hebig.org/blog

Someone on ICQ asked me how I built the BlogTalk gallery pages, if I built them manually, so I added a little about page that nearly took me longer to write than the system it describes ;-)

And that's how it works: you arrange your pictures into groups and series (each group can contain multiple series, in the BlogTalk case, just one does), let run some Photoshop macros for resizing and color/contrast adjustments and dump the result into a folder on your webspace. Add caption and menu images or go for the plain text version. Then, in TextPad or your text editor of choice, you optionally type some arrays that contain the image descriptions and call that a configuration file. Done. What's in between this plaintext file and the gallery pages is no more than 20 lines of PHP.

If you want to add pictures or groups, change descriptions, add additional per-series textboxes, just edit the arrays, done. No special features, no special effects, no Metadata Magic, but it generates valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and makes extensive use of relative links, so you can navigate the galleries with the Mozilla Site Navigation Toolbar, too.