It's been awhile on the gallery

I'm still thinking about photo galleries, sad. I realized that I'm not in the position to learn enough to make something from scratch, but I think I found a javascript viewer that I like. The TripTracker Slideshow is like lightbox, but it has navigation to play a slideshow with the Ken Burn's effect. I only with it panned both ways, I feel a little dizzy after watching it for a long while.

I put together a Picasa HTML template, well two actually, and I made a new section of mustard.net for projects. One makes regular pretty web pages and the other makes output to copy-paste into Rapidweaver.

I was quite pleased with my nerdiness working around Picasa's HTML export limitations, actually. I got the thumbnails into cute squares using just CSS by following an article on clipping written by Mojo on Seifi.org. I don't know who Mojo is, but I appreciate his article on clipping. I also added the necessary javascript onclick attributes dynamically because the slideshow viewer requires an index number to tell it which full-size image goes with which thumbnail but I couldn't get Picasa to provide an index number. I actually probably did something unethical here by adding my javascript to the body of my HTML, but it works . . .

Well, I'll post my efforts for anybody who reads my site to use which is all of nobody soon.

Wedding Invitation Photoshop files

Our Wedding Photoshop files

DOM Scripting

I hate Adobe. Every single one of their however functional products is unstable, slow, and bloated. I just lost my whole post because I got distracted and clicked an innocuous looking link that was a pdf that then loaded Adobe Acrobat that crashed Firefox... so all over again here goes:

I'm on Chapter 4 of this wonderful book DOM Scripting: Web Design with Javascript and the Document Object Model and sadly I'm thoroughly enjoying this non-fiction book aimed at teaching you something. This book is about using javascript to enhance your website with pretty effects and subtle animations.

The example I just read was creating a simple photo gallery. I took some photos of Bouncer while we went for a walk around the block this morning. It's been so nice out!

See my simple dog gallery

My favorite part of this book is that the author, Jeremy Keith, doesn't assume that you already put the other parts of your project together yourself. For example, to DOM script anything, you have to have an HTML document to script. Any other book would assume that the reader already knows all this and would only include the snippet of HTML that is relevant. The author shows you what the entire HTML document looks like so the you don't get distracted from what you're really trying to learn. It's nice that he adds a little CSS example, too, so you can get all excited about how "pretty" your scripting turned out... um yah. I definitely spent more time tweaking the CSS and colors than I did on the scripting.

The best part of the book is the subscription to "say what you're gonna say, say it, then say what you said" method of presentation. Loves it!

My mother should really love me more since I'm learning this stuff to make a website for Northwest Hand Therapy (I suppose I have personal nerd interest, too). I've had some ideas for her site layout that I'll post when the scanner gets unearthed.

I guess while I'm at it I'll hopefully make the photo gallery on mustard.net and the wedding website prettier, too.

Overview: a pretty, easy, usable photo gallery

My needs for my photo gallery are / were:

• Pretty and matches the rest of the site - preferrably integrated into Rapidweaver so I don't lose the cool ability to change themes instantly
• Easy to maintain and add pictures - we used to use Gallery which used a mysql database to store all sorts of meta info and comments, etc
• Snappy and streamlined for the user once the page is loaded - I don't like having to click to another screen to see larger images that loses the context of the whole album
• Simple setup that requires little coding and/or code learning by me would have been nice
• Free . . .

Is that really too much to ask for? Trying to achieve this has been really difficult and time consuming.

One major issue/blessing is that all my pictures are on Skipper (my Windows box) which has more ram and more hard drive space and Picasa of course.

I tried to just pop an iFrame into a Rapidweaver page so I could create albums on Skipper and just link to them, but the iFrame confines the full image size within in the frame which was not very pretty.

I also tried using Rapidweaver pages (and some plugins) but when Rapidweaver manages many external files like images it gets really annoying. Especially if you move or rename the file on your hd, it tells you so... every... time... you... save...

So in the end, I think this will be my final solution: use Picasa's Export as HTML feature using a modified Highslide JS Picasa template, then copy and paste the generated HTML into a Rapidweaver page. It was a little more complicated than that. I'll give more details later once I have it more ironed out.

See the results

Did I mention that I also tried JAlbum and when I went to remove some files I had added to a test album by selecting them and pressing delete it deleted wiped my pictures from my hard drive?

This is the first post

Yay this is the first post! Ain't that wicked exciting?