Kartoony

Yeah, had the same “problem”. I just opened a new “Incognito” window in Chrome and the website showed up perfectly. Great plugin – easy as pie to use – good work, dude!

Thanks, Pamela, for the image sizes. I don’t know any easy way to get sizes right given the unlimited dimensions that could exist. I’ll just put them into Photoshop and “canvas size” the portrait images – maybe with some nice background or a text box callout on the side? Sort of a pain, but my experience tells me you need to find out what doesn’t work to appreciate what does.

Same problem – 3.5 – no Visual Editor – installed Google Library – all better now!!

Thanks Aaron.

Well, I think I resolved the issue.

I rebooted my iMac. When I logged back into “localhost” and went to the admin panel, the problem was still there. I refreshed the page a couple of times (I had done that before to no avail) and, suddenly, everything started working again.

Go figure.

Maybe I’ll learn enough in the future to be able to figure out what’s going on. Clearly it was a Chrome/Firefox issue – so maybe that will be a help. Just wasn’t reading the config files properly – who the heck knows.

OK – being the [degrading comment moderated] that I am, I have spent the last three weeks learning about WordPress, mostly from Lynda.com and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. That dude knows his stuff. I have been through the WordPress Essentials course and if I had one whit’s worth of sense, I would have gone through that before trying to jump into WP with both feet.

I should also have set up a site on WordPress.com and played around with the features there as well.

Let’s face it folks, this is not a five minute install. It’s only a 5 minute install if you know what you are doing and I clearly did NOT.

So I’ve got WP set up on my hosted service and just the other evening set up a local install on my home and work computers. I may even put an install on my MacBook Air. Once you know how to do it, it’s really is pretty darned simple.

So I have to eat some crow and answer my own question with ABSOLUTELY NOT. This is an absolutely amazing platform.

I think, and that’s my problem, I’m still trying to figure out what I want on my website and all of these little things are complicating it, what I’d like is one of those “slideshows” (on the home page) like you see on other website home pages with little buttons at the bottom showing the progress from one slide to the other. Usually the slides have text and graphics, you click them and they take you to another page. (I’m SURE this has some kind of name, but I don’t know it.)

Oh yeah, and not just on the home page. Where a “gallery” might reside inside the site, I need the ability to run video and static graphics and, perhaps, audio.

But I’ve also seen these types of “slideshows” that now contain videos, so rather than going to a different page, a video will start.

A photo slideshow is nice but slideshows now need to support all kinds of media.

I’m pretty sure MUSE will support that and, perhaps, I’m just asking too much from WP. The whole idea was to keep things simple, and I’m OK with that. I’d much rather see less features in WP than a bloated, overloaded platform that bogs down under the weight of stuff that should never have been there in the first place.

And I’m not trying to do stuff on the cheap. But if I’m led to believe that something will perform in a certain way, I want to know how to implement that and so far I’m running into problems.

What I like about WP, since my rant started a while back, is that it APPEARS to be flexible enough that, with plug-ins, I might be able to accomplish what I want. But no sooner do I figure that out when something else pops up (that I see, for example, on another site) and, dammit, I want that too!

If I haven’t said it before, the technology is beginning to change TOO FAST! I consider myself pretty tech savvy, but even I am beginning to get overwhelmed with the amount and frequency of change.

I don’t know if that helps?

Well, I’m BEGINNING to figure it all out. Photocrati (which, BTW, just bought NextGen Gallery) seems to be a pretty good blend of WP and photo galleries. And NextGen looks pretty slick. But I need video galleries as well. NextGen may be able to do that, I’m still trying to figure it all out. Don’t know what Photocrati’s plan for NG is but could also include video in the future – we’ll see, I guess.

I’ve looked at piwigo and zenphoto both since my ISP offers both as a “plug-in”. But they have problems of their own – and they are not intuitive from what I see. Maybe that’s why Flickr is the way it is – maybe that’s the best out there.

