Site Updates

Although I've been using Serendipity for my blog for over a year now with absolutely no problems, I admit to having a little bit of WordPress envy. Even though it's a great blog solution, Serendipity is much less popular, which means fewer themes and plugins to choose from. WordPress, with its huge user base has the advantage of having an absolutely gigantic library of addons. And I had been eying the jalbum plugin for WordPress... So this last week, I decided to check it out and see if porting over to WordPress was the right move for me. It would be a fair bit of work to migrate my blog, but I thought it might just be worth it.

Long story short, it only took me 5 minutes to discover a couple of bugs in WordPress that confirmed I had made the right choice in the beginning by going with Serendipity. I won't be porting over my blog -- however, there will be some changes over the next few weeks as I begin work on a new style sheet to change the look of the site.

Serendipity for teh win!

So my website has been completely functional and running for over a week now, and I just can't get over how cool it is. I mean, not just because I made it, but because I am absolutely fascinated with all the things I can do with it. If I can think of something to put in the sidebar, I can usually get it up and running within a short amount of time. For instance, this evening I decided to research those nifty little music players that I've seen on a few myspace pages. Created on sites outside of myspace, users are given a player that can be embedded on a myspace page where they can post several songs, instead of the current ONE song that myspace allows at the moment (...are you listening, myspace? *grumble*). What's cool about these players is that they give the viewer of the page control over what they are listening to. Choices! Choices are always good. I vote yes for choices.

Since these players can be embedded on a myspace page, I speculated that they could also be embedded on any other page as well... So I decided to give it a try, because I thought having a music player on my site would be cool. And by cool, I mean totally sweet.

After perusing a few of the audio player sites, and not finding anything I was interested in, I happened upon Finetune. Now that's what I'm talking about. The site is simple, sharp-looking and surprisingly easily navigable even by a noob like me! I signed up within 20 seconds, and began filling a playlist with songs. Although there are some restrictions due to internet music sharing laws (no more than 3 songs by any one artist, playlists must have at least 45 songs...), I was still very happy with the playlist I managed to make in under 10 minutes. I copied and pasted the embed code into a configurable html nugget on my sidebar, reloaded the page, and... There it was! It was really that easy. Joy!

So look to the right there, it's just waiting for you to hit play. You'll never love it as much as I do, but please try. Oh, and the popup that results if you try to skip too many of the songs is pretty amusing as well. And yes, I'm a big geek. Whatever.

Okay, so it's not the speediest. But there's just something I like about Gallery, the php open source image organizer I run on my site. And now that I've spent some time over the past couple weeks cleaning up the UI and enabling all the modules I had neglected months ago (in the original install), I guess I've committed to using it until the end of time. Hey... Maybe they'll fix the lag in version 3.0.

So... what's been updated? Well... Comments are now enabled for all users, even guests, thanks to Captcha. I had disabled them previously due to a bot that had its way with my site a few months back. Now that I've enabled Captcha, comments require visual input in order to post -- take it, bots!

UI changes include a handy dropdown menu (instead of an overwhelming navigation list along the left, now you get all that and more in a dropdown!), and a tree view that expands to allow quick navigation of the albums. Because sometimes gallery can be slow. Did I mention that?

Also new are RSS feeds for any item or album. I subscribed to my own feed (because hey, who else will, really) on my igoogle homepage and was rewarded with a gadget that not only lists the image updates, but also includes the image thumbnails, which is super cool. BTW, igoogle is awesome, and I suggest getting yours set up if you haven't already.

Something else I enabled is the ability to upload videos -- they play completely embedded from the gallery page. This would be teh awesome if only I had videos to upload. Guess I better get to work on that. Taking suggestions! On second thought... never mind.

And the last nifty thing added to the gallery is a shopping cart that allows you to choose as many images as you want, and then download them all in one convenient zip file. Why a shopping cart? It's not like I'm charging anything for these images, so the shopping cart thing doesn't make a whole lot of sense... But just pretend you're like one of the kids on Double Dare that won the Toys R Us shopping spree. You're not payin' for anything and you're taking as much as you want. Woohoo!

Alright, if you want to see the results of all this work, checkity check it out. Now I'm off to take the physical challenge and then slide headfirst into a giant sundae. Am I the only one that always wanted to do that?

Alright. I spent my whole Saturday tweaking a Serendipity template to get it looking like I wanted, and I'm really happy with it! I've got a few other things to do... so keeping it short, yo.