site manages large number of users and allows each user to have their own customized experience with a different theme. It is not easily possible to dumb the portal down to allow only one or a few registered users and to restrict every one else to just a read-only participant.
WordPress
At that time, I was not able to get WordPress 1.5.x working on my local web server. Apparently there was some quirk in the wordpress code that kept it from working, even tho phpBB and PostNuke worked without a hitch. So at that time I gave up on WordPress. Since I couldn’t run WP, I didn’t go on at that time to learn whether it would work to build a website.
Photo Galleries
I’m sure there are several photo gallery packages with this name. I studied several and found that they all were intended to build portals for photo galleries. Again these tools provide multiple users and are not easily customized to allow only one or two users. Another problem is that uploading pictures is a very manual process with activity required on the site for each picture.
I have settled on a photo gallery strategy that involves a local tool – ReaGallery – which builds a directory with web pages and resized images – and then using FTP to upload a gallery to the site. I intend to continue to use this to build photo galleries and will like to these galleries from the pages in WP.
At this point, I have come back to WP to build a site for my daughter. She is finishing art school and needs to build a site to publish her artwork for prospective employers. I have built the site using WP and will customize the theme for her before turning it over to her to add content.
I have decided that a WP based site will work for me as well, so I’m starting to move the WW site to WP and over the next few weeks, I expect to complete the transition. YOu will be able to follow the process and problems here, since as I do it, I’ll record my experiences in the site in this category.
A work in progress starts…