Tag Archives: bucket list

#50by50 #23 Part 7 – Fix my digital photo gallery – Re-linking photos and video

The PolyBlog
April 14 2018

Phase III: Fixing an embedding problem in WordPress

One of the things I do with my photos, besides having them in a gallery, is embed them in various posts in my WordPress blog. For example, I have a section on the site dealing with an HR student conference from back in 2002, and I have a small album of photos with the conference docs. Those photos are stored with my Piwigo gallery, and embedded as a hot link in the WordPress pages. Simple, right?. But here’s the problem. The link to each photo currently says:

http://thepandafamily.smugmug.com/yada yada yada

Now that I have the new gallery up and running, if I simply delete the old one, those links won’t work. I have to change ALL of them to say:

http://www.polywogg.ca/pandafamily/yada yada yada

It isn’t a huge challenge, just under 100 posts in total with maybe 400 photos linked. But each photo or video link has to have the SmugMug link deleted and the Piwigo link pasted BEFORE I delete the SmugMug account. If I don’t do it first, then my WordPress site will suddenly have a bunch of broken links all through it and no photos showing from my gallery.

But of course it isn’t as simple as just a search and replace of the opening domain info — the “yada yada yada” is completely different for each site. So they have to be done manually. Since it is easier to do while the two galleries are both running, i.e. so I can view them side-by-side on the screen and copy the links from the new to replace the old, it is still a pain in the patootie. With the uploading and captioning done, I’m about 50% done the re-linking process. But I got my account renewal reminder the other day … SmugMug renews in less than a month and I wanted to be done before then so I won’t get charged for another year.

I did the first few, and they were easy-peasy. So I thought the “rest” would be the same. Strange, but I feel like it was both less work and more work than I expected. How can that be?

Well, I feel like there were “only 98” posts with the cross-linked photos, which seemed like a manageable number. In addition, many of them only had one or two photos, so pretty quick. All in all, that meant I was initially feeling like it was less work than I expected and would go pretty fast.

Right up until I hit some of the photo-rich posts like stories about Being Jacob’s father or various trips we took. Some of them took a LONG time to update. But the weird part is I feel like the photos are somehow “brighter”? That’s weird. I wonder if the filters and themes at Smugmug that I was using were muted somehow. Anyway, I really like how it looks now.

And I’m finally done. It took a bit of time, maybe 6 or 7 hours in total to do the updating of the 98 posts, although in fairness, some of that was because I was sucked into reading my own posts again and editing a bit as I went. 🙂

But everything is re-linked. Whew.

#50by50 #23 Part 6 – Fix my digital photo gallery – Tweaking the view

The PolyBlog
April 14 2018

I was right, uploading took a whack of time. I also don’t much like one aspect of the upload window — if something “fails”, it gives you an error while the screen is still uploading so you can see it, but once the rest of the uploads are done, it just rolls over to a new screen showing the successful uploads. No continued error message to say “64 uploaded, 2 didn’t”. So I wasn’t monitoring as I went, and later in the subsequent phases, I’ve discovered “missing” photos and videos i.e. ones that for some reason didn’t upload successfully the … Continue reading →

#50by50 – Dropping some plans

The PolyBlog
April 14 2018

If you’re following me on FB or Twitter, you might have noticed a series of reposts lately, partly as I realized my numbering style for my #50by50 posts were confusing people. Too many subcategories and I would likely not reach 50 items since I was grouping some. So I’ve gone back to numbering them individually where appropriate, and reposting. But with just over two months left, I realized that some of my possible plans are likely not going to happen. Dye my hair I put a lot of thought into this, which was probably a mistake. Because that thought was … Continue reading →

#50by50 #04 – Start a new job – Update

The PolyBlog
April 13 2018

The best-laid plans of mice and men sometimes go astray. When I posted the first time about my new job, it was after a pretty extensive internal process for me personally — reflecting extensively on what I had liked about previous jobs, what I was looking for in a new job — and a formal job search across multiple areas. As I finished that search and said yes to the dress, so to speak, I went with a stakeholder relations job for disability pensions. I liked the way it was framed, there was a formal set of mechanisms in place, … Continue reading →

#50by50 #27 – Write about wedding planning

The PolyBlog
March 23 2018

Way back when I got married, some 10 years ago now, we discussed the fact that we were taking a pretty simplified and organized approach to our planning, somewhat different from what we found online, and perhaps when we were done, we’d write it up and post it too. Well, fast-forward ten years and I’ve never made the time to do it. Lots of other topics intervened, and yet I had it on my list. Partly even just to be able to share some of the photos as examples. A little over a month ago, I saw a guide online … Continue reading →