Computers – Page 6 – The PolyBlog

Is a photo website battle ever won?

January 24 2021

If you have archivist tendencies, combined with strong analytical props, and a digital bent, digital photo management is the field for you, my friend. As an amateur or professional, you too can find new and interesting rabbit holes to explore.

For me, I have wanted to put some of my photos online since 2005 when we bought our first digital camera. Actually, a little before that, as we had films developed and they threw in digital prints for a $1 more sometimes. And I’ve had a website since back to the dark ages before that, with the natural thought, “Could I share them on there?”.

Round 1 – Basic HTML site

Initially, round 1 of my attempt was to code my own little gallery website. I was doing all of my photos in custom FrontPage designs, and I uploaded two or three albums in HTML code. It worked, it was functional, but it wasn’t very easy to manage. More like “dump them here and you can see them”. I also wasn’t particularly sure if I had a good process behind the scenes, but when there’s only a couple of hundred, the supply side of uniformity in file management gives way to the demand side of ease of management. Throw them in a folder, call it done. Upload a few, call it done.

Eventually, I upgraded the side to a content management system, and photos were NOT an easy inclusion. Sure, I *could* include them, but it was very manual AND hard to manage all the photos on the site. They didn’t go in a subfolder, they just went in one big directory online called “media” or “images”. Not very satisfactory even with a couple of hundred images. If I uploaded another year’s worth? Meh.

Sure, I could do it through FB, but I don’t really like FB that much, and I really don’t like having all my stuff there. Plus lots of people in the family who would/could/might want to view the images aren’t ON Facebook. Or at least most of them weren’t at the time. Over time, that edge has dulled a bit, but still, it’s an issue.

Round 2 – Photo hosting site

Eventually, I decided I needed a REAL solution for online. I had enough photos that I wanted to upload that I went for an online photo site, and reviewed a bunch of sites. In the end, I went all-in on Smug Mug. It was great. I could choose a theme, I could have subdirectories. I had to manually add all my labels and descriptions, uploading my initial pics for the second time plus about 4y worth of photos, but at least I could do it. Cross-linking to my website wasn’t easy peasy, lemon squeezy, but I could do it. Sort of. More like “good enough” rather than “good”.

Except that because of the volume and use I was needing, I needed a paid account. It was only about $100 a year overall, but it was always a bit grudging payment. Here I was, paying for Smug Mug to host my pics, when I was ALREADY paying for my own site. Does that make sense to anyone? Easier than running my own photo gallery, most of the time, sure, but on principle, it annoyed me.

Round 3.1 – PolyWogg.ca

And about 6-7 years ago, the principle got to me. I wanted it on my own site. No content rules, no limitations, my own site. So I moved it to my polywogg.ca account. Great. I ran a gallery called Coppermine initially, got it going, wasn’t totally happy with it, but managed to upload a year or two. Not bad. I considered it “round 3” for online.

But it wasn’t working quite the way I wanted it to, I struggled here and there. Eventually, I decided I needed a different solution, and opted for a photo gallery called Piwigo. It had a lot of power, extra extensions, themes and plugins, like any good online community eco-system. And it handled all of my photos REALLY well. Video was still a bit of a challenge, but I could make it work. Probably.

I didn’t quite get the chance to find out. I ran into some problems about that time with an old hoster, and moved to my third hoster of my online career. I lasted about 18m with that one before they really started screwing me around. I was almost to the point where I was considering calling in a lawyer if the amounts weren’t so small. Mostly I just wanted to smack them around. Really terrible business practices and even worse support. Like them modifying my site without telling me, my finding their changes, their denying it despite the logs showing they had done it, so they deleted the logs, and my support tickets, and then deleting my complaint files (all the same support people) so the bosses wouldn’t find out what they had done. Eventually it blew up on them entirely, and a lot of people went public for awhile before the whole unit was fired and supposedly new people hired, but by that time, I was long gone.

I had moved to a medium-sized company in Canada, my current hoster, and within days of moving, I knew I felt at home. There had been a long, lingering problem on the old site, I was convinced it was a server configuration issue but had no idea how to solve it and the support people denied there were any issues. Two days after I moved to the new host, their support group reached out to me, noting the misconfiguration was likely affecting my site performance and suggesting a fix, if I was okay with it. For what I was doing, there was a small reconfiguration required, and they were proactively helping me solve it. Nice.

I reinstalled Piwigo, spent about a year getting it all up and running the way I wanted it to (after all the other changes I made to my main website were taken care of), and I consider that round 3.2. I started uploading photos. Again.

For the first year of photos, this was the fifth time uploading them somewhere (once in HTML, once in SmugMug, once in Coppermine, and now twice in Piwigo on two different hosters). Some metadata transferred, some did not. Sigh.

Round 4.1 – WordPress

I know I’m anal, but this decision really wasn’t mine. Not exactly.

You see, my site has unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth (within the general setup of the site for speed and servers), BUT one thing that almost all small hosting packages have in common is a small note in the fine print. A limit on “inodes”.

If you don’t know what an inode is, you’re not alone, and most people who have hosting packages never even notice it. It’s basically a “file marker” in the server that tells it where to find a folder or a file. Like an index card system in a library or your old file allocation table in Windows.

For my hosting package, I am authorized up to 200K inodes. Which sounds like a lot. I have unlimited space, but for inodes, I can have say 1 folder with 199,999 files in it, or 100K folders with only 1 file in it. Neither are likely scenarios but here’s the catch. When you install WordPress, with all its little files for the core, themes and plugins, it takes about 10K files and folders. Piwigo takes about 5K all on its own. I also run two other installations of WP on my site (for other sites), and I used to have 3. Which meant just based on “installed” software, I had 35K worth of my 200K inodes already taken up.

Still, lots of room, and I cut one installation when I merged PolyBlog with PolyWogg. Back to 25K in inodes, 175K left. Plenty of space, right? Except Piwigo has a really nasty habit of generating other sized photos. So let’s say I upload 10K photos. That’s 10K inodes. Initially.

Then Piwigo generates a thumbnal (+10K), a small image (+10K), a medium image (+10K), a large image (+10K), and the original image (~0 extra). So 10K worth of images generates 50K in inodes. Umm…that’s not good. In fact, with EVERYTHING running at one point, I was up to 145K/200K used. Yikes.

Now, I can reconfigure Piwigo not to do that, and I did. I got it down to a smaller number, but the way it does it, it will always generally be twice the number of inodes.

Okay, so I had it down to a smaller functioning site, all good, right?

