As of last night, all of the photo galleries are now being served up by the PHP/MySQL back-end. Over the weekend I added some new material to the genealogy section, which consists of transciptions of the wills of Thomas Cochrane and several letters written by Susan Sarah Brownbill.
Only one work day left till turkey day! This evening I made some rather large updates to the genealogy databases. I’m not quite sure how I want to tackle the new PHP/MySQL genealogy database. I’ve come up with a preliminary database design and I’ll be playing around with that over the long weekend to see how best direction to take the project.
I haven’t completed the new site yet, but almost all the galleries are now database driven rather than static HTML pages. I’m using slightly different code on this site than the new one, because on infused.org I store all of the images (except the thumbnails) on pbase.com. On the new site, I will be hosting all the images. While modifying the code for this site, I found a few ways to streamline it and I’ll be replicating those changes to the new site also.
I’ve even started the rather arduous task of putting together a couple of real portfolios for the new site. It’s really hard to decide which photos should be in a portfolio and which shouldn’t. I think the first portfolio may be made up of the black & whites that I’ve done and which I haven’t added to this site.
I’ve got one new database driven photo gallery online and I’ve also converted the Remember 9/11 gallery to the new format. You shouldn’t be able to tell that the 9/11 gallery is database driven, because I’ve hidden all the scripting using some server-side scripting. I haven’t decided which method I’ll use going forward, but I’ll convert all the older databases to the hidden method so I won’t have any broken links on the search engines.
I’ve made a lot of behind the scenes changes to the site. Most of these changes will make it easier for me to make modification to the site and to add photo galleries more quickly. I’ve also complete the basic administration screens on my other site, so I’ll probably be making an announcement very soon that the site is going live.
I have a few new things in mind for this site, such as a new search engine (I won’t be fixing the old one), and a new genealogy database driven with a PHP and MySQL backend. I’ve actually already designed the database schema, so I’ll just need to write some code to translate the information from it’s existing format into the new database as well as writing all the code to display it in a usable format. Probably another 30-90 day project!
Feed