Another week, another site redesign. Probably. I’ve started putting photos on Flickr, mostly for ease of linking when I’m posting for critiques and sharing on other sites. So I’m thinking about removing the gallery I host here and using a Flickr plugin to display the images here instead. It would certainly be easier to keep track of photos that way. Not to mention only having to upload them once, and not worry about hosting them myself. First I have to figure out how to make a couple of small changes to the provided Flickr code, though. As usual. At least I wouldn’t be dealing with the fallout of “merging two PHP/MySQL systems together in unholy matrimony” as a friend of mine refers to the current site setup.
Another week, another new camera toy. I ordered an external flash last week, a Canon 430EX. Of course it arrived after I left town for two days. And then I spent Sunday doing necessary things around the house, and didn’t really get to play with it until tonight. First impression: nice. I love the ability to direct the flash somewhere other than directly at what I’m shooting. Second impression: I’m going to need the off-camera setup a lot sooner than I thought. The flash has some bendy directional options, but it still points forward from the camera. It would be nice to set it to the left or right for slightly more natural light and shadows.
Another week, another fun photo trip. Once again, I headed over to central Washington to see what I could see. Lighting was REALLY bad for landscape photography on Friday, but Saturday turned out beautiful:
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I’ve said it before, nobody ever accused me of being a coder. As much time as I’ve spent working on the site this weekend, though, someone will if I’m not careful. After many, many hours, the site now works almost exactly as I want it to, except a couple misplaced browser titles and a few more font changes. Oh, and the fact that I have to re-do ALL of my photo album titles and descriptions.
And once I get all that done, I have to re-upgrade ZenPhoto. Because while it’s a wonderful piece of software, it turns out the author has a habit of grabbing code snippets from WordPress if it already performs a function he wants. And when ZenPhoto tries to perform the same function that WordPress already has, Bad Things(TM) happen. So I had to roll ZenPhoto back to the previous version, which did not include the gettext functions. Only to discover later on while testing that I might be able to just remove the gettext functions from my chosen theme. But that’s another project for another weekend.
And I don’t even want to talk about what happens when you let php run multiple functions instead of closing each and every one of them.
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I’m working on integrating the ZenPhoto Gallery and WordPress, but something in the code I’m working on isn’t actually working. Unfortunately I can’t find out if it works or not without putting it up to test! So, sorry if you’re trying to see the pictures, check back in a couple hours. By then I will have either fixed it or given up. 
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Apparently I have too much time on my hands. Although I really don’t, because I have too many hobbies. But once again I am redesigning the site. I’ve switched to using WordPress for the front page, mostly because there are some handy integrations with the ZenPhoto software I use for the main gallery section.
So now I’m off to figure out how to customize WordPress so it looks the way I want.
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It’s like someone flipped a switch somewhere. We’ve had nice, pleasant weather for weeks, ranging from about 50F to 70F, sometimes sunny and sometimes cloudy. Then suddenly the last two days were hot and sunny and almost 90F! That is WAAY too warm for me, so I spent the weekend enjoying my air-conditioned house and working on this site. Most of the photos from the old site have been moved over, although some of them will need to be replaced because they are missing EXIF info or are only 800×600 due to the way iWeb used to crop photos. I also spent way too many hours figuring how to edit the PHP pages that ZenPhoto uses to display albums and images. I certainly cheated in that regard, as I found a theme by Nils Windisch that did most of what I wanted, then copied over the rest of the features from the original ZenPhoto theme. Nobody ever accused me of being a coder. Which is why you’ll notice that some of the margins aren’t quite right, and there are some funny gaps between different sections on a page. Those settings are all buried in the style sheets that the theme uses to pick the colors, etc, and I’m working on fixing them. But since I don’t really know what I’m doing, it takes about 3 times as long as it would for someone who could actually write style sheets.
So, enjoy the site, wander through the albums that look interesting, and try to ignore the occasional layout hiccup. Meanwhile, I’m going to go figure out how to make a link back to the main page work from within the ZenPhoto gallery. Maybe. Or maybe I’ll just go watch a movie.
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