Well, not exactly. I still had to keep maintaining the site for admin, including improved security, etc. Plus, it isn’t exactly the most robust of software packages. I found a few things that had to be coded manually to fix, and while we found solutions (or rather the community experts helped me figure it out), it was kind of like hacking the code to make it do what I wanted. Satisfying and unsatisfying at the same time.

Round 4.2 – New WordPress versions

In the meantime, WordPress was continually evolving. It moved forward several iterations and then finally a full version upgrade, and more and more, the Piwigo solution wasn’t really integrating very well, Which is a bit of a problem.

I am, primarily, a blogger. While I have a huge site, most of the content is in pages I wrote as blog entries like this one. And I want to include more photos. Even if it is only, “Hey, here’s this photo I took yesterday at the tulip festival” before I tell some story about the experience. Yet the more WP evolved, the harder it was to integrate the photos from the site. I did it a bit manually for awhile too, passing up on some malfunctioning automated tools, but it was far from satisfying.

What I REALLY wanted was what I had wanted from the beginning. One site, one solution.

I dug back into all the photo galleries that had existed from the dawn of time, or at least it seemed like it. I found dozens that were popular and in heavy use. Some were really cool. I limited myself to those that were still compatible with the new versions of WordPress, but it was still a long list.

And almost all of them had a recurring problem. The same one I had way back at the beginning…they all use the media library as their default save location, which means by default, all the photos are stored in the same place as where you store your site header, featured images, etc. It’s nice that it’s all in one spot, but it is kind of like throwing all your books in one room and saying you have a library. No organization, no easy searching, just a long list of images to find the one you want.

The most popular one of all is one called NextGen. It has been around for years, made by Imagely, and one of the reasons people use it, other than robustness, is that it has a totally separate file structure. That presents good and bad features, but the biggest “pro” is that all of your media is stored separately. Your core media library remains untouched. One “con” is that it doesn’t handle video.

But since none of the others can handle video either, I gave it a go. Again. Sure, I say again, because I had tried it 2-3 other times previously. I always wanted all my stuff in WP, and every time I considred Smug Mug or Piwigo, I looked to see lightly if I could find a good solution in WP, and NextGen was always on the list. I could never get it to work properly.

I don’t know exactly why, but it would NEVER work right. So I’d move on, frustrated.

This time I tried it, and it worked. Out of the box, day one, first light. It just worked. What’s different from the last time? A new version of WordPress, which is significant. And I’m on an entirely different hoster that is properly configured. Does that make the difference? I don’t know. I just know it works.

Holy crap. It worked. I could integrate my GALLERY within my MAIN SITE. Holy snicker doodles.

I started uploading. I got 2005-2008 uploaded, and I hit a small wall. My site design wasn’t quite right.

Round 5 – PolyWogg 5.0

I redesigned major parts of my site in the last year. Fixed a bunch of inconsistencies, tweaked some other settings, added whole new sections. And each time I made a change, I kind of said, “Okay, I’ll figure out later how my photos fit into this new site.” I kept pushing it off.

I needed the “words” to work before I figured out how the photo and videos would work. Or if they even would.

That’s no small issue. While there are huge advantages to having everything in one site, my site has grown. It’s quite large. It has a LOT of moving parts. And the more I push in certain areas, the more I expand my content, the less functional it seemed having everything together.

A few weeks ago, I had to bite the bullet and decide. Was it going back to having two (or more) sites for PolyWogg content, maybe one for my HR guide, a separate one for regular blogging, a separate one perhaps for photos? In the end, I reframed the question. What were the REAL obstacles in having it all on one site?

The final analysis brought me to two pain points:

Navigation
Branding

Content management wasn’t the real issue. It was that I have a lot of content that I want to group together but branding it doesn’t really work with my standard “PolyWogg” headers. And navigation amongst the sub areas is too hard when you only have one pull-down menu for that category with a lot of sub-sub-sub-menus.

Again, as with all things in web developer, there was another option besides a separate site. I could, in theory, have separate headers for my different content as well as separate menus. There would be one master menu for the site, but once you got into more granular areas, you would move to a wholly different menu too.

Except I had tried this on multiple occasions, my theme is SUPPOSED to be able to do this, and I’ve never been able to get it to work. I’ve tried other plugins, nada. But this is what I WANTED. Maybe I could bang my head for a few weeks and see if I could cobble together a solution.

Okay, step 1, reach out for theme support. See if they had suggestions as to which other plugins would work well with the theme to do exactly what I wanted. Or tell me how to make it work with the theme. I’ve had some luck with them in the last year tweaking my theme, so I was willing to give it a go. I posted my question, aaaaand I crashed their site.

I’m not kidding. I literally crashed their support site. They fixed it and went, “Huh, what happened?”. I told them I had been posting a question, they double-checked the log, and sure enough, it was my account that killed it. My account is somehow corrupted (they don’t know how or why), and my posting killed them. They’ve tweaked it so that I can’t do it again, but my acct is still messed up somehow. I can use it, but well, I get some weird screens that others don’t get. No worries, I’ll survive.

Except in the meantime I figured I would see how far I could get on my own down this rabbit hole. I went to my theme. I enabled the features. I went to my test page, switched the header to the proper one, no change. Yep, I remember that outcome. Went back to another sub-page, made some more tweaks, misread an option, set it, reset, now NO header. WTF? Oh. Oops, misread it. Okay, reset that option, found two others that seemed to make sense that I haven’t noticed before, might be new, retested. And my header changed. All of my branding changed for that one sub-page with 2 minutes worth of work. Holy smokes.

Okay, don’t get cocky, I thought. I went to the menu area. I tried to create a new menu, copying over my old one. Told it not to put it ANYWHERE, just a dummy menu. Went in and deleted some stuff just so I could see that it was different. Went to the page that had the new header and told it to show the new menu on that page, not the regular menu. Reloaded. BAM! All of my navigation was changed for that one sub-page with 2 minutes more work.

OMG.

I did it. Exactly the way it is supposed to work, and I’m 95% sure, exactly the way I had tried it on previous occasions. But I don’t care now. It works.

Which meant I could keep my single site. Which means no separate setup. Nothing to stop me from using my existing site. All I had to do was decide on a consistent format to my layout and design for that sub-area that wouldn’t bite me in the butt later.

Because I’m not talking some small site. The average site in WordPress for people using other galleries is maybe 1000 photos. Sites that run full WooCommerce and sell products frequently don’t have more than 1000 items in their site. For me? We average 2000 photos a year, of which I post about a third. We broke a thousand mid-way into year 2, I’m over 2000 by the end of year 4, and I haven’t even included all the photos from our wedding events that year. Including the honeymoon section which is huge.

