zerolight

I’ve finally caved in and migrated my photo gallery to flickr. In the past year I’ve had a few problems with Menalto Gallery 2 which has resulted in a need to rebuild the database – an easy enough task, but one that rewrites the links to each image in the gallery, resulting in dead links all over my blog. I’m told by friends that have been using flickr for ages that it’s very good, so I’m giving it a go. As a result, my work in progress Gallery Photostream module is now dead and buried – replaced my by nifty new flickr photostream module which you see above. I say my module, but it’s actually a modified version of flickr4j which now has a funky background, smaller thumbnails, slimbox integration, and an arrow linking to my flickr photo sets.

Whilst on the topic of flickr, there’s a cool little php app which runs from the h4ppier photos site. What’s cool about it is that you can use it to set the upload date of your flickr photos to the actual date the photo was taken, so that they show up in order on your flickr photostream. Some folk think this isn’t ideal because people want to see your latest uploads, as in the last batch you uploaded. For the most part, I agree – however there are occasions where there are advantages to this process.

For example, I’ve recently migrated several hundred photos from Menalto Gallery to flickr and want to maintain the order that they were uploaded to the previous Gallery installation, thus maintaining continuity for the few folk who actually follow my blog and photo galleries. Of course in the future, the newest items in my photostream will be my latest uploads. I’ve seen lengthy posts asking how to do this on the flickr forum, and it turns out it was quite easy with h4ppier photos.

edit: My modified version of the flickr4j module for displaying a flickr photostream is now completely self contained. I’m very pleased with it and am learning more and more about php and css as I go. Clicking on the flickr logo will take you to my flickr sets, clicking on the arrow to the right of the stream goes to my photostream, and clicking on an individual picture opens that up in slimbox, as part of a set of related images. Anyone wanting a copy let me know and I’ll put together an install package.

Over the past week I’ve been tinkering with my site quite a bit, discovering cool new components such as slimbox, and simple image rotator. I’ve done a lot of editing of my Joomla template to freshen up the site a bit. It uses the same basic rockettheme “Mobius” template that it’s used for some time, but I’ve replaced most of the graphics as well as adding the rotating banner (simple image rotator) in order to give it a more modern – gadgety look.

Part of the new look incorporates Simple Image Rotator. This clever, lightweight component uses mootools to add that rotating image banner at the top of my site. I’ve thrown up a few images based on gadgets and things I’m interested in, which seems appropriate.

The other less obvious change is a lightbox clone called slimbox. This has some nice additional functionality, yet uses a a much lighter framework than lightbox, and doesn’t require all images on a page to have loaded before its functionality is enabled. It also doesn’t get confused when you have embedded objects on your page. Once installed, it works exactly the same as lightbox, except that you can optionally add an extra group name to the rel tag which allows navigation from popped up image to popped up image. Check out the Impreza/Evo story or my new flickr photostream (above) to see what I mean. All in all, it’s faster, slicker, and smaller than lightbox. And it works better.