After about a month of grinding, I’ve converted all my galleries, that were handled by the old server (remember that it crashed for 3 weeks) to a newer, more integrated system and a single server. I’ve been diligently hammering away for the past week to 10 days to build the new system. There are still missing features I hope can be revived (with help from a developer), but I believe even without these features, the new system is better. All the images are now delivered within the framework you are viewing now. In the past, the images were presented on an entirely separate page and website.
Building the “Bird Galleries” required most of the labor. I wanted the Pseudo-family groups nested in a logical way, with back-track links (called “Bread-Crumbs”) for reverse navigation. I experimented with some automated software packages call “Plugins” that purported to do this for me, but the results were unsatisfactory, so I worked a manual process that got me the results I wanted. Learning how to seed all my images into “Galleries” and my galleries into “Albums”, sometime several tiers deep, took time. To migrate all the 1200 Blog images into the new system was easy compared to the 4200 images that needed to be moved into the more complicated system for the “Bird Gallery” (see the “Galleries” on the top menu).
With a redesigned system back-end, a new face on the front-end seemed appropriate. Gone is the 400 pixel high slide show at the top of the page. In its place is a leaner, 80 pixel slide show with new graphics. I implemented this change to allow more ‘screen real estate’ for viewing images.
Like me, my website is ‘a work-in-progress’. Try looking at the older Blog posts to see how the new system integrates with the stories. Please look through the sections under the “Galleries” in the top menu. I hope you like the latest look.