Long term, I’m estimating somewhere around 20K photos just to get caught up to now, although that may top 25K. I know professional photographers who don’t have that many. AND I haven’t even got to what I want to do for astrophotography images.

Rebooting the gallery

Since I had already uploaded the photos for 2005-2008, I didn’t have to do much to “fix” those galleries. I renamed a bunch, I changed the look and feel from an old template being deprecated to a new one, tweaked some inconsistencies here and there, and added a new video section that works really well, so I’m generally “good to go”.

Previously when I played with the first 4 years worth of gallery, I had to spend a lot of time getting them up and running. Maybe one gallery a day. I just did 32 galleries in about four days, one year per day, generally about 2 hours work while I was editing other things.

I’ve even managed to get past my previous point of progress (2005-2008), completed all the old galleries for the wedding, and I’m finally back into the truly “new” ones for being part of WordPress. I had reached 2011 at one point with SmugMug, I think, but I’m pretty happy with my early rebuild. I have a full workflow figured out, complete with Mylio as my software, and it is giving me the confidence that I have finally “turned the corner” on my go to solution. Four years down, thirteen to go, albeit the next thirteen won’t be anywhere near as fast. And alas, 2009-2011 is redoing old work. At least I’m doing it properly now.

Just don’t ask me about astrophotography yet. I don’t know HOW I’m going to organize that stuff.

Overall though, apparently the “seventh time was the charm”…I have won a decisive battle, but the war rages on.

Figuring out my FULL workflow for my photo gallery

January 11 2021

I mentioned in my posts about my goals for 2021 that I want to do a fair amount of work on my photo gallery (Setting goals for 2021 – Part 5: Computers, Website, Blogging, Writing, Media and Photos). But in order to do that, one of the things that is a challenge is ensuring that each gallery (say, a given month of a year) is set up consistently each and every time. That’s not a “small” step of consistency, but one that starts from the very beginning. So let’s talk about the different stages of the workflow.

Stage 1. Taking the photos

My photo gallery is made up of photos that come to me from multiple sources, and I need to be able to tell them apart for the purposes of managing. I can manipulate the filenames after the fact, but it would be easier (as my friend Matt suggested) if the filenames themselves were a bit more process-friendly. So let’s look at what those FNs would look like:

Andrea’s iPhone –> IMGxxxx – YYYYMMDD – AH
Paul’s iPhone –> IMGxxxx – YYYYMMDD – PS
Jacob’s iPhone –> IMGxxxx – YYYYMMDD – JH
DSLR –> IMGxxxx – YYYYMMDD – DSLR
Point and Shoot –> IMGxxxx – YYYYMMDD – SC (* for small camera)
Screen grab –> IMGxxxx – YYYYMMDD – SCR
Tablet –> IMGxxxx – YYYYMMDD – TAB

Now, some of those can be assigned at time of capture, while others will have to be assigned at time of file transfer. Depends on the original tool. So the workflow bifurcates after this step, but the step here is the same:

Take the picture

Stage 2. Managing the photos – Pre-processing and pre-sorting

Managing the photos is initially quite easy. I have to copy them from the device to the same folder on my PC, and I do it in four stages depending on the imaging source (copy to the hard drive, copy to the sorting folder, simple sort, and convert videos).

For Andrea’s iPhone and the Point and Shoot camera, the photos get transferred to her desktop and then copied onto a USB thumb drive.

For Jacob’s iPhone, the photos get transferred to his laptop and then copied onto a USB thumb drive.

For my iPhone, the DSLR, and the tablet, all the files are synched onto my desktop into a Synching folder.

Any files that are not already renamed properly can be renamed at this stage.

For the final step, all eight original sources are then moved into a sorting folder where I sort them by month and day or event into relevant folders. Since lots of shots are grouped together, I create a file folder structure such as:

YYYY / MM-Month (general folder as the upper level folder)

YYYY / MM-Month / DD (Event title) like “14 Kayaking at MEP’s” or “29 Birthday party”

YYYY / MM-Month / Extras as a folder for ones not being used in the gallery (often mistakes or just not meant for public, like a photo taken in a store of something I want to buy)

YYYY / MMb – Special – Special event for the month (#1) like a party, trip, etc. where a large number of photos warrant their own gallery

YYYY / MMb – Special – Special event for the month (#2) like a party, trip, etc. where a large number of photos warrant their own gallery

YYYY / MMz – Blog posts for photos that I’m going to eventually upload to the website to include in various blog posts but are generally not interesting enough on their own to include in “general photos”.

For the first level of sorting, I move everything into the relevant folders. It may mean, for example, that I have a folder for a big trip that has photos from multiple sources in it, and in fact, I usually do have at least 2 sources for various daily events.

For the second level of sorting, I convert all MOV format videos into MP4 format (suitable for the web) and move all old videos into the EXTRAs sub-folder.

Copy from the device to the hard drive
Copy from hard drive (potentially via USB flash drive) to the sorting folder and rename any if necessary.
Do a simple sort by event and dates
Convert videos to MP4

Stage 3. Managing the photos – Advanced sort in Mylio

I use Mylio as my image manager, and I do four steps in Mylio.

First and foremost, I import all the images from the sorting folder including the directories I created. When they arrive in Mylio, they are in a sorting folder too. I basically go through and move the quality images I want to use for each event into the MONTHLY folder (such as 2021 / 01 January). Extras that I’m not using, such as the secondary or tertiary photos of a group of ducks, I move into the EXTRAS folder. I also do a quality sort on the videos, special events, and folders of photos I intend to use for my blog posts.

In some cases, I may decide to edit a video or photo to make it suitable for sharing, in which case I make a copy and edit the copy rather than the original. I usually do this in another program beyond Mylio and then reimport the edited version.

Once I have a set of photos and videos for a given month (for instance, 2021 / 01 January), I run facial recognition on the “good” photos (there are too many photos to worry about doing the Extras too) and I let the computer do most of the work to group them and guesstimate who is in the photo. After the first few hundred of a given year are posted, the rest of the guesses are usually pretty accurate on the first attempt. I then add metadata to the files. This includes a name and description for the photo (identical as it is used differently in WordPress), something short, and some keyword tagging that includes year, city, event, and any people in the photo who were tagged in the Key Words. Finally, I save all the metadata to the image file.

