8×10Gallery.com

Archive for February 28th, 2007

It’s the end of the month and I thought I would do a quick wrap up on the month’s events. A lot of updates recently and I have been adding a lot of pictures with plenty more to come.

The website has been progressing quite well. The structure of the site is pretty much set although I do know the changes I will be making in the near future. I want to add some additional links for other information I want to share. Expression Web has been pretty decent in most respects. I have moved past the initial shortcomings of no photo albums and themes. I still those are pretty significant and in typical Microsoft fashion instead of fixing the problem or offering an alternative, they just moved on to the next feature of the program. I still think they should have added alternative to the features they ripped out. But on the whole, Expression is pretty good. I’m getting used to the UI and the Dynamic Web Template functionality. Now that I have the hang of it, it does seem an easier way to go. At least in simple terms this is the same functionality a lot of people were trying to achieve with Server Side Includes. But of course, running things on the server, no matter what they, tends to make people nervous. Again, I’m only scratching the surface with Expression Web, but the program is starting to grow on me.

Jalbum has turned out to be quite an enjoyable app. Now that I get the hang of it as well, putting albums together is very easy. They aren’t super fancy with all sorts of Flash trickery, but they are easy to make and post. Lots of new pictures have gone up recently and I still have plenty more to add.

I’ve been taking a lot of new pictures with the Rebel XTI and the more I tinker with the camera the more I like it. The burst mode is very impressive, the extended battery life I added with the batter grip is just amazing and understanding the readouts within the camera itself is getting much easier. I’m really excited about this camera and the new abilities it gives me. It’s a very fast shooter and it producing some excellent results. The 70-200mm sports lens is really turning out to be impressive (now that I have that stupid circular polarizer issue worked out!!) It offers so much range that I see all sorts of possibilities as I’m shooting. Should I go for the wide open shot to show all the details? Or should I pull in tight and fill the frame with one element. It’s very exciting and there seems to be possibilities in almost everything these days. Something that is pretty mundane and common takes on a whole new perspective when you zoom right into it and show off the tiny details.

I’m anxious to give the lens a full day test at my son’s upcoming lacrosse game. The practice shots have been pretty good so I’m hoping with a full action game there will be plenty to capture. My daughter starts her season of lacrosse too, so it should be a full season of action. I’m missed a lot of shots of her last year so hopefully I can make amends this time around.

On a non-photography note, I have learned more about IIS and PHP in the last month than I would have ever thought possible. From installing this blog to installing the discussion forum, it’s been a learning experience. There isn’t a whole lot of documentation about getting PHP apps to run under IIS. Let me rephrase, there is very little good documentation on the process. But I have muddle through and made some pretty good progress.

Installing PHP and MySQl was no big deal. A couple of minor glitches due to my inexperience and everything was up and running. And it’s not that PHP doesn’t work well under IIS, it seems to work fine. The problem is finding what settings need to be used and what permissions need to be set on each folder. Since most of the apps don’t have an installer like Windows where it creates folders and sets permissions you need to do all this manually. It sort of makes it tough when those details are left out and you have to do endless Google searches to find some poor soul who is in the exact same position as you and what he did to resolve it. And usually it’s a pretty simple fix. But it almost seems like there is mentality of “If you have to ask, you shouldn’t install this.” I guess with so many real Apache servers out there, there is not a lot of sympathy for us saps trying to get this to work under IIS.

And speaking of Apache, I am really getting tempted to install it and give it a try. I might try the simple route and install Apache under Windows. This sounds like a contraction in terms to me to, but they make it and I know people who use it. Apparently it works pretty well. Of course if that fails miserably I may just bring up a whole new Linux box, or whatever term they are using these days. Right now what I have is working just fine, but I am really liking the PHP apps out there. There are all sorts of add-ons out there. So as I keep going down this road, it seems I will reach the end of the PHP/IIS compatibility and will need to have real Apache running to make it all work. Could be an interesting ride.

Stay tuned for more changes to the site and more pictures to be added. I’ve sort of got a rhythm going now and there is a lot more to do. The weather is getting pretty nice so there will be even more opportunities for great pictures.

As always, thanks for stopping by!