How Galleries Work

Carol reported she could not find the larger photo where her hair is “exploding” which is featured as a thumbnail on the main page of Tybee Island 2003. Dad also reported not finding some photos.

The main page has a link to a group of pictures. I put the # of pictures in that group on the page. “All Dressed Up” has 30 pictures.

gallery-how1.jpg

Each section is presented in sets of 9. In the upper-right corner of each section of 9, you will see left and right arrows as well as numbers representing each section of 9. “All Dressed Up” has 4 such sections.

gallery-how2.gif

Carol’s hair exploding is the first photo on section 2.

Once you “zoom” in on a screen-size photo, you can also go through every photo one by one using the left and right arrows. And you can go “up” a level on any page by clicking on the title.

gallery-how3.gif

Each photo has a “Full Size” version that can be used for printing to photographs. These are usually larger than the screen. To save a full size photo, click on the link at the bottom of the screen-size photo and then right click on the giant photo that will appear to save it.

Navicat

In search of DC’s deleted weblog data…

I’m not used to using databases and not being able to “peer into them” through some kind of GUI. I was able to see all the MovableType MYSQL tables on my system with Navicat. Added a user to the MovableType author table called “Navi”. So that’s why he’s writing this and not Jeb.

(Now… off to restore DC’s deleted blog and entries from backup.)

Update: Now using CocoaSQL which is much free-er than Navicat and works well.

Search Me Update 12-9-2003

The search engines are visiting mac.fiveforks.com and indexing the blogs and other pages. People searching for things in Google, etc., are being directed to our pages. The search words show up in this Search Query Report.

engine: teoma

search phrase: cow skull

found: Kelly’s photo of cow skull at Grandpa’s

engine: yahoo

search phrase: Commercial Electric Compact Fluorescents

found: getting replacement bulb

engine: google

search phrase: somewhere over the rainbow chords piano

found: Greg’s recommendation of Harmony Central chord website

engine: yahoo (United Kingdom)

search phrase: cd goldfish mno goldfish

found: Carol’s comment on Ted’s ipod posting

engine: searchaol.aol.com

search phrase: found a small cyst on my three year old’s head on left side what is this

found: Clyde’s surgery photo… last paragraph on Kelly’s birthday.

Poor lady.

MacFive News 11-2003

Congratulations to Kelly on making Blog-Of-The-Week with her Pumpkin Seeds Mystery posting. Carol’s Pedicure posting earned the previous B.O.T.W.

The mac.fiveforks.com home page has been updated and includes the following features:

1. Every hour the home page automatically updates to show new posts. So going to mac.fiveforks.com is a great way to see if there are any new articles.

2. The “newspaper column” format includes each Web Log (blog) and the most recent two postings with day and date.

3. The photos on the page “rotate”. Every time you come back or press the refresh button in your browser, they change. Danny claims he pressed the refresh button until they “ran out”. That’s not possible…. I don’t think.

4. The total number of blog entries (articles) is included next to the blog title.

5. The total number of comments to an entry appear next to the entry.

You’ll also notice that most of the blogs have a “Recent Comments” section. Great way to spot new comments to older articles that you might otherwise miss.

Enjoy! Keep posting!

In Search of Random

Randomline

Random On This Day

SomeDays

MTPhotogallery (cron job can update randoms)

MTRandomEntries

Recent Comments List

My goal is to take some of these plug-ins and techniques and have the mac.fiveforks.com home page be dyanmic, interesting, and a summary of new things on everyone’s blogs.

Combining the OtherBlogs plug-in with the Recent Entries code, I can have summaries of recent comments from all blogs. In this way, people leaving comments get some recognition and comments are more likely to be found.

Thumbnails On The Fly

MovableType’s manual mentions supporting thumbnail creation when uploading pictures if ImageMagick is installed.

A google on ImageMagick lead to this entry by Scott Hacker: birdhouse.org: ImageMagick. That saved me a lot of time, because it pointed to a Mac OS X install version. Now all Fiveforks bloggers can do this…

… upload an image file into their blog, create a thumbnail size, and have the thumbnail zoom open to the larger photo. Thanks to ImageMagick! (Kind of like installing a gorilla to swat a fly.)