Hey Folks
Hey Folks,
So what have I been up to all this time, if I wasn’t pushing my van around Alaska in the winter? Well, I’ve been updating my website/s, giving them some new content and a slight aesthetic overhaul as well. Nothing too major, but learning a few things about design and tweaking some little things. One of things I’ve been working on is integrating a coding technique called “Flash” into the web pages. It’s pretty cool, though I know some web users are averse to Flash stuff.
For all you “non-web-design” people (i.e., my dad) “Flash” is the software used to make these cool little automated slideshows like you’ll see if you check out the home page of this website right now! The home page of course, is here. Looks pretty cool, eh? I did that, all by myself! Also, how about those rounded corners on the table on the left side? Fancy stuff. And I’m not even showing off – yet. 🙂 I re-did my Recent Work webpage.
I also added a short slide show on my backpacking website, Expeditions Alaska. On that site, I also re-did my Eye of the Beholder webpage, and will be making a few small tweaks on one or 2 other pages soon, too. I hope you like them.
I’m also working on another slideshow, but I’ve got a few things to tweak before it goes public – I’m really excited about putting it on the site, but have to finalise a few details first.
I also added a bunch of new images to this website from this past summer/fall. So how do you find all the new images on my website? Easy, mon frere. Go to this page, type “Carl” in the Search box (sans the brackets), and “60” in the “Newer than XX Days” box. Presto! You should be taken to a gallery that displays all the images I uploaded to my site in the last 60 days. If you want to just look around, I’ve re-configured the galleries to display images in the order they were added, ,so each gallery will show the most recently added images first, so check them out.
From memory I think I added images to the following Alaska pages:
Denali National Park
Wrangell-St. Elias National Park
And under Adventures there are new images in these galleries:
Under Birds:
Under Wildlife:
Bison
Dall Sheep
Elk
Grizzly Bears
Moose
I’ve added a few other images here and there as well, but I think those are the main ones. I’ll have some more images coming online in the next 2 weeks or so, I hope, if I get some old scans worked up. We’ll see if that gets worked into the incipient holiday madness. In the meantime, this stuff should give you plenty to look at.
The photo posted above here was from this past September, when I visited Katmai National Park with my parents. I wish I was smart enough to figure how to do a little slideshow here on the blog, but I fear that’s beyond me for now. 🙂
Thanks for your patience while I’ve been offline.
Cheers
Carl
Hey Carl – are you using the search engine friendly plugin for coppermine? Just wondering if you get hits to specific php pages within your coppermine gallery. I have to work on my own a bit. Still looking through the changes you have here…. but love those rounded corners. 🙂
Hey Mark
Those little rounded corners took me WAY longer than is probably healthy for me. 🙂
No, I haven’t used any of the search-engine plug-ins for Coppermine, but I’ve tweaked the code to make the tags stronger – I have a couple more to do and it should be even better. I tweaked the code a little, then got some help from Jason Hahn, he knows php, I just stab at it and see what happens. I’ll send you a note once I get the next few things tweaked.
By the way, I changed the galleries back to display images by name rather than date added, so this post is already past it’s relevancy date – still, most of them should display newer images earlier.
Yes, I do get hits to specific php pages – I try to make the coppermine pages reasonably strong – some of them work better than others, for some weird reason.
I love the flash stuff you use on your site.
Cheers
Carl
I was noticing some of the text you had in your subject specific pages, like on the Great Greys page:
“Great Gray Owl Photos – Great Gray Owls, Strix nebulosa, photos of these great silent hunters, Great Gray Owls.”
I was wondering how you tweaked the PHP to get that in there, but it is a description different than say the album description on the “birds” general page of ; https://www.skolaiimages.com/stock/index.php?cat=5
I know you can add some descriptions from the config section of Coppermine, but getting them to show up where you want them is another story. I don’t want the text next to the gallery thumbnails, but rather on the main page like you have for the owls.
Hey Mark,
hhhmmm – something about what you said isn’t correct. What you quoted is the album description, and it shows the same on both the Birds Category, and the GGO album page – that’s in the config part of your program.
You can set it so the description doesn’t show up on the Gallery thumbnails (the category page, right?) .. I have the home stock page set up like that. Stock Pages
Are you asking how I get individual Image Display pages to show both the Image Description and the Image Title to show up? That’s tweaking the php some more. I can’t remember exactly what I did .. you should probably be able to find it via searching on the Coppermine Forums .. I asked a million questions there – those guys are kinda hard to deal with sometimes though. 🙂 I think it’s in your image display.php file . just add the Desc and Title tag below and above the actual image file – I think. I can send you my php files if you want.
Now, what I really want is to have a different description on the subject specific pages, like the GGO page .. I’m using the album description also as the Page Title tag .. which helps SEO .. but I don’t like having it copied verbatim on the page itself – I’d like to allow another text description there so I can add some more text, make it more reader friendly, etc, and keep the description purely for the Title tag.
I think the other thing that helps the SEO a lot is having each gallery accessible from each and every page on the site. That’s why I think drop down menus are so helpful – each gallery on my site is one page deep into the site, which helps. There’s lots of little stuff about the coding that can make search engines relish your site – text links are another. That’s one reason I have the filenames under each thumb act as a link to the image display page.
Uh oh, Jeff Beck just came on iTunes .. I gotta play some guitar – be right back –
…..
….
oh man – nobody plays like that guy – what an insanely amazing musician!
Anyway, does this make sense? Most of the stuff I’ve done I’ve asked about on the Coppermine forum, so you might find more detailed info on those threads – I don’t understand much php stuff – well, ANY php stuff, really.
Cheers
Carl
Great post.