Lions Fan Site
August 12, 2008
With the upcoming NFL season, I need to make a decision about my Detroit Lions fan site. I really like the site and really like talking about my favorite NFL team, the Detroit Lions. Unfortunately, as one can see by looking at the site, I haven’t made a post since late June.
This isn’t from lack of interest but simply a lack of time. I did a lot of posting during the last season and the first couple of months into the offseason. But mostly, my time has been spent here on Mr Papa’s World and Cruise Talk Central, plus a few other miscellaneous sites I maintain. Throw in my work on the Simple:Press Forum plugin for WordPress and I don’t have much time.
I am contemplating abandoning the Lions fan site and just blogging about the Lions during the season here on Mr Papa’s World. I would really like to keep that site going, but it hasn’t garnered much attention but that’s going to be mostly due to my lack of attention. If anyone (Hi Tim!) wants to help out with the Lions site, just let me know. I probably won’t make any decision until around the start of the season.
Coming Soon – New Gallery Look
June 14, 2008
Well not all that soon to be quite honest. Its going to take a lot of work to convert over all my albums and photos to a new appearance, but work will start soon. If you have been wondering about the lack of activity here at Mr Papa’s World its because of all the work on developing the new gallery appearance. That, plus the work on do on Simple:Press Forum plugin that I am part of the development team.
I used my other sites as test beds for development of the new gallery appearance. I started with some existing WordPress stuff out there and the customized the hell out of it. I have also fed back most of my customizations back to the original authors for their consideration for incorporation into the baseline.
Previously, I had been using Gallery2. To be honest, Gallery2 is a really nice, well done web application. I have used it for many years, well before WordPress. Due to the work of some folks, it has integrated pretty well with WordPress too, but it was really overkill for what I needed.
With the release of WordPress 2.5, they finally added some built in support for photo galleries. I would rather do things using core code with some plugins than use another application. It took several months after the release of 2.5 before the Gallery2 plugin was updated due to the complexity of the WordPress changes.
Anyways, after getting what I wanted working on some of my other sites (ie test beds), it was time for actual deployment on a site that heavily uses my photo galleries. That side would be Cruise Talk Central. This led to a few more tweaks to the code, but more importantly, I had to move all the pictures and then enter in new descriptions and captions (thanks Suzanne!). I also had to make sure that all references to the old Gallery2 images anywhere else on the site (lots of old posts) now pointed to the new stuff. The site is going to take a hit with search engines too because I couldn’t figure out a good way to redirect to the new location of the images. I did at least redirect them to the new gallery instead of getting a page not found error. Some day, I need to learn how to master apache redirection.
With the Cruise Talk Central Photo Gallery now deployed, its time to start thinking about moving Mr Papa’s World over to the new gallery appearance. I have a bunch more photos here though so it will take time, plus Suzanne and I need a break from playing with photos. Stop on by the Cruise Talk Central Photo Gallery and tell me what you think. Still time for me to incorporate any good feedback.
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