Pixelyzed - On Building Pixel Worlds

WordPress, web design, dev & personal ramblings

WordPress, design, dev & personal ramblings...

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New photo gallery

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Following on my Enabling Technologies post from yesterday, I’ve just finished uploading a brand new section of this site called pixel gallery.. It is an image gallery that is powered by the superb SlideShowPro Flash component which I use to display my efforts as a budding photographer.

I started taking photography seriously (while having a lot of fun learning) when I bought my amazing Canon S1IS camera last year which sports a 10x optical zoom. There are of course much better cameras out there but, for the price and for a hobbyist like me, it works wonderfully, provides a lot of manual control and yields fantastic results… enabling technology for sure!

I’ve uploaded pictures in 5 categories (or albums as SlideShowPro calls them) so far and I still need to sort the best of the over 430 pictures I took during our trip to Nova Scotia 2 weeks ago. I’ll then need to prepare them for addition to my gallery. Most of those albums will continue to grow as I experiment further with my camera and take even more pictures. I’ll also post more to explain the methods I use to process and enhance my pictures and may write articles for my still empty pixel forge section on that very subject sometime soon…

Site moved & New Blog App

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Last month, I annouced the move of my professional webfocusdesign.com site from another hosting company to HostMySite. That move has completed without issues so, last week I also moved this site to HostMySite and at the same time I decided to try another blogging application.

I used to use Ray Camden’s BlogCFC which is a terrific (and free) blog application but I wanted some functionality that it doesn’t have yet, like trackbacks, and pings from individual posts. I also wanted some more extensive administrattive features (through a Web GUI) and I decided to try BlogFusion 4.0.6 and it has all the features I wanted and then some. Its administrative GUI is absolutely fantastic and it installs with the FCKEditor right out of the box. The copy I had installed into BlogCFC had stopped working and I couldn’t figure out why. Although not free, the developer has a special for non-commercial use where you can get BlogFusion for $5.00.

The drawback with BlogFusion is that the ColdFusion code under the hood is much less eficiently written that Ray’s BlogCFC code and, as is typical with many backend developers, the front end HTML and CSS code it generates out of the box is less than ideal (to be polite…) I had to spend many hours modifying the basic BlogFusion skin templates to fit the design of pixelyzed.com and make it output decent HTML code. This is an ongoing task and I’m not quite finished yet but I’m getting there. I also had to make many modifications to BlogCFC’s code but there was fewer templates to deal with and Ray’s code is far more modular with a lot less business logic mixed in with the HTML code. It was a lot easier to deal with.

I think the extra work with BlogFusion was worth it for the additional functionality and flexibility it affords me. As I get to kow the app better it will probably get easier to modify it. I can experiment without breaking anything as switching from one skin to another is quite easy. Blogging itself is also quite new to me even if I’ve been reading blogs (through FeeDemon) for quite a while now. It took me long enough to finish this site in my spare time but I’m finally getting there… 😉

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