Now that Flickr allows you to upload illustrations as well as photos, I’ve been adding some of my portfolio pieces to my Flickr set. Links are below – I figured this would be a good way to collect images for an updated Portfolio site of my own.

The key is the ease with which I can update the portfolio.  I’ve learned a few web development techniques in the past four months that should make it easier to create a web portfolio that gives my art the showcase it deserves.

I don’t know Christy Mihos, I don’t plan to read his web site, I probably won’t vote for him, but darn this is a funny video.

[youtube]tT9Xp0P9eOo[/youtube]

Added with the “Viper’s Video Quicktags” plug-in from http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Video - a pretty sweet WordPress plug-in. 

I’ve let the blog lag a bit lately, but now that I’m on Facebook there’s at least a 35% chance this blog will be read.

Set up my first Wiki at www.joesanswers.com.  Intended as a users’s guide for my Mom’s frequently asked questions, I hope that over time this may be a useful resource for others with similar questions.

I chose MediaWiki as the software that powered the site; it’s the same stuff that powers Wikipedia.  Despite the harsh criticisms from Wikitruth, I chose it since

1. I was able to set it up pretty quickly – download the files, unzip them, and run the installation script.
2. It looks way cleaner than PhpWiki or its many variants.
3. It doesn’t create a zillion text files – it stores info to a MySQL database, which is what I was looking for.

Only drawback (so far) – there doesn’t appear to be any Word-like interface, so unless the user can learn wiki code (with its many bizarre [], === and || symbols) I’ll probably be the only one to edit the site.  Still, it’s nice to have a site that I can edit from afar, instead of having to edit the source code via BlueHost or edit, upload, check, and re-upload until the site looks okay. 

Ideally I’d like a Wiki with the following features:

1. Easy to install.
2. Content stored in SQL database, not a bazillion .txt files.
3. Word-like, WYSIWYG authoring.  Twiki has this, but Twiki uses CGI and doesn’t allow spaces in the page titles.  Doesn’t seem like a big thing, but I’d rather
4. “Edit” button that opens the editing on the same page, without loading a new page.  Maybe an Ajax-ified interface – click “Edit” and suddenly you can edit the page instead of constant page reloads.
5. While I’m dreaming – a Wiki with a built-in content management system for video, audio, text, and images.  Upload a file, tag it with a keyword, and link to it later.  Right now with MediaWiki you have to know exactly where your file is and what it’s named in order to embed it in your page.

I start an advanced web design class tomorrow.  Maybe at the end of the class I’ll be able to whip up a Wiki with some of the features listed above.  If not, I’ll probably just wait till someone else creates it, then download it as open-source software.

I updated www.eljardin.org with a new design, and it looks like the photos of the Jardin’s residents and location will be one of the big features of the site.  After playing around with PHP script for a while, I fell back on my old tricks of manually coding each page that needed to be created.  Once again, the need to get something up and running trumps the need to create an efficient process.

But now that the basic page is up and running, I’d like to create a WAY more efficient method of adding new photos to the site.  The requirements of this new photo album are:

• free download and installation
• easy to modify design (CSS, HTML ,etc)
• easy to upload files to my own server (rules out flickr)
• easy to tag photos - I’d like to tag some as related to “activities,” some as “spiritual development,” and allow users to browse around the different categories to get a sense of what’s going on at the Jardin.  This will also be a good exercise in creating a working content management system.
• PHP and SQL based – ‘Cause that’s what I’m learning about. 

My options so far are:

• Simple Photo Album – http://www.gieson.com/Library/projects/spa/index.php - one page of PHP and a .txt file is all you need.  Easy to upload photos and manipulate the design.  However, the code may require a bit of playing around, and there doesnt’ appear to be any way to tag photos with keywords.  You can add descriptions, but each one gets saved as a seperate text file.  Also, an interesting link to http://www.gieson.com.
• Coppermine – http://coppermine-gallery.net/index.php - Can be installed at the click of a Fantastico button via Bluehost, but looks WAY too complex to modify to match the rest of the site.  Also, seems to organize photos into albums without tagging.

More later.