Finally, now that the photos are all sorted, named and tagged, I move it from a sorting folder into my full folder structure for the Panda Photo Gallery in Mylio which generally has the structure of FAMILY / YEAR / MONTH.

Import images into Mylio sorting area
Do advanced quality and photo selection, filing the rest in EXTRAS.
(Optional) Edit any photos or videos that require tweaking
Facial recognition
Add metadata (name, description, tags/keywords)
Save metadata to image file
Move from sorting folder into a full folder structure

Stage 4. Uploading to WordPress

Up until this point, most of the file management stuff is just simply a good process / workflow for keeping my photos organized and filtered for quality. Now I look at the parts of getting it on the website.

Initially, I create a page to hold the gallery (while this could be done later, it saves a step in the gallery creation process) and assign it a name such as 2021/01 January, and insert two default items — a blank photo gallery and a blank video gallery. I save the page, but leave it in edit mode.

Then, working by folder (such as 2021 / 01 January), I create a new GALLERY called 2021-01 January in WordPress. This opens an upload area, and using Mylio as my initial interface, I upload all of the good PHOTOS for that month/event. Since I already populated the metadata fields, the upload puts everything into the WordPress fields for me. This completes the step of uploading all the PHOTOs. I can then edit the GALLERY description to describe the various events in the monthly folder (copying the description for later use, like a descriptive table of contents), add the link to the page created above (the step that I saved allows me to do this now), and add the GALLERY to the appropriate ALBUM (such as the year, 2021).

Then it is time to upload Videos, if any. These have to be done in the Media Library, and using Media Library Assistant, I save them to a separate sub-folder usually called YYYY-MM. Now that all the files are uploaded, it’s time to go back and edit the page I created earlier.

Each Gallery page has six components to edit:

The Page name, if it needs to be tweaked from the standard page name (usually YYYY-MM for months but could be YYYY-MM Special – Trip to Mexico);
A manual breadcrumb that I’ve created to allow the viewer to go one level higher easily;
A description of the gallery (same as what was already entered in the Gallery Page, just pasted here);
The blank gallery block to choose which gallery I want to show, and to change the order of photos if needed;
The names / description of any videos that need to be linked; and,
Linking to the videos themselves.

Finally, everything is saved and the page is previewed to make sure everything works, and the page is published. The link is then shared to FB along with the gallery description.

Create a page and edit the page name, add a blank photo gallery block and a blank video gallery block, and save in draft mode;
Create the new gallery, upload all the photos, edit the gallery for gallery description (and copy for later) and link to the page created above;
Add the GALLERY to the right ALBUM;
Upload videos and sort into sub-folder;
Go back and edit the page for page name, manual breadcrumb, paste the description, choose a gallery in the blank gallery block, edit the names / descriptions of the videos, and link to the videos themselves;
Save and preview/test, then publish;
Share link with FB.

Stage 5. Backups and further usage

Mylio automatically does a backup of all photos to a secondary location, and long-term, I want that to upload to the cloud too. Later, I do a separate backup of all my files to off-site storage.

At the end of the year, I also take all the “GOOD” photos and put them on a USB thumb drive for Andrea to weed and use to make a Photobook. Once she’s done, I save the final photos back to another folder labelled PHOTOBOOK. If there are any really good ones for the year, we also use them in Calendars, New Year’s letters, metal prints, and an e-frame.

Backup to secondary location/vault;
Backup with all files to offsite location;
Create a small subset each year for Andrea to use for photobooks, calendars, New Year’s letter, metal prints, and e-frame;
Copy subset back to a folder called PHOTOBOOKS.

And then, finally, I’m done. Whew. So let’s look at that workflow all together so I don’t miss anything each time. I’m also going to copy it into a PowerPoint print-out so I don’t lose it. Nineteen steps that I have to do consistently every time or something gets messed up.

Take the picture
Copy from the device to the hard drive
Copy from hard drive (potentially via USB flash drive) to the sorting folder and rename any if necessary.
Do a simple sort by event and dates
Convert videos to MP4
Import images into Mylio sorting area
Do advanced quality and photo selection, filing the rest in EXTRAS.
(Optional) Edit any photos or videos that require tweaking
Facial recognition
Add metadata (name, description, tags/keywords)
Save metadata to image file
Move from sorting folder into a full folder structure
Create a page and edit the page name, add a blank photo gallery block and a blank video gallery block, and save in draft mode;
Create the new gallery, upload all the photos, edit the gallery for gallery description (and copy for later) and link to the page created above;
Add the GALLERY to the right ALBUM;
Upload videos and sort into sub-folder;
Go back and edit the page for page name, manual breadcrumb, paste the description, choose a gallery in the blank gallery block, edit the names / descriptions of the videos, and link to the videos themselves;
Save and preview/test, then publish;
Share link with FB.
Backup to secondary location/vault;
Backup with all files to offsite location;
Create a small subset each year for Andrea to use for photobooks, calendars, New Year’s letter, metal prints, and e-frame;
Copy subset back to a folder called PHOTOBOOKS.

Animation software: Adobe After Effects (3), Character Animator (1), and Flash (2)

November 29 2020

Adobe always has awesome and powerful products and my hesitancy with it is more about their business model. Some time ago, Adobe went to the monthly fee price, and if you signed up for all of Adobe’s products in Canada, with the Cyber Monday deal that knocks a bunch off the cost, it is still $40 US a month, or about $52 a month/$600 a year. That’s pretty freakin’ steep. Now, maybe that doesn’t seem fair, because that’s ALL of Adobe together. Except here’s the kicker…while LightRoom and Photoshop are uber powerful, they are way more complexity than I want for my simple photography needs. InDesign for page layout might be nice, but again, overkill. Illustrator would be a nice-to-have as would Premiere for video editing. Even Acrobat Pro would come in handy from time to time. I could probably find a use for Spark, InDesign, and Audition too.

But none of them are “must-haves”, not like MS Office for instance. If Adobe dropped it to $100 a year, I’d say sign me up. At $600 a year? Yeah, no.

But I can license them separately if I find one I like, and Adobe has three products on my list — Flash, After Effects and Character Animator. While lots of people still use Flash even in 2020, it’s being phased out for website use and not generally recommended much anymore, so easily dropped.

AfterEffects is more about motion graphics in general, so not really what I want either.

Which leaves Character Animator.

1. Character Animator ($$$$$)

I downloaded ACA with their free 7 day trial and it seemed pretty powerful at first. It has some stock “puppets” to work with, including some anamorphic characters (monsters, etc.) and humans (man, woman, ninja). So some good stock characters.

