The Gallery Is Open For Business
In the first post in this journal I mentioned that I had some longer term aims for the aaronkoolen.com domain and I’m pleased to finally say that step one has been complete – a simple menu system and media gallery to provide a small showcase for my photo and video hobbies.
My idea was to use AJAX but I wasn’t feeling inspired to learn it until some part-time PHP development work cropped up which started to look like it was heading that direction anyway. Therefore I took the opportunity to educate myself early, using my own site as a learning project.
Now I’ve quite enjoyed learning ‘The AJAX way’ but I have to say that I have not enjoyed Internet Explorer in any way shape or form. I would often get the next part of the site up and running on Firefox and Safari without any problems, only to test it on IE and have the whole thing fall apart. Not only that, but there seems to be handy debugging tools for Safari and Firefox but nothing for IE. It really is an awful browser and I did toy with the idea of not allowing IE people to visit my site, but I capitulated to the will of the devil in the end.
Overall I’m quite pleased with the way the gallery is working. It supports categories and is driven dynamically by the files on the server (no database content required) and also contains video where I have placed up some of the short films I’ve done over the years. It uses calls to PHP code to retrieve the list of files (the PHP also generates thumbnails if they aren’t there) and then the Javascript does the job of displaying the selected item.
Next is to populate it with my favourite images in each category. The Music and Outside categories I’m happy with so far, but not the People and Animal ones, I need to shoot more. But for now it will do.
Click aaronkoolen.com or hit the tab at the top.