I finally joined the blog style of web page design. After reading several other blogs (especially The Nears), I settled on WordPress for the main blogging software and Gallery2 for our photo gallery. I’m also using the WPG2 WordPress-to-Gallery2 plugin for embedding the photo gallery in the overall WordPress theme. (I updated to WordPress 2.0 on 12/31/05. Works great!)
I’ve created a plugin for TinyMCE that allows you to choose an image from your Gallery2 photo albums by browsing thumbnails. (Click here for the information page.) I originally added the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) plugin for WordPress, which is based on the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor with the Iimage photo browser. But I ended up modifying it severely to enable it to browse Gallery2 thumbnails and easily embed them in the post. The thumbnails that are posted in the entries in the Photos category were inserted using the new plugin.
The theme is a kludge of Connections from Vanilla Mist and the modified Connections at The Nears. I took code from both and modded several files to arrive at this final design. I’ve had a few requests for the theme files, so I zipped them up and posted them here: WPG2 1.0/Gallery2 2.0.x version — WPG2 2.0/Gallery2 2.1 version.
The photo at the top is a crop of one of Leslie’s photos from her trip to Tanzania.
The small icon that appears in the browser address window is a picture of our dog Mandy. I generated it at a great free site, FavIcon from Pics.
I decided to disable comments, since this is our family website and I did not want to open it up for outside editing. Someday in the future, I may set up a second blog so that I can discuss technology issues with feedback.
The site is hosted on SimpleHost. They have unlimited storage with 40 GB of transfer for $7.50 per month! iPowerWeb, who was our old hosting service, couldn’t touch that. So far, so good.
–Kirk