I did a couple of tutorials and the interface is not particularly compelling for me. One of the features, quite common I know, is that you can use your own webcam and microphone to animate the character. So, for example, if I move my head side to side, or bob around, the characters head moves too. Equally, I can record my voice over the character and it will (in theory) lip sync to my words. Not very accurately, but a pseudo replica of my movements.

Which is okay, but not compelling to me. I closed out, checked some stuff back in email, did a couple more things, and went to go back to it. It wouldn’t load. Total crash. Okay, shut down, reboot? Nope, won’t load. I’m not sold on it, and it is more expensive than most because of the subscription model, so I’ll just uninstall it.

Nope. It insists on loading the Creative Cloud tool (CC) first, and it keeps hanging. The help page says reinstall. Why would I reinstall just to uninstall? Sigh. I eventually had to download ANOTHER uninstaller to get the first uninstaller to work. Nice.

And to be honest, this is one of the things I hate most about Adobe products. When I’ve used their Lightroom, for example, it didn’t just help me manage my files, it started doing a whole bunch of changes to folders and subfolders and meta data so that nothing else would be able to manage it either. That’s not an option I accept, particularly when I have other tools with better interfaces for some functions.

Okay, all of Adobe is definitely off the table. Too bad.

Today I choose to grind it out (TIC00062f)

September 27 2020

For my website management, it is probably trite to note that some parts are more enjoyable than others. Writing posts is fun; managing plugin updates is not. Solving gremlin issues is not.

A few months ago, I revamped the site. Mostly because I had accumulated enough little management issues that my site was running slow and I was starting to notice irregularities in different posts. You would expect that if multiple people were posting on a site, the back-end admin area might get a little cluttered. People might save photos in odd places, for instance. But my site is all me. Everything should have a place and everything should BE in that place. More or less.

Most of the time, nobody would ever notice. Except a lot of my posts are part of various series of posts. And on one page, I used “blah blah blah – blah blah” as the title, and on the next, “blah blah blah: blah blah and blah”. A dash in one case, a colon in another, and inconsistent wording for the blah part. Most people wouldn’t notice, but in some cases, it was off enough that it made me question what the title SHOULD be i.e, what was the goal of the post? Not simple pedantic naming conventions but actually what I was trying to communicate.

The images and tables were messed up in a number of places, and some people had noticed enough to point it out. But overall? It just needed an update.

So I did it. The last time I will be able to do that manually from start to finish, partly as I am close to 1500 posts in total. That’s a lot of chickenfeed.

I still have about 150 posts that are messed up somewhat for photos, and I’ll eventually “fix” those in the fullness of time. They’re fine as they are, I just flagged them so that when I finish some photo updating, I’ll fix those too. I’ve ground through a couple of layout and table issues in the last week. But I had a big one that was outstanding.

My book reviews list was not complete. I have 190 BRs on the site, all live. I failed to notice that #160 was messed up for format when I went through them earlier, but I caught part of it tonight. Anyway. The real issue was that the index only listed the first 50. There were another 140 to add to the index, and while I have a lot of the info in a spreadsheet, each item in the index needs to link to the proper post with the review.

I had done about 10 at a time previously and each batch was taking me over an hour to get into shape. I split it into a bunch of stages so that I could assembly-line-bulldoze some updates earlier, and it fixed the majority of layout issues in batches, but it still left me with the index not done. I figured this was something that would take me several months to update, perhaps 10 here or there, or even 20 in a day.

Earlier today, I started looking at it differently, and seeing if I could tweak my Excel spreadsheet to put all the info I could into a single “paste” and then just edit the remaining missing pieces. In the end, it worked. I added 130 records at once, complete with full HTML code for the links, and then just manually pasted the URLs one by one into the website’s database table. All together, it ran about an hour. The whole thing? Up and running? In about an hour? Woohoo!

Months worth of work the old way, and because I decided to just grind it out a bit today, I dug in, found a faster way to do it, and saved myself a ton of work. Plus moved my markers on what is “next” on my to-do list.

Today I choose to just grind it out on my website and update my Book Reviews index.

What choices are you making today?

PolyWogg 5.0 – Ten significant updates to my site

September 11 2020

I have gone through a series of iterations of my website and I tend to see them as grouped together like versions of a software release:

2000-2008 (versions 1.0, 1.1): These were HTML versions, mostly collections of bookmarks, based on a structure I designed and my friend Liam turned into a website for me. The site was mostly just pages of links for me and there was very little content on there for other people.
2008-2014 (versions 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3): These were variations to make the site work with Drupal as my content management system and I started expanding my content for others. Book reviews, movie reviews, and the start of posting my HR guide online.
2014-2017 (versions 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3): I switched over to WordPress for the blog and Piwigo for my gallery, and played with lots of options in between. I had serious issues with my hosting platform (GreenGeeks) and I finally gave up on them and moved to a new hosting provider (WHC.ca). Primarily, I worked on expanding content.
2017-2019 (version 4.0): I combined my two separate websites (ThePolyBlog.ca and PolyWogg.ca) into one and started expanding my content dramatically. I passed the 1000 posts and 1M words mark, and my site traffic jumped up to about 150 visitors a day.

Before the pandemic hit, I had been slowly chopping down the tree that was my old website. I was working on integrating my photo gallery, I changed some layouts and formats for things like book reviews, and there were a few issues I needed to fix here and there. When there were only a couple of hundred posts, little niggling problems weren’t much of an issue. But now that I’m over 1300, with some 28 categories and over 1.4 million words, those “little issues” are a bit more challenging. And this is, relatively speaking, the last chance I have to fix them before those problems become insurmountable if I need to go back and edit something. You’ll see as I go, none of them were terminal problems, but they did leave me with some major inconsistencies in my website. Some affected the front-end, most affected the back-end.

In the end, I decided to do all of them the “right” way, the way *I* wanted them to be, and the result is another jump in versions. I now have version 5.0 of my PolyWogg.ca site. Most of the work I’m mentioning below was stuff I did in the first six months of this year, I’ve just never summarized it before.

#01. Switching over to “blocks”

Two years ago, WordPress upgraded their back-end interface and released Project Gutenberg which replaced the classic editor with a “block editor”. In the past, you would basically type away and then if you applied formatting, you would usually do that afterwards. The “block editor” tried to move everyone one step closer to a desktop publishing layout tool, and well, let’s just say there’s a reason why the fifth most-used plugin across millions of sites is a tool that lets you revert your editor to the old one.

