The commenting system was broken in my photo album, but it should now be functional again. A big thanks to Dustin and Sarah for finding this problem (and reporting it).

I have turned on an option in Monkey Album that should help silence some of the harshest critics out there. Viewers of my photos may now click the photo itself to proceed to the next one. In the future, I’d like to implement a more elegant navigation approach, but this should suffice for now.

I’ve just rolled out a new version of the software that powers my photo albums. The only external change is a modification of the breadcrumbs when viewing an individual image. Instead of the image file name, you will now see a ‘X of Y’ progress indicator. This should make it a little clearer where you are in the album, and removes unimportant information from the breadcrumb list. Page titles for individual image pages have likewise been updated, making back history a little clearer.

One of the largest back end changes in this release is the ability to reorder album images. Previously, album images relied on their file name for sorting purposes. Albums now default to this when uploading, but the order can be changed after the fact. I plan on making some changes to at least one of my old albums using this new functionality.

I hope to offer a behind-the-scenes look at my photo album software in the coming days. Lots of updates have been made to the admin panel, and I’d like to share what I’ve learned. Stay tuned!

Late last night, I rolled out a new version of my photo album software. The largest new feature in this release is the Favorite Photos section. As I explain in that section of my photo gallery:

These images are my personal favorites from among all of my posted photographs, chosen either because I really liked the photo’s composition, or because the subject means a lot to me.

Here are some of the details about this new feature:

• When browsing through the available photo albums, you’ll notice a ‘Favorite Photos’ section at the bottom of the page. This section will show 7 random images from the collection, and provides a link to browse all the favorites.
• When browsing an album’s thumbnails, any favorites will be styled slightly differently (with a different background color) than their non-favorite counterparts. I tossed around using a ‘badge’ overlay with the thumbnails, and even implemented said feature, but I’m using the simpler styling for now (it presents a few less complications). I may switch to the badge at some point in the future.
• Favorite images are also identifiable on their respective image pages (for those who browse albums by viewing all the images).

A few other minor features and fixes made it into this release. First, page titles now indicate where you are while browsing images. This is a big improvement over the previous “same title for every page” implementation. Second, page styles have been tweaked a bit. Colors have been improved in several areas, and text size has been decreased in the breadcrumb area. Finally, you’ll now note that my list of photo albums is now broken across multiple pages (I currently show 9 albums per page). This was a surprisingly difficult decision to make. Moving older albums off of the first page makes it more likely they won’t be viewed by new visitors to this site. At the same time, with the number of photo albums I have here, keeping them all on one page would push the new favorites feature to the bottom of a fairly tall page. In the end, I feel the new favorites feature is more interesting to new visitors than a listing of older albums.

I was hoping to have a new photo album to roll out with this update, but sadly I haven’t taken any serious photos in a while (my last album was quite honestly a halfhearted attempt). Since its inception, the number of photo albums I’ve posted per year has decreased dramatically (11 in 2006, 9 in 2007, and 5 in 2008). I intend to fix that this year.

Let me know what you think about the new features, and please report any bugs you spot. Thanks, and enjoy!

I have tweaked the page titles here at Year of the Code Monkey. You’ll now find article titles up front, which should make things a little easier to find in your browser’s history (especially in the back menu). Due to this site’s lengthy name, page titles can often overflow, making it hard to see where you are. Also, the oh-so-redundant ‘blog archive’ bit has been removed from individual article titles.

I’m making this change in anticipation of a new release of my photo album software. In the current setup, page titles are essentially non-existent when browsing my photos. This has bothered me for a while, and it’s about to be fixed. The update will also include several new features, and should see the light of day in the next few weeks. As always, stay tuned!

I have fixed two bugs in Monkey Album:

• Comment cookie data is now restored properly. The cookies were being created just fine, but form data wasn’t being pre-filled from them like it should have been.
• Apostrophes in comments no longer generate a leading slash. This was due to an unfortunate side effect of including several WordPress files (strange as that may sound).

Hat tip to Dustin for pointing these out.

Over the past few months, I have been hard at work on a new version of Monkey Album, the software I use to display my photography at this site. The new version is now live, and includes the following changes:

Per-Picture Comments

This is a feature I’ve wanted to do since day 1. Visitors to this site may now leave comments on each picture, via a handy WordPress-style comment form. Akismet is being used for anti-spam purposes (it will be interesting to see how well it works), and several built-in WordPress functions are being used for sanitization purposes. I’m a little nervous about turning this feature on, but I will gauge how well it works over time and adjust as necessary. Thanks to the magic of cookies, you only need to enter your author information one time.

Better Album Previews

The previous album selection page was sorely in need of an update; it wasted too much screen space and generally looked bad. No more! Album previews are now handled in a much more professional manner, and I’m proud of the results. I really like the wide-screen style preview image, and I hope you do too.

RSS Feeds

Two feeds are now available for my photo album: a feed following new albums, and one following new comments. The latter is probably not as interesting to you as the former, but I’m making both available.

Cleaner Presentation

The overall presentation of my photos should be a little cleaner now. Vertical space has been improved, color schemes now match my primary site theme, and other minor tweaks have been made here and there.

In addition to these changes, a number of administrative changes have been made, all of which will make my life much easier. As always, if you find a bug, please let me know. So much has changed in this new release, that I’m sure a few things fell between the cracks; letting me know about them will help get them fixed quickly.

Enjoy!

I have made a few changes to the way individual entries are handled in my photo album. The URL for a specific image no longer uses the image filename, which should help the Google bot better index my photos. I noticed recently that none of my images were being found by Google’s indexer, and I’m pretty sure that the filename in the URL was the culprit. If you spot anything that’s broken, please let me know.

I have fixed a bug in the navigation links in MonkeyAlbum here at the site. Some of the links used to navigate photo albums with multiple pages were pointing to the wrong location. If you happen to spot any other problems, please let me know.

A new photo album (possibly my best one yet) will be posted within the next day or two, so stay tuned.

I’ve rolled out some upgrades to the software I use here at the site for my photo albums. Here’s the list of improvements:

• Clean URLs are now used through the magic of URL rewriting. I think I’ve gotten most of the kinks worked out with this, but WordPress feels like it should control everything on the site. I’ll be making a post later this week on what I had to do to get things to work.
• HTML is now supported in all my photo captions. I’ve added a few links to a few of the photos, and I’m looking forward to using this feature on future albums. I hope to add this functionality to album descriptions eventually.
• The header image is no longer shown on photo album pages. This reduces the height of the page, reducing the need to scroll down.
• Extended photo information is now shown in a table using four columns instead of two, again reducing the height of the page.
• A new database backend is being used (the MySQLi extension instead of the raw MySQL PHP calls).
• A photo gallery title is no longer shown on each album page.

I want to add comments eventually, but there’s more effort involved in doing that than I want to spend right now. If you notice any problems, please let me know about them. I’m aware of a minor bug in my rewriting code (no regular users should encounter it), but I hope to fix it in the coming days.