photoblog

Right, I've spent all night messing about installing crap photoblog software... I swear there is not one decent package out there... half of them don't work, some have the most nasty hardcoded values and so on.

I've decided to write my own (as I've already mentioned). My photoblog software will be very simple... and will likely operate in a very similar way to folderblog. If I can be bothered I'd rather use a database (probably with some abstraction, e.g. PEAR::DB) so as not to rely on either image names or last modified information to provide the image ordering. Right now I don't care about comments, but something like that is always easy to add at a later date.

I came to the conclusion that a good photoblog is defined largely by a) the photos (duh!); and b) the site design. The whole idea of this thing is that it is very simple and allows you to concentrate on the photo, not all the whizz-bang camera settings, image manipulation, big site logos and other stuff. With this in mind I've come up with a prototype design in HTML and CSS (no PHP yet) that fits these needs quite well.

I'm in two minds about the little RSS logo and text at the bottom-right corner of the page... on small screens this will overlap the image, which isn't good. I think 1024x768 is my basis for the design, which is a fairly safe bet -- trying to design the site for 800x600 is a bad idea as I don't want to provide tiny images like most other sites do these days. Images will be 800 pixels at the maximum dimension (so for a 6"x6" photo it would be 800x800).

Anyway, the idea is at http://www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~lewiz/photos/photos.html -- let me know what you think!

P.S.
I know the RSS thingy stick to the bottom corner... I guess some fancy stuff is required to make that work. Just imagine it does for now.

EDIT: Well, I've made the RSS thing do what I wanted, although it doesn't seem to do horizontal scrolling... I'm tempted to just ignore that ;)