The short version is that when you go to start a new “section” on a page, you tell it in advance if you want it to be a paragraph, image, table, etc. The default is a paragraph, but whereas you used to just insert tables or images, now you insert a “table block” or “image block” and then add the table or image inside that “container”. For those used to doing desktop publishing, it’s the equivalent of drawing a box, telling the computer it will include an image, and then adding the image. Writers want a writing editor, which is what they had; now everyone from the writer to the final admin has a desktop publishing editor. No offense to the lovely folks who designed all this, there’s a reason why everyone uses Microsoft Word and not their companion app Microsoft Publisher to write their documents. But I digress.

Does anyone see a difference on the front-end? Nominally, no. At least not at first. A WordPress site would still show the code from either editor just fine. However, with the new blocks came some new power for users, and so designs started getting more complicated, more robust. For good or bad, the front ends of many sites started to change as people started to use their new tools. But viewers don’t “see” blocks, they just see the layouts changing.

For me and my site? Not so much. I hated the block editor. It was not intuitive at all to me, and many of the work processes I was used to using just didn’t work right in the block editor. So, like literally MILLIONS of other users, I installed the classic editor and just bopped along the old way. But I knew that I should eventually convert to the new method and I could see a few advantages, such as ways to replace a couple of inefficient work processes. Earlier this year, I sat in on the WordCamp for Dallas and when it was over, I fully committed to the Block Editor. I kept hearing the Mandalorian catch-phrases in my head. “They have spoken” and “this is the way.”

On the positive side, those 1300+ posts mean that I have a really good idea of what I need — and what I don’t. But I was committed to switching to Blocks, and I wanted to see what was out there…the good, the bad, the ugly, and well, the downright stupid ideas people had. The default Block Editor comes with a wide range of default blocks for everyone to use, but other companies have released dozens of collections of “extra” blocks with different “look and feels”. Many came with a lot of extra options to tweak them that the default ones didn’t — colour backgrounds, typography, ability to add images or icons, etc. In addition to the default blocks, I reviewed 9 other collections, trying out all of their blocks, and considered each and every one of the 209 possibilities.

No, you didn’t read that wrong, I looked at ALL of them. On the positive side, if it can be called that, many of the collections include similar options. For example, many included a special block for doing lists with the bullets replaced by “icons”. So 6 or 7 blocks that all do the same thing a little differently, and if you consider the overlaps, there are probably about 80-85 separate “types” of blocks.

One collection stood out way above the rest. Stackable’s collection generally did everything all the others did, and added way more tweaking options to every aspect of the block — text, size, spacing, colours, background, borders. Everything. They grouped it in three tabs — layouts, styles, and advanced. Most collections had small subsets of the styles and nowhere near the power of the advanced tab.

For the other collections, I tended to pick one or two out of their collection and disabled the rest. And there were lots that I just have no use for in my site. For example, I never show collections of old posts within another post or page, and there were quite a few designed to do just that step. So I simply disabled them.

In the end, I liked Stackable’s options so much, I upgraded to their Premium addition to get some extra sample styles and their support for a year.

I have disabled the classic editor, and I have gone all-in on using the block editor.

#02. Upgrading my featured images

Every time I post a new post, I assign it to a category and choose a “feature image” to go with it. For me, they are thematic. So all my book reviews should have the same featured image off to the side of the post. For those 28 categories I mentioned earlier, there are at least 28 images. But if I was honest with myself, sometimes I wasn’t really consistent. Suppose for example I write a book review about an astronomy book…do I use the astronomy image or the book review image? Is there a hierarchy in my mind?

Or what if I had goals related to astronomy? Should I use the goals images or the astro images?

While that is not a HUGE issue, I did have another challenge. I had added categories over time, and while not all the posts in that category used the same image, the bigger problem was that not all featured images were the same size. Some were 200px wide; some were 150px; some were 300px. I can override that in the site and “force” them to all be the same size, but they also weren’t all the same file format. Some were PNG, some were JPG. Some were transparent, some were not. Every once in awhile I would tweak something, it would look good, and then 3 weeks later I’d be looking at something else on the site and realize that my previous change had indeed worked for the image I had been working with for THAT day, but not for all the FIs. And suddenly I had things all messed up on a post that was a year old. I would “discover” it after the fact and think, “WTF? What happened to my site?”. I’d disappear down a rabbit hole only to emerge later with the answer that it was an old post that didn’t work well with a new tweak in all instances. It worked well enough, but messed something else up.

So I went hard-core. I reassessed ALL of my featured images, modified all my possible headers too, changed a bunch of images I use for signature blocks, and converted them ALL to transparent JPGs that are all the same size. No matter which image I choose, it is the same width as the others. I even had to accept that since dimensions/proportions change for some images that are taller than others, I went with a set width that limits the height to a set range.

But here’s the hard-core part. It meant replacing each and every featured image on every post. There are tools that will kind of do that for you, but not all of my posts had the same image to replace. And not all of them by category would have 100% the same image. There is SOME variation. Which meant the best way to do it was to edit them all individually.

Hmm.

Right.

1400 posts?

To replace images in a way only I would probably notice?

That sound you hear is crickets. Even *I* didn’t think that was a good enough reason.

#03. Fixing inconsistencies in some common elements

Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and editing old posts on a website might be the work of the littlest mind of all. But I didn’t like that a couple of things I had done over time didn’t really look right.

At the end of every post, I have a signature block. My default one says “Happy reading, PolyWogg”. I really like the tool, I created the block in PowerPoint, and I love the tagline to close my posts. I don’t know why, I just do. But then I added some for TV show and movie reviews, and “happy reading” didn’t seem quite right. For astro posts, the more common salutation is “Clear skies”, and I added that one. But I have 28 different categories, and when I was done reviewing them, I figured I might need up to 10 separate signoffs.

Sure, I could do that starting now. Just upload, use the new ones from here on out. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. After all, how many of the old ones really needed editing? 10%? Not worth it.

Right?

#04. Changing my post layout

I use a theme that I have used for over 10 years in one form or another. It works AWESOME for me. Weaver Extreme. There are more powerful options now, but this one just gives me tweaking options out the wazoo and I still love how it looks.

Except for one thing. It wasn’t big, just a “I wish…” moment. At one point, I was going through a bunch of sites, and I saw a bunch that had their dates sitting outside the post i.e., to the left of the text, and it looked pretty sharp to me. There is an option in the theme to include your featured image out there, but I always embedded it in the page and wrapped text around it. But, being able to set out the date? I couldn’t do it with my theme and so I pushed it aside, no sense crying over missing milk.

