There’s a saying among computer programmers, the last 20% of work is never as easy as the first 80%. We I’ve certainly reached that point now with version 5.0. It’s been about three weeks since I’ve blogged, and half that time I didn’t work on the website at all, and the rest has been cleaning up and polishing up the site. It’s the small detail work that separates good sites from great sites, and I’m trying my best to achieve the latter. That includes the dry and boring work of browser compatibility testing and hacks to make the site work for those weird cases (I’ve built version 5.0 to be compatible with at least 95% of users, officially supporting IE6 and IE7, Firefox 1.5+ and all Gecko-based browsers, and I’m trying to get it to work with Safari 2.0+ at the moment). Lots of graphics to add, clean up rough edges and of course–test, test and more testing.

I’m hoping to deploy within a week or two, with any luck that is. At least by the 4th of July. That would make this release about a year and four months overdue–and nearly 2.5 years since version 4.0 was released. Given that 100% of the code was rewritten and the site rebuilt from the ground up, and I do this on my own on my spare time for fun–that’s not too bad.

Hi folks, hope you had a good Memorial Day weekend. Like many people I spent the holiday weekend with friends and family relaxing and grilling some good BBQ to celebrate the beginning of summer. Unlike many places however, summer in San Francisco is about bundling up and staying warm! I threw a BBQ at my house this year. It was a great party but it was freezing outside, with the fog rolling in and strong winds billowing outside. We wound up staying inside, watching some baseball on TV and playing some games on my new Nintendo Wii. The party was a success, except for the freezing part. Ironically the next day the fog burned away and it was quite warm. Sadly it wasn’t to last and most of this week we’ve been blanketed by clouds and fog.

Well what can I say, work continues on the website. I keep thinking that it’s going to be done soon, but then there’s always something more to do. I really should just write down what’s left to do. I do know what I’ve done this week so far. I’ve started to (finally) reorganize my images. The reason is that over the years, the number of photographs online has grown from an initial set of maybe 100 images to now something in the thousands, from a dozen galleries to now several dozen. It’s impossible to find anything. Many of my friends have commented not being able to navigate around to find things because it’s just so huge now. There have been a lot of great images that they’ve seen for the first time but have been online for more than a year.

Simply it’s a matter of scale; what worked for a small modest website that version 1.0 and 2.0 were doesn’t work any longer and navigation is a hopeless endeavor. So one of my main goals for version 5.0 was to reorganize and simply navigation and organization of my images. To that end, I’ve created a simple new concept called a virtual gallery, which basically is an image gallery but instead of being solidly linked to an exact set of images (which are all stored in a very particular location), virtual galleries can consist of any images. Basically you can think of virtual galleries as something like a “greatest hits” album. An artist might have many albums, each with its own very exact set of songs. A “greatest hits” album say would consist of just the artist’s best songs, which would of course originate from any or all of his/her albums.

So what I’ve done is a few weeks ago I created support for virtual galleries in the data model layer. The GUI layer doesn’t care at all because to it, it’s just another gallery. And for the past few days I’ve been going through various sets of galleries and culling my favorites in placing them in essentially “greatest hits” photo galleries.

It’s actually a really good way to organize and present images. For visitors, there are only a few sets of featured galleries now, all of them being either new image sets or “greatest hits” sets. Instead of having to sift through hundreds and hundreds of pictures and dozens of galleries, my newest, best and favorite work is right there. And for those few interested in looking deeper, you can continue through and look through the image archives–all the old galleries are still present and accounted for! With this I really do hope to tremendously simplify navigation, plus make my best work stand out instead of having to be found.

So far I’ve managed to create “greatest hits” galleries for San Francisco images, some Chinatown galleries and the Pacific Coast Highways stuff. There’s still a bit to go but it’s getting there. There’s still a number of bugs to iron out and I want to finish up an article or two as well as doing some more gallery organization before I think it’s ready to go live. I’m also evaluating web hosts since my current contract expires in about a month.

I can’t believe it, it’s already the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend. It’s the traditional beginning of summer, although you couldn’t tell from the weather outside out here where I live. The fog has come back and while other parts of the Bay Area are sizzling, it’s a bone chilling 50F here.

It also means we’re halfway through 2007; amazing how time moves so quickly. Most of the past week I decided to do something else besides work on my website. Nearly a month of doing nothing else on my free time, I kind of was feeling burned out. At the same time, the website is really nearing completion. The data model architecture has been fairly stable for nearly a year now (holy smokes I can’t believe it’s been that long since I started working on it!) Right now it’s more about building out the content and presentation of the website.

I’m also looking at different webhosts. I’m using iPowerWeb currently, which my friend recommended to me long ago, and it’s served me pretty well. But my contract with them is nearly up and I’m looking for a different provider, one that costs less (this is not a profitable venture). My contract ends in July, and I hope well before then to have switched providers and have the new version 5.0 up by then.

I hope to have a little bit of time to work on content for the site. There far too much content I want to add, but I should start with a little bit of new stuff, plus update the older stuff to at least work with the new website. Every new version this happens, that’s why I created my metascripting template engine to get around this upgrade problem. I’m going to be having a BBQ party at my house, so hopefully the BBQ gods will be kind and make the fog go away. I can’t wait for some tasty hot links!

I’ve been working like crazy the past couple of weeks on the website, spending most of my free time after work plus some time on the weekends inbetween errands and having a life working on the website. I’m trying to cram in as much as I can while I’m in a Zone. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a Zone. For many months I was suffered from severe creative block, spending hours, days on end sitting in from of the computer trying to get something going–anything; but with no luck. Now that I’ve got moment I’m going to go with it as long as I can.

