Category: Technical Blog

I wrote to my host about getting a site for a friend and he told me he couldn’t take on new business.But he gave me a referral to another host and they look more than decent. This correspondence also led to him telling me I was going to have to move my site as well.

While I completely understand why I have to move I am a little nervous.Luckily I don’t have anything on there that can’t be easily transferred (I hope).My ” work”
site comments haven’t gotten any comments and my other blog is flat file.Hopefully they have as good a set up as I already have.See? Try to do someone a favor and you get the boot yourself.It’s ok, I knew it wasn’t going to last forever…

I came across this really easy to use photo gallery,written in PHP and XML.It uses XML files instead of a database. Give me a break – I just started playing with it at 2:45 am! It’s called

Phormer and you can download it from Sourceforge. Or to make it even easier on you I’ll pass you the Webpage & download LINK .
I’m always on the lookout for small,lightweight gallery software. I’ve collected mostly non-database flat file stuff so far. Everyone knows the big mysql+php apps,anyway:

• Coppermine
• Gallery,Gallery2
• Serendipity( or is that a blog thing,I forget)

So, you don’t need me to tell you that those packaged gallery applications do all the mysql table populating for you and that all you really need is a mysql connection and database name and password to use them. This was a stumbling block for me. I used to only have access to the world’s most hostile php environment, and in order to test projects on this host I had to struggle immensely against this environment to get anything to work.I was lucky to get another project test site running Apache with a Fedora core set up by Troy Wolf who knows PHP & programs with it or whatever. Things I upload to that host run so fast and sharp I couldn’t believe it.But working the hard way did force me to open up the files of an application and visit a lot of help forums and I think I learned a little whereas if it had all worked from the start and out of the box I’d be really clueless instead of mildly clueless.
Like I said,Phormer is e a s y. I unzipped the files,ftp’d them and I didn’t have to edit one file.All of the configuring is done in the administration panel.You can upload pics and it makes thumbnails.You can write descriptions.You can delete it all and start over. There’s 9 or 10 skins, although there isn’t much of a difference in the skins… some of the colour names display very similar looks.But they are very nice looking skins indeed.You really wouldn’t be ashamed to use it for your photos at all even if you didn’t modify one line of CSS.
It shows exif info(I think exif info is kind of ugly)but you can opt out of that. You might have a bit of an organising hassle when sorting your pictures since the package has some default cats set up. I only spent 10 minutes looking at it and I think I get what it’s up to…
Much like Quick.Cart(a free flatfile shopping cart) the admin panel takes a bit of figuring out but is pretty instinctive.It might a little difficult for a complete noob.

I finally got a chance to meet up and actually talk with my next client.
Our project is a redesign of his website for his bar in midtown Manhattan.And he wants a flash splash page with vector graphics.Of course he does.Thankfully nalds, who heads the doop team(an excellent CMS), sent me a link to SWISHmax.I may be able to create a fairly nice and functional set of flash demo pages with the 30 day free trial.He

knows what he doesn’t want.The site is a bit out of date.I think he said it was made over 8 years ago.The decor of the bar gave me an idea of his design sensibility since he did the interior decorating…This is a barter job.But I do not care about the money (or lack of it)I need more sites under my belt and I’m going to work like mad until I get a decent amount in my portfolio.

Have you heard of this site?
weblogalot.net.
They exist soley to collect what people are posting/writing about on the internet.
My blog about A.Bourdain included a brief note about Jimmy Fallon and sure enough they linked to that post.Now

on their Jimmy Fallon page my little snippet appears.Interesting.Or not? It’s a random toy this internet.
They have a lot of celeb pages but the site isn’t only for posts about celebrities.It seems to collect and make pages for celebrities and other subjects and it seem it’s done on the fly.I’m fascinated by on the fly.I really love it when a package or app or script does this when I set it in motion.I’m still really new to programming and programming languages so I still view it all as a bit of a magic trick.
Just like when you were little you may have thought the bands playing on the radio were actually in the radio.Aww,cute.