Or…could it do it? I went to the support forums for Weaver, and connected with Scrambler who is a Weaver user extraordinaire and offers support in the forums. She or he has helped me in the past with other glitches or tweaks, and I was happy to see they were willing to help with what I wanted. I confess, I didn’t even really know where to start. I wasn’t sure if it was a theme setting, HTML code or simply CSS code. I didn’t even know if it was possible, but I described what I wanted and they said it was possible with CSS code. Hot damn.

If you’re reading this on a desktop, go back up by the title and you’ll see that the featured image is set off from the main prose and below it is a date styled with red and white boxes that looks a lot like the classic Google calendar boxes. Scrambler helped (i.e., spoon-fed) me in figuring out the right code to make it happen. Then they told me how to fix it so it didn’t break bad on mobile and tablet.

But with that change made, and the FI sitting out there too, that problem I mentioned with all the FIs not being the same size and proportions started being something larger to consider changing.

#05. Mobile-friendly

Back in the day, mobile-friendly sites required you to have two separate themes running concurrently. One handled desktop, one handled mobile. If you loaded the site “m.yourdomain.com”, it ran the mobile theme; if you loaded, “www.yourdomain.com”, it loaded the full site. My theme was mobile-friendly in that sense, but over time, it kind of stopped as the mobile tools upgraded and I didn’t. The new approach is to make your pages “responsive” — they shift in size depending on the size of the screen viewing it. Any theme WILL change, but responsive means it changes intentionally and collapses gracefully.

Someone had mentioned in a Reddit thread that they were trying to access a number of pages in my HR guide (you know, the main draw to my site), and the pages weren’t very mobile-friendly. Why? Because they used a lot of tables. Damn it. I liked tables. That’s why I used them.

Or was it the reason? Hmm…if I thought about it a bit more (and I did), I realized I used tables because it was the simplest and fastest way in the old editor to control the alignment of elements. But the block editor has a LOT of different blocks that help with multiple types of alignments.

I could start using those today, but if I wanted to improve my existing friendliness, I would need to edit a number of posts and pages.

Damn it.

Nope, I was still going to resist going back to old posts and updating them.

#06. When is a meme not a meme?

I have my HR guide, that’s a big draw. People love my posts on my telescope alignment tips. A few other posts here and there get a lot of hits (Phoenix audits anyone?). But none of those are really why I started my site way back when.

I started it to post my book reviews, movie reviews, humour and quotes.

I have often played with layouts of all of them, but the two biggest challenges to “gel” as a concrete layout are the humour and quotes. I love Aunt Acid layouts where they have a common image, a few lines. E-cards are another layout I like. So I’ve played with lots of techniques to design simple “cards” or “memes” where I have some text, common branding with my frog logo, and a joke or a quote. Perfectly designed so someone can “share it” as a graphic. Like a meme machine.

Yet here’s the rub. If I post a great quote in a graphic, the website doesn’t “see” the text. It doesn’t index the words, or the source. Sure, it looks pretty, great for sharing, but if someone searched for a quote by Abraham Lincoln, my site would NOT pop up anywhere. For all intent and purposes, my site is invisible to search engines for that content. By contrast, if I just put the text in the site, then it isn’t a pretty graphic that can be quickly shared. Some people put in the pretty image and add the text as ALT-TEXT. That is a LOT of extra work in my view.

Finally, after hemming and hawing between text or graphics, I bit the bullet. If I have to choose between having the text on my site and having a pretty picture to share, I’ll take the text. I want to be able to find it easily myself. So I don’t have the meme option? At least I have the text. And yet, I can put a pretty picture behind it on the website, it’s just not shareable as easily. Big deal.

Oh, except to convert my existing ones over meant going in and editing all those posts individually.

Double damn.

Okay, fine!

The universe was very clearly telling me to fix / edit with more consistency and so I took everything off-line and started editing the 1300+ posts, fixing tons of stuff as I went. Layouts, FIs, signature blocks, tables, etc. And in particular, all the special layouts I have for book reviews, movie reviews, TV reviews, humour and quotes.

Let’s see what I have for posts, noting of course that some occupy more than one category so it isn’t simple addition:

Astronomy: 94 posts;
Book reviews: 252
Civil service: 55
Computers: 127
Development: 28
Experiences: 176
Family: 115
Goals: 254
Governance: 31
HR Guide: 13 (although most were moved to pages)
Humour: 86
Ideas: 64
Learning: 111
Libraries: 8
Movie reviews: 12
Music reviews: 17
Photography: 54
PS Transitions FP: 1
Publishing: 30
Quotes: 96
Recipes: 19
Spiritualism: 17
Television: 267
Writing: 51

I’d love to say it all went swimmingly, but it didn’t. Some of the pieces were significant challenges. One of the blocks I was using was causing wonky issues on my phone — it kept thinking my background image was actually a video so it was trying to give me a link to “play it”, but since it wasn’t actually a video, it was giving me the play button with a big line through it saying it couldn’t play. Well, no sh**, Sherlock, cuz it’s not a video. Stackable realized it was an actual bug when I submitted my support ticket, AFTER I spent a ton of time with Scrambler teaching me how to handle it a different way. Then Stackable fixed the bug, and all the glitches went away and I went back to using it normally. Nice.

I basically went category by category, as most of the “issues” were common across themes:

Adjusting some nomenclature in the titles (simple things like where I used dashes in one title and colons in another, or a series of articles that I reviewed and some said “Articles I Like:” as a category, and some didn’t);
Switching from classic paragraph block (one big block) to separate blocks to allow better editing…if I didn’t have to do sub-edits, I just left the classic paragraph one running;
Replacing the signature block with the new ones;
Replacing the featured images with the new transparent ones that are all the same size;
Tweaked the size of the social media icons after each post;
Leaving the “big” format posts to the end – recipes, book reviews, music reviews, movie reviews, humour, quotes, and TV reviews.

I also was able to create a bunch of reusable blocks to ensure consistency in layout and format in the future, so that I won’t have to redo any of this again. And, to be brutally honest with myself, in a way that if I do decide to do something different in the long-run, I can leave the current one as is and just start “fresh” from the new point. I don’t need to be in lockstep for the past and future posts, just improved flow and consistency for the above elements.

Will anyone else notice? Probably not. Some people have noticed a few improvements here and there, but most of them won’t see a dramatic shift — it’s still the same theme and colours.

