Korey Atterberry’s Idle Chatter

This summer we bought a popup camper and we’ve been having a great time with it. This past weekend we made it up to Starved Rock for our first club outing, which also happened to be the last outing of the season . The Great Lakes Pop Up Club is a fun bunch of folks. We had a great time and we’re looking forward to becoming more involved next year!

They planned a potluck dinner, a pancake breakfast, crafts for the little ones, trick-or-treating, and a good old camp fire. It got down to 37 degrees overnight, but we kept nice and warm!

So that’s what Open Source software is about… what a great feeling! After a little bit of research, I modified Lazy Gallery to support thumbnail caching and to allow it to be included on a Wordpress page (which fixes the problem with the tabs, by the way). This was a fairly rewarding exercise, and I learned a fair amount about Wordpress and PHP in the process. Right now the code is UGLY, and the HTML isn’t 100% valid, but I’ll get it fixed up and posted before too long.

Well, after auditioning a ton of photo album plugins for Wordpress, I decided simple was best. I set up “Lazy Gallery” from http://www.lazyboy.dk. It doesn’t do too much, but it does what I want it to and isn’t crowded with all the extra links for ratings, comments, etc. Those things are great, but I’m going for “Grandma-friendly” .

There are a few things I’m working on. First of all, the plugin generates the thumbnails in real time, storing only the source image. I’ve about finished a simple caching setup along with some changes to avoid having PHP open and parse the files. It has to open the source file to get the height and width to display under the image, which takes quite a while, and isn’t worth it for me.

Secondly, I need to figure out how to get the plugin a little more integrated. I wanted to put the photo gallery on a tab at the top of the page. Each tab represents a “page” in Wordpress. I’m currently using the “Redirectify” plugin to redirect the photo page to the PHP file for the gallery. This works fine except the tab doesn’t show as active when you click it.

Ok, here we go with a new website! There’s not really anything here just yet, but I’ll add stuff soon. This new site is going to be weblog-based, so hopefully I’ll keep at it!