The bang (exclamation point to some of you) is because I’ve been working on the photos section for quite a while. That’s because I was on a quest for the best photo-album software I could fine — or at least one that met my specs.

I went back and forth between photoblog software (geared toward new and unrelated photos being added daily), and photo album software (geared toward groups of related images).

I settled on photo album software, as I tend to think in categories.

Then I needed to find one that A) was free, 2) was templatable, and iii) had support for IPTC data.

IPTC, for those of you who haven’t read about it here or elsewhere, is the standard used by the world’s photojournalists to embed information about an image within the image. You don’t need a separate database holding things like the title and caption.

There are lots of galleries that let you add titles and captions, but most store that in a separate database, meaning you’re married to it if you want to keep your captions. So IPTC was a must.

The end result: zenphoto. (Had I gone the photoblog route, the clear winner was Pixelpost.)

While the "official" build doesn’t support IPTC, the community build does. "Huh?" you say? Zenphoto started as the work of one guy, but has been picked up by a community of coders. They’re working on the next version, and meanwhile you can get in-between versions that support IPTC from the nightly-build page.

I considered both Gallery and Coppermine, which I had experience with, but both were overloaded with features I didn’t need. (Further still, zenphoto integrates nicely with WordPress, which powers my site.)

So I installed zenphoto (10 minutes’ work), then set to creating a template that would keep the site’s look. That done, I went through all my photos, picked a bunch to put online, and uploaded them.

Zenphoto is great in that you can create a new album, say "dogs," by simply using FTP to upload a folder called "dogs" to the albums directory. The rest is automatic. So once my template was done, it was just a matter of uploading and going to get some dinner while 400MB of files were copied.

There’s still much more to do. While I might demand IPTC support, I haven’t added IPTC titles and captions to many of my photos. That’s a long-term job. But now, if I scan 50 old family photos, I can have them on display in a nice format in the time it takes to upload.

I love automation.

So thanks for reading all this. Now go take a gander at the unfinished gallery.

And yes, I’m messing with some new CSS features, such as popups when you hover over certain things. My plan is to use it for asides and footnotes, or maybe for quick definitionsLike this.

A little thanks, a few changes, some background, and some waxing technological.

First, thanks for all the suggestions; keep ‘em coming. I’ve taken many of them and considered all of them, all of which you should see reflected in the design now.

One thing I thought about is what people will see.

Some of you go to the home page (as would many new visitors), but many go straight to an entry, either through RSS, because of a Google search, or because of a direct link. So the individual entry pages had to act as pseudo home pages.

The real reason for the redesign is something you can’t see. The back end was a mess. There were five or six stylesheets, and I didn’t know how many of them were actually being used. There was a mix of old Movable Type entries and the newer WordPress ones, (Turns out WordPress had them all. Once I cleaned out the old MT stuff, everything switched to the new look, even the really old stuff.)

Even if there was only one stylesheet, the code was still a mess. I tweaked it so many times that some sections had two lines of code setting the font when it should have been <h3>.

So the back-end code is now cleaned up, and the pages have been simplified.

Getting a bit technical: I decided not to switch from using tables for the overall structure. I know purists think everything should be done with CSS, but frankly using tables is a lot simpler when you’re doing columns. So all the formatting is done in CSS, while the overall ’shape’ is done with a three-column table. It’s still a lot easier to work with and tweak.

Now it’s just a matter of making sure the design goes through to all the interior pages — the Contact page, for example, didn’t exist for a while. Now it does.

And that’s that. I’m sure to make more changes, but I’m vowing to keep it clean on the back end so when it’s time for the 2009 version, I’m all set.

Thanks for reading this far!