Building this Blog Site

I thought it would be of value to record the trials and tribulations of building this blog site.

This whole site (davidedwardsphotos.com) came about after my wife complained that we have thousands of photos that are stuck on our computer but never viewed. If you think back to the film days, you normally made an effort to put photos in an album which would come out whenever you did a major cleanup. Also with film cameras we didn’t get too carried away with pictures, especially when using expensive slide film. Now with digital, you snap off a dozen shots of almost the exact same view and don’t think twice. So, getting back to the point, I decided to setup a website to display my pics.

Establishing the Site

I went through the usual considerations. Did I want to build a site at home and connect it to the internet? Nope, too much risk and potential maintenance. Did I want to use one of the common photo sites, such as Flickr? No, I didn’t want to lose control of my pics and their use.

The third option was server hosting, where you have virtual server space on someone’s server farm somewhere to do as you wish. The added bonus with this option was that most hosting companies provided a swag of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (or Perl, or Python)) products ready to install, and they took care of registering a domain name.

Based on positive feedback from colleagues, I settled on HostGator and their BabyCroc package which costs me about $10 a month for more storage than I could poke a stick at (could I ever fill 600Gb of photos). It also comes with the fantastico LAMP stack and the installer mechanisms to do all the installation and configuration of the tools (such as building the databases). I’ve been in IT for 20 years and there’s nothing worse than getting bogged down in software installation and configuration. The LAMP stack included lots of software; photo galleries, blog software, wiki’s, and more. Everything I could need.

The next challenge was to find a good domain name. It couldn’t be an Australian one (*.com.au) as you needed a registered company to tie it to. The service provided by HostGator provided a .com domain name, which was fine. It took a few goes to find one related to my name that wasn’t already taken, but I was able to get davidedwardsphotos.com.

Building the Photo Galleries

The fantastico software came with three photo gallery products; 4Images Gallery, Coppermine Photo Gallery, and Gallery. I chose Gallery as it seemed fairly widely used, offered a lot of nice themes and a good range of plugins. Installation was a snap, although I originally planned a single gallery but later decided to split it into three, one for my trip photos, one for my martial arts photos and one for the family photos.

Once I had the first gallery installed and some photos loaded, I started looking at themes. The standard install has a basic theme and there are some other nice themes available on the Gallery Downloads page (there is also a comprehensive list of modules you can add to change the look or functionality of the gallery). However I stumbled across the Pedro Gilberto Xtreme Themes which are visually stunning and feature different colour packs, frames and icons.

I chose the x_charcoal colour pack for the main gallery website and set about tweaking it. I created a banner featuring a nice tree fern and a simple logo in Photoshop (love Photoshop!). I tweaked some of the colours used to match the banner colours, such as changing link hover colours to green and creating a set of green icons. Some of this was simple CSS file modification. I found two tools invaluable in doing this:

• Firebug a Firefox plugin graphical tool to explore the CSS being used on a web page (and I’m sure it can do heaps more), and
• W3 Schools website, particularly their CSS Tutorial.

I also used PG Xtreme themes for the other galleries; the x_snow theme for the Bushidokan photo site, and x_silver for the family website. These also underwent some tweaks, with custom banners and colours. I also enhanced the New Items module to show a nice little “new” icon over the bottom left corner of the relevant albums, mostly done through CSS.

This was all good for a while, but thought I really needed a way to tell the stories that went with capturing the photos…

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