chrisstreeter.com

For a long time I’ve had a photo section on my site. Initially, I wrote the code that just searched through a directory structure for pictures that I had stuck in there. This worked fine for what I initially wanted, but didn’t scale well. Plus, it was quite slow. At the time, this stressed my PHP abilities and so I searched for better solutions. What I found was the open source Gallery. This solution worked well for me for the past several years. Since when I was hosted on Berkeley’s OCF servers to today’s more robust hosting with my own domain name.

However, I’ve just begun to realize that this solution is no longer viable for me. I’ve realized that my flickr and facebook accounts give me a much greater visibility in a much more social environment. In addition, the point of me having photos on my site was to share them family and friends. At this point now, I would have to post pictures in three places. And since each place has different privacy controls, I couldn’t just post the same pictures to each place.

All this so far is just to say that I’ve decided to leverage the power of WordPress, and install the FAlbum plugin. So now all the pictures on my site are from my flickr account, which will allow me to more easily manage them. With this change, photos.chrisstreeter.com is now deprecated and has started pointing at the new location of my photos. FAlbum lets you view the photos just fine embedded in my site, but one will have to go to flickr in order to comment on them, which I encourage people to do. As you can see above, I can also now embed pictures from my album into my posts really easily, which is something else I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time. All in all, I think this is a great change.

Posted by Streeter on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 9:13 pm, and filed under Media, Site. Subscribe to the RSS 2.0 comments feed.