Although Chris’ recommendation of Zenfolio is good. Their navigation structure is the best I’ve seen, but it’s a pay-to-play site. Nothing wrong with that, but that’s not what I want right now – maybe in the future. I just don’t understand why it all has to be so complicated. (Like the latest version of iTunes – what the heck was Apple thinking???)

What gallery plugin would you recommend?

I’ve looked at photoblogging themes and, quite frankly, they seem to complicate matters.

I’ve also looked at some open source gallery software which my ISP supports and thought I could easily link to, but that software is not very intuitive.

Chris has recommended ZenFolio and I have to admit that looks pretty good but it has a gazillion bells and whistles that have to be configured to make it work right – something I don’t have time to do for John or even myself. Those type of sites assume you want to sell photos and I know I don’t want to do that now and I’m not sure John would. And even if he does, there’s that whole piece to configure correctly and maintain.

Like I said, there is nothing easy.

But I would like some recommendations for gallery plugins. In my own case, something that will support video as well as images. The majority of what I do is video. Right now I’m posting everything I do to Vimeo with embed code on other sites.

There are absolutely no limits to storage and bandwidth with my current ISP – which I think is a great deal. Yeah, it’s a shared service, but I have the options to go to a virtual server or even my own hardware if and when the need arises.

Those of us who have been fiddling with this stuff just take it for granted. When you start to break it all down – like you need to do to explain it to someone else, you realize how complex it all still is. As much as we’d like to think it’s simple, it really is not.

Sorry about that. I’m me – the John I was referring to was my friend who has the photos. Actually he’s my dentist but we both share an interest in photography. He’s more into the post production end after discovering the old negatives. The photos adorn his dental office and are just fascinating to look at. Farm life in the 30’s – a real step back into history – the kind of stuff that was done for that WPA project, I believe, that sent photographers out around the country documenting life during the depression? These photos, however, were those taken by an advanced amateur. This guy knew what he was doing and had the equipment to back it up. I can’t remember what John said he did, but he had some kind of high level job – college professor or something like that. Point is, he had the bucks to buy the equipment he needed and the time and inclination to document his family.

Anyhow…I’m trying to figure out the easiest and best way for him to get a web presence so that he can share these photos. I can tell you, if the technology gets in the way, the project probably will die. I’ve got to make it easy for him so that he can focus on restoring and developing those negatives rather than fiddling and futzing around with web sites and such.

As you and I have discussed before, the gallery properties of WP are kind of clunky and I just don’t want that to be a problem for him.

But, sorry for the confusion – I could have been clearer.

Yah – I’m beginning to believe. My thing is that I tend to get sidetracked and WP has some very attractive features that could do that – creating themes and developing widgets for example. I’m trying a couple of themes to see if they will do what I want, but I fear, eventually, I’ll be drawn to the dark side of WP development.

I do believe, however, there there is great potential for folks to learn WP inside and out and help others develop websites to REALLY be drag and drop simple.

I’m thinking of a friend, for example, who has an incredible collection of B&W images his father took back in the 30’s in the Mid-West. He used very high end equipment (for the time) and left behind a treasure trove of 4X5 negatives. John has been using Photoshop to bring these images back to life and it’s a shame that the only way you can see them is to stop by his office and see the gallery he has hanging up all over the place (which, BTW, is a GREAT way to display art).

There just is NO WAY he has the technical skills (nor does he want them, as far as I can tell) to do everything to create a website that we all just take for granted.

He could, very easily, upload images and write posts, but, let’s face it, for someone just starting out, the whole process of obtaining a domain name, buying hosting, setting up the templates and all that is daunting.

On one hand you could say, “Look, get with it. If you want to participate in this technology – learn it!”

But that’s old skool high priest technology and is the reason why Facebook has a billion users.

I’d love to help him, but don’t know if I have the time to set it all up and then field the phone calls I KNOW will be coming as he encounters issues.

Face it – NOTHING IS EASY (anymore). I’m finding WP is pretty slick, but there’s a learning curve (as with anything I suppose). I’ll figure it out, but can I then transfer that knowledge to someone like John so he can do what he wants to do, which is just display his art.

