New Family Website

I know I seem to have fallen off the Miniature Painting map lately. I have done some lurking on my usual message boards, but have not been painting or posting online, because I’m wrapped up in another project.

As followers of my blog already know, I recently redesigned MamaGeekMinis.com in php for maintainability. I no longer need to type in URLs for any of my photos in JavaScript or HTML. I wrote php code to perform file listings on gallery directories and build everything for me automatically. This way whenever I add a new miniature to my gallery, I can simply upload a new directory with all my images, and it will just show up, with no additional coding required.

Well it had been my intention all along to apply the lessons I learned from that project to my family’s personal website, which has been long neglected. I didn’t like having to type in all those image urls every time I uploaded photos, so I was using Flickr, and then Picassa, and just linking to those galleries from the site. However, I quickly used up the filespace limit for a free account on both. I didn’t want to pay for more space, since I’m already paying for space on my own website, and I might as well use it.

So, the time had come to bite the bullet and do the work of converting to php on my personal site. It wasn’t long before I realized that a clean start was needed, so I created a new domain under MamaGeekMinis.com called “schofam” and got to work. I made a new, cleaner navigational format, and a simple graphic for the homepage (which looks much better on a white background).

Then I wrote all of the php for the gallery, using some great JavaScript from DynamicDrive for the slideshow. My gallery builds itself automatically by polling the directories with all my image files. The image captions come from the IPTC data imbedded in the image itself, and the thumbnails are created from exif, so all I have to do to add a new gallery is upload the JPG images and a text file with the gallery title into a new directory. My php builds both the index page and all of the gallery slideshows automatically. It even links to enlargements of selected photographs that I thought viewers may want the full size copy of, all handled by the php.

I’m gradually moving my images over to the new site, and additional content (videos, misc. stuff) will be added over time as well. The new site is up and running, though, and I think it’s pretty slick!

So, for your great (hopefully) viewing pleasure, I present to you: Schoenberger Family Home

Enjoy!