zavesky.org

Okay, so just starting to use some of these blog/web/etc software packages, I guess I have a few expectations that are not being fulfilled as easily as I though.

1. Formatting: Even though this WYSIWYG stuff is pretty nice for WP, I still like my old-fashioned wiki style formatting.  I have a lot of legacy stuff in twiki, so I wanted to see if it would owrk.
2. 

   A good UI for photo browsing.

   Photos: Image gallery support is horrible.  Now I see why Kevin was insistent on creating his own content management software.  All of the existing gallery, album, etc. things just don’t get it right, imo.  In fact, I think that for simplicity and ease of use, Dave got it right with his very basic perl script, album.  I will not give up the fight, though, and refuse to give into the wills of others and host my image on some shared service (i.e. flickr, picassa, facebook, etc).
3. Speed: This stuff just isn’t very fast.  Again, maybe expectations are high because I’m used to working locally on a server for my own work, but editing and loading pages seems pretty slow on this shared web-hosting account.  I knew I was saving money, but is this better than people loading things off of my own cable-modem based server?  The jury’s still out.

Just in case you’re interested, here are some notes about editing these different pages and to get them the way they look now…

1. WP: Edit the ‘images’ directory
   • Select the ocadia theme.  Change the color of many of the images <wppath>/wp-content/themes/ocadia/images/ocadia to match my own color set.  Replace the header image.
2. Gallery: Install/select the ‘carbon’ theme.
   • Change the album.tpl file in “<galpath>/themes/carbon/templates” as described in this page to turn off date information on every item.
   • Change the size of the comments boxes to be smaller (size=40 not size=80) and now cause line breaks on smaller displays by editing these files: <gallery>/modules/comment/templates/AddComment.tpl and <gallery>/modules/comment/templates/blocks/AddComment.tpl.
   • Change the background image CSS for the theme in file <gallery>/themes/carbon/theme.css from

     .buttonLast a { display: block; width: 15px; height: 15px; background: url(‘../carbon/images/last.gif’) no-repeat; } .buttonLast a:hover { background-position: -15px 0; }

     to something like this

     buttonLast a { display: block; width: 15px; height: 15px; background: url(‘../carbon/images/last.gif’) no-repeat; background-position: -15px 0; } .buttonLast a:hover { background-position: 0px 0; }