To be continued…

You know the story of the Shoemaker’s kids not having great shoes? My Flickr site sucks right now – but I’m working on my website.

It’s taken me a while to get my head wrapped around digital photography. I grew up with film – and a lot of B&W. My dad was a pro photog and I grew up on Speed Grafix. Heck color didn’t even come about until my teens? My mother did “oils” of my dad’s B&W work – many a night she’d be up until 3-4AM retouching and coloring senior portraits that dad was developing in the basement. I remember when he processed his first roll of color film. That was back in the day when the “color lab” was the big thing – we used one in NJ I think.

I like the looks of Zenfolio but I really don’t want to sell stuff online. I’m not sure I even want to do a lot with ESM. I’m just trying to see if I can get that off the ground. Maybe pick up a couple of projects to work with along side my day job.

Here’s a link to my school Flickr photo stream. I’m working on a project to get all the school photos of the last couple of years up on Flickr. Most of the 2012 stuff is mine – particularly the sports stuff. I don’t do much post processing since I shoot a lot of images. I’m doing a fair amount of multimedia work for the school particularly projects like this. Hope to do more promotional work for the school.

Yeah – backup is one reason I started looking at Flickr and SmugMug (I had an account). Right now I’m just letting CrashPlan (used to use Carbonite – but they won’t backup external drives) backup all my photos. I’ve got over two terrabytes with them so far.

ANYHOO…this is getting WAY off topic. If you want to continue talking shop feel free to email me @ john dot orban @ gmail.com. I LOVE talking photography. In fact, I think what you’re doing and what folks like these guys are doing is the future of photography.

Although, my photographer is doing some pretty good stuff without that “artsy-fartsy” stuff (but imagine what she COULD do). I just don’t think it’s good enough just to take good photos – capture great images – Ansel Adams did that in B&W 50+ years ago!!

I’m always looking (and trying to encourage others) to come up with the “next great thing”. It’s a constant learning (and growing) process.

Cheers,
John

Nice clean site – that’s what I like about WP. The only thing that concerns me is that WP sites all seem to look the same. Of course, it’s the content that should set the site apart – nice images BTW – what filters do you use for post processing?

I agree about the media organization – that’s what led to my original frustration.

I’ve been looking at some Gallery software that my hosting company offers: Gallery, Piwigo, Coppermine, Zen Photo, etc. I’m thinking it would probably be pretty easy to do some simple linking (well, shut my mouth – NOTHING is ever simple).

It appears to me that WP creates individual posts for each image and then, somehow links it all together into a Gallery – kind of kludgy??? I’m using a Free Template from Vandelaydesign.com.

I REALLY do NOT want to spend a lot of time “webmastering” – I want to focus on my photography and post production work. I was hoping WP would help me achieve that goal, but it’s looking like that’s not going to happen.

OK – I take that back about those galleries – after perusing a couple of their sites, it looks like a lot of trouble – better stick with Flickr for now.

Let me restate what I said earlier – “nothing is easy”!

Doubtful – I suspect you need to configure something on your end and/or you loaded WP into the wrong folder??

I use inMotionHosting and the WP files have to be loaded into the “public_html” folder – my primary domain is configured by them to point to that subdirectory. All subdomains are configured in the AddOn domain section to point to subfolders in the folder (e.g. public_html/subdomain).

Although as I think about it, if the domain is pointing properly, you should get either a “maintenance page” (put there by your hosting company) or just a file folder structure.

Sounds to me like a call to tech support is in order.

Well…I may have to eat some crow. I think I’m beginning to make sense of all of this. I think my problem was I tried to do too much in too short a period of time. Clearly this is something that takes some learning. But before I can work with the teachers I have to understand it myself. I don’t want them going through what I went through. We’ll see how it all works out.

I appreciate your follow-up and calming me down.

Thanks

Thanks for your reply, Mike.

I had big hopes for WP at my school – that it could be a great teaching and collaboration tool. But if it’s this difficult for me to use, then I don’t think it’s going to work for them.

I’m not sure what to do at this point.