TXAVy said:
Great setup on your picture pages Brendan. Did you do that yourself or is the site hosted with someone who has the nice thumbnailing package?
I got the idea from a friend whose picture gallery was set up to look like a roll of film (negatives) with the holes along the top and bottom. While that was cute, I wanted to do other things. I took his scripts and have pretty much rewrote them since. It's all Perl. I don't host my own site, but they have the CGI support I need and I just update my scripts when I want to do something different.
The goal was to make publishing my pictures fast and easy. I didn't want to write the same HTML over and over. Plus, writing tables is my least favorite activities. By having the CGI write the HTML for me, it's a do-once proposition.
I have several page-generating modes using a couple different variables. The
Truckload of Gravel page is the basic default layout which sets up two columns--one for the thumbnail and one for the description. When I write longer descriptions for each picture, as if I'm telling a story with one picture for each though, I use this mode.
Other times, when the content it mostly self-explanatory, I use the "rowpics" mode as in my
Portland Auto Show pictures. My
Wild West 2002 pictures which most of you have seen are this way as well. All of the modes include an introductory description of the pictures between the title and the first row of thumbs.
More recently, I decided I might want to display the pictures using larger thumbnails. I developed a "small" mode that I used for my
Parasailing in the Bahamas pictures and our
Cat Bed Endorsement. Notice that I also allowed for a caption under each picture.
If you've clicked on every link thus far, you can see too that the script allows for a setable background image for each page--it's another variable.
Well, I don't want to bore you all, but I have had a lot of fun writing the scripts that generate the different picture pages. Everytime I want to use a different effect, I modify the script to support the additional feature (without destroying other features, of course), and make it that more robust. I recently added the ability to "inline" descriptions between rows of text for my
Oregon Coast gallery. Some of the stuff is kind of kludged together, but in time, I will probably revamp it. There are still some things that annoy me about it, but that's the way software is.
Thanks for the interest; if there's anything else you'd like to know, just ask.
Brendan