The image overlay effect

On ChristopherWardPhotography.com, when you click on an image, it pops up the image in a floating panel above the other images. I think this is pretty cool. I have done something similar in code that I had written to tarken the screen, put up a “glass pane” (you can’t click on links), and place content in an overlayed div. This library works really slick though.

I first started with lightbox. It is pretty popular, and quite a few people use it, although I don’t think it is over used. This works pretty well. It has a few dependancies, such as prototype, and scriptaculous. These libraries on there own add quite a bit of functionality to javascript, but they aren’t lightweight.

Then I found lytebox. This project shrinks down the code by “borrowing” just what is needed for the lightbox effect. Then he has improved it. The images will automatilcy resize to fit the browser screen, and it will also allow html documents in these pop ups, not just images. This is what I went with.

I kind of wish that lightbox had the same image scaling and html content that lytebox has, because I have some more plans for some sriptaculous scripting…

Vision Driven Workflow

David DuChemin over at the Pixelated Image has a great post. I am a couple of days late on this. Being sick put me behind on my web readings. Anyway, this is the kind of post I really like from David. Practical info on putting vision to work. I struggle with getting a vision into my photography, and his post on post-processing with vision is very usefull. If you can’t name the mood in a couple of words that a picture was trying to convey, then you won’t be able to get it there in post. This seems so obvious, but it was one of those “Ah Hah” moments for me. Like he warns, I spend too much time trying to make my pictures “not suck” instead of bringing out the mood that I saw of felt at the time.

Christopher Ward Photography

Well, I finally did something with the domain ChristopherWardPhotography.com. This will be where my “portfolio” will be. It is a start. I only have one album out there right now, and really, it is just some images I have pulled from flickr. They are not really a cohesive album. I need to spend some time to get some images out of Aperture. I need to get some thumbnails too. The thumbnails you see are just browser scaled versions of the larger images.

The NAS is still down

I got my Western Digital green 1TB drives the other day. That didn’t work. I got a new power supply, thinking that the new drives just took more power than the old clunker could muster. No luck. Still dead. Not sure what the issue is at the moment. I need more time to troubleshoot. The system takes forever to boot, whether it is the existing system disk, or a CD of Ubuntu. It sits there just after a boot logo for a long time. With the drives in, it never gets further. Without them, it eventually continues. I can’t figure out where it gets stalled. What could be causing this?

Integrating with WordPress

I probably should be working on the 2.7 upgrade, but instead I started looking at photo gallery options other than Gallery2. It is just too slow. There is too much of it I don’t use as well. I think I have settled on zenphoto. It seems to work pretty well, with out the feature creep that Gallery2 has. I figured I would convert the annieandchris.net site to that.

It got me thinking though about how I might integrate it with WordPress. After seeing the tantan Flickr plugin, and how well it works, I figured that there must be a plugin for zenphoto. Well, no. Not really. There are a couple that will let you show pictures in the sidebar. And Trung’s presszen looked promising, but it didn’t seem to work. I started taking a look at the code for the tantan Flicker plugin, and saw how he was able to take control of a URI to insert his own code in with the current wordpress theme. I stripped out the relevant stuff, and got it to work. This is the code.

function parse_query(&$query) {
	$query->is_404 = false;
	$query->did_permalink = false;
}
function request($query_vars) {
    $query_vars['error'] = false;
    return $query_vars;
}

function cww_template() {
	get_header();
	echo '

Zen Integration

'; get_footer(); exit; } define("CWW_ZEN_BASEURL", "/blog/test"); if (strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], CWW_ZEN_BASEURL) === 0) { status_header(200); remove_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical'); add_filter('request', 'request'); add_action('parse_query', 'parse_query'); add_action('parse_request', 'parse_query'); add_action('template_redirect', 'cww_template'); } elseif (strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'].'/', CWW_ZEN_BASEURL) === 0) { header('location: http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'].'/'); exit; } ?>

I think that I may take a go at pulling in the zenphoto albums in a plugin, and see how it goes. I like how you create plugins in WordPress, and it is kind of fun poking around. It was frustrating for the longest time when I was trying to get it going, and I was getting the body of the blog showing up at the bottom. I finally realized that I needed to ‘exit’ the script to prevent the loop from happening. You would think you could override a WordPress function to prevent that instead.