#07. Fix the admin menu on the back-end

Nobody else sees the admin back-end menus but me, but I have a bunch of plugins and the order has always been a bit chaotic. Things that I thought were low priority were near the top, others that I use almost daily were buried at the bottom. That’s just a feature of WP, it lists them in the order they were installed or as per whatever order the developer thought was good. Fortunately, I could use an advanced admin menu editor and go in and rearrange everything the way *I* want it — posts / comments / pages/ gallery and media / downloads all near the top. Plugins / settings / appearance / blocks all near the middle. And users / tools / security near the bottom. Pretty much in the order of the frequency with which I use any one section.

#08. Auto sharing of posts on social media

When I write a post, I usually finish it, save it, preview the final version on the website, and then I manually share it separately on social media (well, FB and Twitter). The “best practice” in the industry is to auto post to social media so you don’t have to repeat those steps, and up until 3 years ago, that was easy to do. WP and FB worked fine together. Then FB closed some posting privileges for individuals, and suddenly you couldn’t auto-post to FB. I changed my approach, did most of it manually, and relatively “sat on it”. It wasn’t a big problem for me, but it was a small niggling issue. Particularly when I write book reviews where I end having to share it 3 different places!

I downloaded SNAP’s auto poster and sure enough, FB didn’t want to play ball. They advertised that if you went with the paid version, you could enter your login and password and it would work perfectly. Yeah, no. I paid and what you ACTUALLY have to do is try about 30 times to get it to accept the FB sharing with your account, and each time, it kicks you out of FB and makes you log in again. It’s supposed to do that 4 or 5 times and then “accept” it after that, but I was well over 30 at one point and no dice. Lots of reviews online say the same thing in much harsher terms for their false advertising. However, you CAN do a back end tweak to fake your way into letting it share, and if you just leave the cookies and sessions running (even if you close the browser), it’s all good. As long as you don’t “log out”, it mostly works.

I use it sporadically, but it saves me a few steps, sure.

#09. Re-organize my HR Guide posts and pages

I mentioned above that my HR Guide is the most popular page on my site, and there are sub-Reddit threads devoted to discussing it. Where users have posted links to pages they liked. And therein lies the problem. A few of those pages are ones that I’ve “archived” as old content, but I left them “live” while flagging very clearly that they are OLD with links to the NEW versions. Yet because people see the links on a Reddit link, they end up jumping there when they click, and they frequently don’t follow the link to the latest version. AND they often often pose questions in the comments on the old pages. WTF?

When I turned off comments on the archived pages, people complained they couldn’t leave comments on a dead page. WTF x 2?

In the end, I put ALL of my content on a page whose URL won’t change, which was the obvious solution, but it left me two issues.

First, I didn’t want people just getting error messages on the old pages. So I went through and set up formal redirects to send them to the RIGHT page with my table of contents for the latest elements.

However, the second issue wasn’t as easy…people had detailed comments and replies on those old pages. Content I didn’t want to LOSE when I archived the page. Fortunately, I was able to find a plugin that lets you move comments from one post to another. I was a little skeptical at first, but the plugin worked like a charm. Everything moved where it was supposed to go, no hiccups.

What I really have been wanting to do over the last few months is to re-write the guide and update it to 2020, but the revamp of the site had to take precedence, so I haven’t got past Chapter 3 yet. It’s still on my list, but I’m a bit disappointed that the site revamp took so long to do it “right”. I was hoping to have the HR Guide all done by my birthday which was back in June. It wasn’t critical, an artificial deadline so to speak, but it would have been nice.

#10. Limit tables where possible to TablePress

I mentioned earlier that tables are generally not “mobile-friendly” and the best practice in design is not to use them at all. But there are times where a table is just the simplest and best way to present data.

Take my various reviews for instance. I have about 190 book reviews. And to help people find them, I used to have a bunch of manual lists that I created so that it WOULDN’T be in a table. They were separate lists and sorted by:

Book title;
Author last name;
Review number;
Date of the review;
Year of publication;
Series name (if applicable);
Rating (out of five); and,
The link to the review, of course.

It’s a lot of information, I keep it and more in a MS Excel spreadsheet, and I was adding it to manual lists on seven separate pages. It was a pain in the patootie.

Enter the plugin TablePress. It lets you store all the info as if it was a spreadsheet like file, and you can even “paste” from an Excel spreadsheet into the back-end to generate the data. No need to retype it. But that’s not the big time saver.

Once you generate the table, and it does have to be “generated” to see it live, you can set it so that ANY column is completely sortable on the page. One page, 7 columns, all sortable. No waiting. No repasting. No editing. If you want to sort on the title, click the column. If you want to sort on the author, click the column. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

And with a premium plugin, I can even make it “filterable” in advance plus add a search box to the top of the table that lets you self-filter the table. Only want the entries that were published in 1998? I can prepopulate it that way and JUST show you 1998, or you can type it in the search box yourself. It’s awesome.

It turns your simple table into more of a searchable database. It’s not perfect, but it is WAY more power than I had. With the only “hitch” being that it is a table. It doesn’t look great on a mobile phone. But you can search on the main page just fine with a phone, so if they can’t work the table for my book review index? No huge loss.

I have a few other pages that will also have tables on them, but there’s no getting around listing data that way. I could do a LOT of extra work for minimal benefit, and it wouldn’t look right any other way. Instead, I’ll sacrifice a bit of mobile-friendliness to save myself a ton of work.

Other tidbits…

I did a bunch of other stuff too, little tweaks here and there…I reduced the number of active plugins and cleaned up some outstanding “security” tweaks I wasn’t sure if I should make permanent or not (I did).

I still have about 50 posts to fix before I am back fully live, but that is more a question of a huge design question for a small problem with small single images from my NextGen Galleries. I solved it, I think, but that is worthy of its own post all by itself. And I need to tweak my approach to both backups, photo management, and a simple glitch with my CRON (automatic macros) scheduling. Nothing challenging, but they need to be done.

Well, I shouldn’t pooh-pooh the photo management. I have photos embedded in posts from my old photo gallery, and once I get them all embedded properly in my main site, I need to “update” those links. So, as I went, whenever I saw something that would have to be “updated” later, I added a flag to the post. It is live, but I can pull it up with a simple sort. That’s part of a much larger photo management project, but it means between 145 and 185 posts need to be updated at some point. Once I get to that point, it’s a few hours work, but it’s still outstanding.

With the amount of work I did above earlier in the year? I can live with those items still being on my to-do list.

The PolyBlog

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