Welcome to the new aaron-kelley.net.  I’ve migrated all of my previous content to WordPress, which now powers my site.  This makes the site much easier to manage than the makeshift CMS that I had in place before.  Hopefully, now I will be able to find the time to add some useful content.

There will be some changes to the appearance/theme over the next few days and weeks as everything gets settled.  However, all of the old content is now available here, and the site is completely usable.

WordPress is a pretty cool platform to build a web site on.  It’s really starting to take off now, too.  I’ve known about it for a long time, but some of the features that made me decide to go ahead and move only came in as of version 2.7 ot 2.8 (or, in the last 8 months).  I recommend looking into it if you are looking to build a simple site; it’s not only for running blogs, you can manage static content pages on it as well, and it is pretty easy to extend if you know any PHP.  There’s even chatter about media albums coming to WordPress in the near future, so I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to move all of my content from the photo gallery into this site, just to have everything in one place.  More on this later.

Probably, next up will be a series of blog posts on Ubuntu Linux — the operating system in general, and fixes to some specific issues that I’ve come across as well as other general tips.  I’ve been collecting these since I switched to Ubuntu last November but never got around to posting them online.  How can I not, now that it is so easy for me?  I’ll also be posting whatever random useful information that I come up with — after all, my main audience is Googlers who find a page on this site while looking for something specific, and that’s how I plan to run things for a while longer.

I looked at many options for this.  The easiest solution seems like it would be to use an existing online photo sharing site, like Flickr or Windows Live Spaces.  I looked at four or five of these, and none of them really offered what I was looking for.  And what was that, exactly?

Access control. I want to be able to upload a bunch of photos for the general public to see, but have more that friends and family can log in to view. I want to be able to assign users into groups and set some photos visible only to certain groups.

Tagging. Some existing services have limited support for tagging. I really like Windows Photo Gallery’s hierarchical tagging. I wanted some way to bring this into my online photo gallery.

(Hold on, why don’t I just use Facebook? It seems to fit the bill so far. Well, how about these…)

Download the full-size, original photos. Users who have accounts should be able to download the full photo for archival or printing, not just a scaled-down web version. And I’d like the photos on the web site itself to also be reasonably high resolution… no 640×480 junk.

Easily managed appearance and organization of photos. Specifically, I want photos to be presented chronologically, and I don’t want to have to do some tedeous rearranging or even be sure to upload photos in the correct order to get them to appear in the order I want.

After dismissing the idea of using an existing online service, I thought about writing my own. I started working on my own online photo application. It was to support everything I mentioned above, and even support importing XMP metadata information saved by Windows Photo Gallery and expose the hierarchical tag tree for users to browse. I made some good progress on this application during the previous summer, but I ended up dropping it because I simply do not have the time to devote to it.

However, all of that effort was not lost. I finally settled on Gallery (what a name), an open-source PHP based photo gallery web app. I extended the metadata module provided with it to support reading XMP metadata from Windows Photo Gallery (tags, corrected dates, and captions), using code I had written for this that was originally intended to be used in my own photo application. This makes uploading photos that I have already organized in Windows Photo Gallery very easy for me. I made some other minor tweaks to the app, but now it is up and running at gallery.aaron-kelley.net.

Here’s what you need to know if you want to check out my photo gallery!

I decided not to expose tag information directly for privacy reasons. However, you can search on the tags. My tags are pretty detailed, so if you put in a location, person, or whatever in the search box, you may be able to find photos.

Personal photos (that is, photos of me, friends, family, and so on) are only visible to people who have an account and sign in. If you register for an account, it has to be verified by me before it becomes active. I will only allow friends and family to register accounts. People without accounts can still view my more “general” photos.

Account holders may also download the original version of any photo they have access to. Other web users may view the rather generously sized 1024×768 versions. (I thought about going even higher than that, but decided that it’d make the page bigger than some users’ web browser windows. I’ll check out the Google Analytics data on this after a while, and raise it if it looks like it won’t bug very many people.)

At this moment, I’ve only uploaded photos from the last two months. I will be adding more in the coming days and weeks, starting from now and going backwards. Photos marked “NEW” on the site are photos that I added within the last 7 days. (After I run out of digital photos, I hope to digitize some “traditional photos” and make them available. But I have lots of digital photos that I have yet to even sort through and tag for myself.)