Although it looks like I haven’t done anything for a while, I have in fact been quite busy. I’ve fixed a few CSS bugs I found in Internet Explorer 7, particularly on the photos pages. It seems that IE7 really isn’t that much more standards compliant than IE6 (a discussion point for another time) - surprise surprise Microsoft! Behind the scenes I’ve also been working on the commenting system for photos. It’s taking longer than I’d hoped, probably because I’m a perfectionist! I want the comment system to work in a similar way to the Wordpress system as that just makes sense to me. The Gallery comments module on the other hand has different ideas so I’m going to have to rewrite it somewhat to bend it to my will.

In other news, I’ve got a job! From September (after I’ve graduated and been slumming it around Europe for a bit) I’ll be working for a small company called Protec Innovations Ltd as a Web Application Developer. Currently lots of the details are still in discussion but I’ll post more info when I get it.

It’s time to celebrate! You can now download the full-size versions of photos. This feature is useful for anyone that wants to print the photos at any decent quality. One problem with Facebook (which a lot of my friends use to share photos) is that although you can save the photos on it, if you try and print them, they look crap. If you’re really interested then go and try it for yourself. Everyone else just take my word for it!

Time for an update I think. I’ve been working hard on getting things a bit more how I want them and particularly on the photos section. I’ve uploaded and partially set up my theme for Wordpress, it is not finished yet but I think the site is pretty much still usable and the bits that do not work properly will be fixed soon.

The photos section is now looking pretty good and has basic functionality, you still can’t comment on photos or download the full-size versions but I’ll do that soon. To celebrate I’ve added an album of photos from New Year. Don’t worry I’ll be adding some more soon. In fact that’s the next thing on my todo list.

Just a few other points. You may notice that the menu at the top looks a bit odd. That’s because it’s not finished yet and as I add the other sections of the site it’ll start to look a bit more normal. Also there’s the ‘Weekly Artists’ section on the front page sidebar, which is thanks to another plug-in for Wordpress called Scrobbler. This uses a clever bit of AJAX to pull the information from a feed on my Last.fm page and stick on my site. Lovely!

So, where to begin? Well the first thing to do is obviously to get Wordpress and Gallery 2 all set up and installed. Clearly the Wordpress installation went OK otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. I will be integrating Gallery 2 into Wordpress to make the whole thing look like one site with the help of the rather useful and aptly named WPG2 (Wordpress Gallery 2) plug-in.

After installing Gallery 2 and downloading the required plug-ins for WPG2 to work (really easy to do with Gallery’s awesome plug-in manager) and some mod-rewrite magic, the path /photos now points to my embedded galleries. Time for another coffee…

Those of you with eyes may have noticed that things have changed just a little bit around here. Don’t worry all the content and photos that were here before will be back soon and the site will be bigger and better than before. I finally swallowed my pride and decided to use pre-built software for my site as I’m never going to be able to provide the features that a fully fledged CMS can. Instead I will be building this site with a combination of Wordpress and Gallery 2 and recording the journey as I go along. Watch this space…