WordPress 2.7

So, no sooner do I have a bunch of new stuff added to the blog, than WordPress releases version 2.7. This is no small release. There are a bunch of things added that can break plugins and themes. Comments are upgraded, the admin interface is overhauled, and several new functions exist to support all this that need to go into the themes. There is a migration doc here. I will probably need to use it. The theme I am using is not yet on the compatability theme list, and I have customized it quite a bit. The The plugins I am using are not on the compatability plugin list either. I am a little nervous to upgrade at this time. I will probably need to install a “test” version of 2.7, and install my theme and plugins and see what I need to fix.

New Stuff Added

I have updated the site a bit. The About page got updated, and I added a new page called Books. I wanted to have a page where I would keep track of the books I have read, and a place where I could link to any of the posts I have made about these books. I also will put together a list of the books that have been recommended to me that I plan to read.

You may also notice that there is a blue space in the top header. I have some images that I need to update. Might be a good time to swap in some new ones. The reason for the gap is that I have made the blog content area wider. As I had blogged about earlier, the medium images from flickr didn’t quite fit. Now they do.

The new F150 Tonka

I have also found a really cool plugin called the Flickr Photo Album for WordPress. It is very cool. It does three things. First, there is a widget on the right sidebar that shows the last 8 flickr images I have posted. Second, it allows me to select a flickr image to insert (I did this with the Tonka Truck) without needing to goto flickr and get the url for the image. Slick. The third thing brings us to the menu changes. I have changed what I have up there, and there is a new tab called flickr. Clicking on that brings you to a page, still in the blog template that shows pictures from flickr. You have access to all the albums there. You can even initiate the flickr slideshow, which is a nice touch.

I don’t think I broke anything, but you never know…

Another Book!

David DuChemin now has a book on pre-order at Amazon. It is going to be called “Within the Frame, A Journey in Photographic Vision”. I am starting to get a list of books I want to read going, and this will definitely go on that list. In his post about the book, he mentions that he still doesn’t have the pictures. This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One, I would be scared to have a book promised with no pictures. But that is one of the things that sets the amateurs apart from the pros, they can produce great pictures on demand. The second is that he appears to have the writing for the book mostly solidified. This isn’t a “picture book”, or a “how to get this shot” book. This should be a window into Davids vision.

I have been following his blog for a while now, and have tried to understand what it means to have a vision for what you want to convey in a picture, and how he does this. I still feel like I come up short in understanding this, especially when I try to reflect on what I want to say with my pictures. I hope this book will help sort more of that out. My only wish is that it was available now, instead of the spring.

2 Terrabytes of Backup Goodness. Maybe.

It doesn’t do much good to have any amount of backup if you can’t use it. Right now, the NAS, where I intended to put them appears dead. Not sure what happened. I powered down, put the new drives in, powered up with the newest Ubuntu server disk, and it dies on the install. Now it won’t start up at all. I get the Ubuntu graphic, then a blinking cursor. I am going to have to pull everything out, and put back pieces until it starts up. Just what I wanted to do.

WordPress Code Plugin

If you look at the tutorial I put up, you can see that the code snippets are syntax highlighted. Most of the java classes are initially hidden, but when you press the arrow to the right, the code slides down. Very cool. I found this WordPress plugin called WP-CodeBox. It works pretty slick.

One thing that I wasn’t completely happy with, was that there was no “name” to the code. The header for the top just looked like this:

code here

What I wanted was something like this:

code here

It took a bit of sorting through the code, but I found the section that parsed the parameters, and added a “name” parameter. Now I could add whatever text to the header I wanted, and have the name of the code stand out.