I am finally getting around to using my website more often. There should be some interesting improvements rolling out in the next several months. Sometime before March, I expect to move over to a private webhost and off of my university’s servers. This will be a somewhat involved process as the vast majority of my static content that was developed while overseas and on poor internet connections is hard-coded for the Oregon State servers and is not as easy to transfer as the WordPress-driven content.
Looking forward, I expect what I do with this site to evolve and change. Its purpose and meaning still is not clear to me. Some people look at my website to check out photos and stories from when I lived in North Africa and Europe. Others come to look at my resume and professional information which is woefully unorganized and cluttered. Whatever the case, this place is sorely underused. Much of my content over the last few years has been ending up on Facebook. One of these days, I need to port all of that content over to here. That day will happen when I find a suitable photo album management plugin. Currently, I’m testing the NextGen Gallery plugin but I don’t like it for three reasons.
- All photos in NextGen Gallery are stored within publicly-viewable folders. I haven’t found a way around that yet. I really like Gallery2‘s feature where it stores all images outside of public-facing folders. Down the road I might want to sell some of my photos and I would like to protect my content, especially the high-resolution originals. Don’t get me wrong, I like both what NextGen Gallery and Gallery2 do with regards to storing the original on the server. It’s a great feature to have for backing up photos from an unfortunate harddrive crash and backup media failure. Still, I want to be able to protect those originals. Were it not for webhoster policies these days that prevent using space on their servers for backup, I’d just upload the raw images to a server and be done with it. Oh well!
- There is no rotate feature in NextGen Gallery. I can’t rotate a photo to the correct orientation once it’s uploaded. I would prefer to do as little pre-processing as possible before uploading the images.
- The watermark feature in NextGen Gallery, while nice, isn’t up to snuff. The features, again, in Gallery2, are much more advanced and suitable to what I’d like.