Day: April 23, 2008

The Story of the Wedding Website

/ chollaball / Leave a comment

Once there was a dream known as The Wedding Website.

It began in the waning days of aught four. When i returned from our honeymoon full of emotion and the idle time of the annual xmas slowdown at work. I wanted to post all our magnificent memories, but neither my slapdash current Wedding Website, nor any of my humble or profound attempts at web design thus far seemed worthy of such weighty and precious content. So began The Cruel Tutelage of CSS.

Its first test was here in the Big Crack.

and here again, programatically better and with bugs killed, in Moab.

Until finally a year later the code was perfect, the style honed, and V. 1.0: Bryce & Zion looked quite nice if i may say so. All that was left was to upload some photos.

ahem…

…about those photos.

See, our photographer was a really good guy. And this was when digital was just blowing up. And somewhere between us saying “we want digital copies” and him hearing “we want some digital cam pics” the really sweet photos he took on his film camera with all his artistry and training were developed to print. It is way way way way way easier and cheaper to develop film to digital files off the roll. Alas, we do have the negatives. So we borrowed a scanner from my buddy Eric, and we scanned, and filtered, and filtered in other programs, and resized, and re-filtered, and removed chip’n’scratch, and refiltered, and manually touched up. Beckie did this for weeks and I am to this day not sure if she quite had a sound methodology since I never could follow it, then I was left with finishing it. Nice! And about 400 hours and one tinyHuman later, we had some not-so-bad pics.

What would this post be without a few.

The Wedding Website will not be. i must finally accept the inevitable and most of all my fundamental loss-of-interst in the project. Photo albums and the like have always been a means for me to keep my skills sharp and learn new things, not produce anything commerical. Cripes the logo on this blog is my 80×80 mtbr avatar, and has not changed in a year since I learned how to achieve the photo effect (feathering) I wanted; the actual production of it became a tedious chore i have yet to complete. The wedding photos i have on the computer, and I have a dvd burner – the web is not needed here, or more appropriately, it would be lots of work with no payoff. There are some stories to tell, there will be another post, my epic toast will be logged, other memories will be captured. Think of this post as The Story of the Wedding Website: a story of a story yet to come.

WordPress 2.5 Gallery Rant!

/ chollaball / Leave a comment

i worked with this for 1 post and found like 10 bugs. I don’t feel like posting this shit anywhere, cause i’m weeks after the release and i don’t feel like dealing with accounts and email and forums. Perhaps sometime I will see about the beta tester process, but only if they let me communicate with the key developers. I’m not farting around on a forum I am too advanced for that.

1 hour, i found:

  1. the multi-file upload makes your last item in the upload array the first, so the order is fubarred
  2. sort order is pulled by the id in the db, not by the filename. This is unintuitive.
  3. Documentation on the orderby param for galleries is minimal.
  4. Flash uploader also orders from post id in the db, and this is non-configurable
  5. Flash uploader needs to present common editing options in a grid and truly be a multi-editor
  6. Flash uploader does not allow multi file inserts without opening and closing, but will allow multiple file changes.
  7. Thumbnail default changes affect the creation of the thumbnail image only. You need to manually recode the html to get an existing uploaded image to be your new size. This would be so easy to fix if the thumbnail default setting just wrote to the flash editor, no html to worry about and it would not affect existing posts. Who cares if you resize a 150×150 thumbnail to 100×100 or vice versa its a damn crappy picture already
  8. Columns in the gallery are n-1, with the last item wrapping to the next row.
  9. Their plugin to disable the flash uploader only disables the ability to upload multi files you still need to use the crappy flash program to manage your files.

What a piece of shit!