Version 5.0 is really taken shape and is near beta quality now. A lot of rough edges have been smoothed out and I’ve added some graphics which make it much more elegant. Most all of the new photo galleries are complete, and much of the navigation and main pages are complete or near so. The past weekend I concentrated on one weak point of my website, and that’s been the articles.

My website is not just about sharing pictures but also sharing ideas and experiences too. Unfortunately the articles section has suffered from inattention for a very long time. Unlike the rest of the site, the articles section is not dynamic. They are just simply static HTML pages I created. This it makes it quick and easy to write and organize initially. But over time as the website evolved, I constantly had to go back and upgrade the pages manually, which is a less than fun experience. Consider that in order to upgrade the presentation of ALL the images in my photo galleries (a couple thousand I’m guessing), I only need to upgrade one source code file. Same with the photo galleries–just one source file needs to be fixed. But each page of every article must be hand converted. It’s very time consuming, bug-prone and tedious.

I tried looking to various open-source content management systems. I even looked into using WordPress (which powers my blog) to handle these duties. But most were overkill for my needs and/or too difficult or near impossible to integrate well with my software. So instead I created my own tiny specialized and very targeted content management system, along with my own simple scripting meta-language to handle these chores. The goal is very simple–handle all of the tedious tasks of organizing written content, add functionality that integrates it well with the rest of the photo gallery system software, and simplify the upgrade process as much as possible. Basically what I wanted was to be able to write the content of an article just once. When it’s time to upgrade the software again (say someday to version 6.0), I don’t have to fix up the content–I only need to upgrade the presentation source code. I don’t have to worry about broken links, fixing up the content or anything like that.

As for the rest of the website, I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.2. My blog is now an integral part of the whole Vivid Color Photography website, not just a bookend as it was before. There is no longer a standalone blog page. Instead the front page and the blog page are now completely integrated. In addition to this I’ve been working on a new field report on my new camera, the Panasonic DMC-L1. When version 5.0 is released this article will be published.

There is still much to do. My plan still remains to put up the site when I reach a fairly good beta and I hope to do that soon. Still I want to make sure I finish up or at least get very close to core goals before that is done:

• Consoliate the best photos of each collection into uber-galleries that will represent my best work. Right now there are older galleries (dating back to version 1.0) that are doing this but it’s pathetic. Most of my photos are keep together in galleries based on date, no better than piles of clutter.
• Add more polish. The pages look good but they could use some more detailing. Still feels boxy and rough.
• Do some more written work. I need to also rewrite the introduction, which is very dated now and a lot of hot air.

I have very high expectations so please bear with me. I want to make sure–even a beta still arrives with high quality and workmanship.

Well it’s been nearly two weeks since my last update. Progress is going remarkably well; much of the basic flow and design is completed and now it’s a matter of adding non-core functionality. For example, there’s a new feature that’s going to appear on the front page of the website which displays 16 randomly chosen photo thumbnails which users can click to get a larger view. The only problem is that some photos displayed are those of a less general nature, for example pictures from my friends’ weddings. Some of my friends would prefer that less people look at them, so I added a new feature that essentially allows sets of images to be excluded. Sounds trivial but it’s not and it took me about two hours to implement (ah the beauty of INNER JOINs).

I still don’t have a good idea when it’ll be ready, there’s still quite a lot of work to do. One of things I’ve been investigating is how to handle the articles section. Using static HTML pages is terrible, and every version of my website I’ve had to completely revamp them. Plus they aren’t indexed or searchable. I’m looking into using WordPress Pages (WordPress runs the blog) to see if that might solve my problem but because of the complexity of what I’m trying to do, there’s still a bit of research to be done.

In other news, I neglected to mention that I bought the Panasonic DMC-L1 camera kit a few weeks ago, and the Olympus Zuiko 7-14mm f2.8 ED lens for acouple weeks later. I’ve been too busy to write about it, but I’m planning on writing a hands-on report that will go up along with v5.

Again sorry about the mess. I know the blog sucks (all those error messages, I know what they are but it’s not worth fixing), no new pics in ages and a general “oldness” feeling to the site. Version 5.0 is light years better and it will be worth the wait I promise, just bear with me a little longer!

Well it’s been a long time since my last post.I’ve really been neglecting my website the past few months, a combination of being busy but also disinterest in fixing a dead code line. On a more positive note, work on the the new version of the website is progressing very well. Much of the back […]

Wow I’ve actually made a new posting within a week of my last, that’s not bad. It’s been a tough day, I’m sick and I had to work from home.It’s raining outside and it’s supposed to remain pretty gloomy for the rest of the week. My back is still pretty messed up so I have […]

Well it’s been a while since I last put an entry in here, rather pathetic don’t you think? It’s been quite a busy past few months. Photography and this website has always been a big part of my life, but lately it’s taken a back seat to other aspects of life–friends, family, my girlfriend. I […]

Holy Smokes, it’s already Halloween–three months since my last post. Talk about time flying by quickly. I’ve been really busy with work and other things (including getting back into video games) and I sort of put off fixing the website until about last week.
I’ve made a lot of steady improvements lately, like designing and building […]

Hi Folks,
Well I still haven’t made much headway lately v5. Much of the underlying architecture has been completed; but what’s got me bogged down is more athestics and creativity. One of the things that sucked about v4 and its predecessors was there was so much content, navigation was unweildy; not just for the user but […]