Category: Site Stuff

I’ve come to the conclusion that this blog needs my single window technique implemented. Currently, when you click on a link or an image, it opens in the same window (or tab) as the blog page.

When you click on the back button to return here, my blog has to reload itself. Using the single window, a new window/tab will open just once, and subsequent images or links will reuse that window/tab. The blog page is left open in it’s own tab, and doesn’t have to reload.

To see this in action, click a photo in the post below (Friday: 7/8/11). A new window/tab will open the photo in the Viewer. Leave that window/tab open and come back here and click on another photo. Your browser will switch to the new window and display the photo.

Think of that new window/tab as your work area for this blog. All links will open in there without opening multiple tabs. It’s a pretty slick technique.

I’ll start working down through all my posts and implementing this. It’s a lot of work for me today, but it will be worth it…

Update 10:00am: Done!

I’m redesigning some aspects of this blog, for quicker access. Dropped the Tetons header image and implemented the Google Font code, with shadows, for topic headers.

(Damn, if I can just get the cat hair off my keyboard, I’ll be able to type…) Steph’s off to Music On Main, with the girls, in Victor. Pipers laying on the floor here in my office, attacking my feet every time I get up.

Anyway, big weekend coming up and I want the blog in good shape because I’m going to throw a lot of media content at it. I’m also driving the Flickr API hard and coming up with some new apps, which will appear under the Photos menu item above.

And, if I could just remember what I had for dinner… (dementia is setting in, really)

Sometimes I just blow my own mind. I have a Flickr plugin installed that doesn’t work for general photo viewing. It puts my photos in a small lightbox with options. Actually, I’m keeping it around for showing Galleries, but I needed better.

So, I’ve redone my Photo Viewer app to go full screen and all my thumbnails, big and small, link directly to the new code.

Scroll down to the “Drictor” set below and click on a thumbnail to see it in action.

In case you’re interested, I’ve written a new PHP app that takes a Flickr PhotoSet ID and generates a block of thumbnail code that I can insert directly into a blog post.

The little Flickr icon that bounces down in the upper-left corner of a Photo Viewer full screen image, is a direct link to the photo on Flickr.

It’s great to be a programmer…

I’ve been diving deep into the Flickr API. Wrote a PHP module to grab all of the data for a specific photo-id, including the large image for my new Photo Viewer app.

Now I can send a specific photo-id to the API and get back everything I need to make this blog work. Very cool…

Non geek speak = The larger icons use the Photo Viewer directly, and the smaller icons have a link to the Photo Viewer within the lightbox.

I have two sizes of thumbnails. The larger ones get their images from Flickr directly and I previously just showed them in the browser as an image link. Flickr requires (as I’ve recently learned) that they have a direct link to the contents Flickr link, from any content hotlinked from their site. (Even though I’m paying for the server space…)

So, I’ve written a sweet little app that accepts each photos Flickr image data as parameters and displays the photo in a nice frame, with a link to Flickr at the top. All of the larger thumbnails in this blog now follow that procedure. I’m working on the small thumbnails from the Flickr Gallery plugin, to do the same.

Click any large thumbnail to see the new app!

I’m totally ready for that new camera. I just signed up for a premium Flickr account with unlimited upload capacity for one year at $24.99.

I’ve redone the Vegas posts to process Flickr sets, as opposed to storing them on my server. See: Notes from the Strip ( 7 ) and ( 4 ).

WordPress and the plugin community are blowing my mind. I’ve been able to put together an amazingly slick website in a very short amount of time.

Of course, my tech chops are high and my knowledge base is deep. I read PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and jQuery like other people read children’s books…

I took that picture of the Grand Tetons in the header above, it’s not a stock photo. The original is actually quite a large photo with much more detail, taken off Stateline Road between Idaho and Wyoming. The blog required a 940×198 image so I just cropped out a section, thus no resizing needed. Here’s a reduced view of the original: