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November 30, 2004
More half-assed feats of technology
Well I finally got something done today that I had been meaning to do for months. I finally successfully installed Gallery. Now, in addition to reading my pointless and poorly constructed ramblings, you'll be able to see my pointless and poorly constructed photography. It's really useless, but it's fun for me, and I know that "totally lame" generally passes for "oh my God, I wish I could do that" on the Internet.
Following the necessary instructions to put together a basic Web site is pretty much comparable to baking a cake. If you're so dumb that you you would burn down the house by putting on the frosting, then you should probably keep your distance from projects like this. If you're halfway literate and can follow simple written instructions, then you can probably handle installing Gallery. That doesn't go very far in explaining why I managed to mess things up quite so royally in previous attempts, but there are sometimes circumstances beyond your control, like a faulty oven in the aforementioned cake-baking analogy.
I do take some solace in the fact that I did manage to get Gallery working on the first try, the first time I tried installing it. You can check out the results of that little experiment on Danielle's site.
I had some problems with this attempt, but I safely place half the blame on CuteFTP, which I used to upload the files during my lunch at work today. Some of the files for Gallery ended up in the wrong directory. The other half of the problems come from old configuration files from a previous attempt to install the software. They were pointing to a directory on my old domain. Everything took about ten minutes to fix, so I wasn't terribly upset. In all fairness, following the instructions will only get you so far sometimes. Even if you do follow everything, there can still be problems.
Remember the cake? Suppose you get that caked all done and it looks good enough to bury your face in, but when you do, it tastes like bad fish. Obviously there's a problem, but fixing it won't be easy. That's sort of how I feel with some of the problems I'm having right now. It's installed, but some things, like creating a gallery from an existing folder of images, just won't work. When I try to do it, I get a bunch of php errors that don't make much sense. I can still use the form interface to upload photos, but I'd rather use FTP when I can. It's just one more thing on my list.
Gallery could definitely be better about letting you fix stuff during the setup process. Every time there was an error when I tried to submit the changes I made to the configuration, I was stuck starting from scratch, hoping no new errors would appear when I was finished. It wasn't a huge problem in the end. Like I said, halfway literate is all it takes.
If you try setting up Gallery for your own site, you'll probably agree with me that the configuration pages could use some serious work. I find that I have the same gripes about a lot of open source stuff. Some programs, like Adium, could not be more polished. I'm always sort of surprised that a bunch of programmers working together with no budget can put together something so nice. Others, like FileZilla, are an absolute mess. The interface is absolutely horrible. How bad? Bad enough for me to voluntarily continue to use CuteFTP over it at work. That's pretty bad. Gallery falls somewhere in the middle. The configuration pages are a maze, but once you get past the initial setup, things seem to run pretty smoothly. So far, I have no major complaints about the interface of the actual software, and I love to complain. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that version 2.0, which isn't too far off, will add some of that Adium-style polish to Gallery.
So far, so good with the installation. The software seems powerful; at least as powerful as Movable Type for what it does. I have yet to see how customizable it is, however. Creating a gallery using the default template is simple enough, but I'd eventually like to make one using custom styles. The default templates generate HTML 4.01, which is pretty weak in this day and age. I want to get something together that's a little nicer to look at both on the outside and under the hood.
I plan on using Gallery for this site and Funk 'n' Gumbo as well. It'll be mostly for showing pictures of drunks to the drunks in the pictures for both sites. The main difference being that the drunks on my site will be friends of mine while the drunks on Funk 'n' Gumbo's site will be people at the shows. Another difference is that my drunks are considerably better looking, and that's not saying much.
I know I'll get a disappointed look from Colin for not jumping right into Flickr, but this suits my purposes. I do intend to dig deeper into Flickr in the future, but I'd like to get things taken care of quickly here and then maybe look at learning about some other options. Gallery is open source, so I get that initial warm and fuzzy feeling for using it, but time will tell if it'll wear off. If it does, Flickr or something else may be the way to go.
Before I forget, here's my photo gallery. You can also find a link to it in the top navigation menu. Enjoy!
Posted by Chris Coleman at November 30, 2004 12:00 AM