If you don’t want to read about what it took to get the Family page to it’s current glory, skip the next two paragraphs. The tl;dr version is getting various technologies to work with one another when you don’t fully understand them is hard.
If you have seen the family page, you should notice a couple of things. First of all…a lot of pictures. Right now there are 88 of them. I’m using Picasa for web storage so I don’t necessarily have to rely on the rather clumsy WordPress backend for photos. Don’t get me wrong, WP is fantastic in most respects and when you only have a photo or two, works really well. Gallery options though are limited and frankly undesirable. To fix this, they have a plugins which are tiny “programs” written by users to give your blog more flexibility.
Still more unfortunate is that no one has written an all encompassing plugin which covers most options for displaying photos in various ways. To get it to work the way I wanted I needed a photo gallery plugin which would work with the Picasa web albums and a plugin to display the photos themselves with the captions I used. It was a mix and match operation which I was about ready to give up on until I tried a combination I had tried before and it just worked. Mind you, this is going through about twenty five different plugins and tweaking those settings to see if they can work. Point is, it works and I’m not messing with it right now.
Other than that, the blog has suffered a bit as I’ve spent my spare time trying to get it to work. I’ve missed writing on some cool stories but I’m okay with that. I mean, nothing has happened recently that doesn’t need my special brand of commentary or that isn’t being talked about somewhere else.
I do have some things coming up that will be pretty cool. I’m working on a story for a contest run by John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton which I’ll dedicate a separate post, and oh boy it’s fun. Also, CONvergence is coming up in a couple of weeks where our friends Annie and Josh Lynsen will be participating in a panel with us about the geek relationship.
With the photos in an acceptable state right now, hopefully this will lead to more blog posts…but you never know.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.