mikeberryart.com

At last, my gallery is finally live! Every two steps toward this goal seemed to be followed by one step backward. It's this NextGen Gallery that I'm using. It has an amazing back-end (just like your mom, -- zing!), but it's just so overly complicated and difficult to tweak. I feel that I have managed to massage it into working with my theme, but there are still a few bugs and features that are not yet working. For instance, I haven't yet tested attaching a single pic to a post such as this one. All things in due time though. First, I want to finish notating the works in my gallery, and then I want to get my blog roll going. Following that, I might work on the rest of the gallery functions. We'll see.

Oh, and also take a look at the page I created covering the details of modeling work. I send something similar to every model that expresses interest in working with me. I've built up its contents over time by just writing down the answers to the questions I receive, so really it was nothing to port it over to html, and give it a bit of a navigation menu.

I’ve made great progress on my galleries.  I’ve completely skinned them to match my theme, and I’ve added room in the layout for a description.  The only remaining tasks are to make the css work with IE6, and tweak the “album” page.  Once those are done, then I’ll be able to install the gallery plugin here on my main blog.  I’m not quite sure how to solve the IE6 problem, so even though there isn’t much left to do, it might take a while.

Well, this gallery thing is going to take longer than I thought. I’m trying to modify it somewhat to both match my theme, and to allow me to post longer descriptions with my images. Unfortunately the javascript that loads the images is kicking my ass. I may have to call in the big guns on this one (meaning Seth).

I’ve found a gallery manger/generator that I think will meet my goals. It’s the NextGEN Gallery by Alex Rabe. It’s extremely popular, and integrates exceptionally will with the WordPress backend.  I have to say that I’m impressed.  It doesn’t do everything my heart desires, but I can’t imaging anything will unless I make it myself.

I’m testing it on my test site now, and I think it will work for me.  Before I make it live though, I’ll need to tweek it a bit to get it to mesh with my theme better.  Then comes editing and resizing the images that will live in the gallery.  Once that is all done, the gallery will go live.  I’m guessing it will only be a few days, depending on how well this project holds my attention.

I decided to build myself a theme before beginning my blog, as I hoped making it feel like mine would encourage me to post.  There is still a lot to do here, but this is a start.  First and foremost, I need to find a way to build a gallery page.  Sure, I could write the hole thing outright in html and css, but I would far rather have a script build it for me dynamically.  I hope to find something that will allow me to freely change or expand the gallery’s content without having to rewrite any code or formatting.  I know I’m not the first person to have the idea, so I’m sure there is something out there that will meet my needs.  I just have to go look for it.  If you happen to know of anything, please leave it in the comments to this post (just click the link below).

I’d like to thank my good friend Seth for all his help, and for being patient with my unending php, css, and html questions.  Also I’d like to say that W3Schools proved to be an absolutely priceless reservoir of website building knowledge.  I think I read the majority of their html, xhtml, and css content from cover to cover.  Good stuff indeed.  I highly recommend it.