News
19/8/07 Got back from holiday, so I've been able to put up Boo's photos. Most of the descriptions are from her, so I hopefully haven't said anything stupid this time.
8/8/07 Just had the chance to test Internet Explorer 7, and it seems to be far more successful than IE6 (still not as good as Firefox, and stealing FF's ideas rather late, but it's progress). So if you have trouble with anything on the site, and for whatever reason can't or wont use firefox, I'd suggest trying IE7.
26/7/07 Search is here! Try it out... And since the drop-down menus weren't working properly in Internet Explorer, I've disabled them (just for IE - everything should still work fine in better browsers).
23/7/07 Chloe's photos, and a few from Holden making the beginning of an odds-and-ends gallery, are up tonight.
14/7/07 I got some more pics through late last night - thanks Chloe - but I'm afraid I wont have time to put them up before I go. Something to look forward to when I get back ;-)
13/7/07 I'm off on music res for the next week. Please keep sending photos in (I'd love to come home to a load of stuff in my gmail inbox), but don't think I'm ignoring you if I don't put it up straight away.
11/7/07 - Part 3 And Poppy's photos are in, too. There might be higher quality ones later "if she can be bothered" ;-)
11/7/07 - Part 2 Apparently Internet Explorer doesn't handle the drop-down menu for the galleries quite right. Until I can work out a proper fix, just click on the "galleries" link, and it'll take you to a list of the galleries... Bloody IE...
11/7/07 The first photos are here :-D Katy gets the prize for fastest response.
Why?
I guess first I should explain why I'm still doing this, despite bebo and facebook and stuff emerging. Well, as I see it, there's a few good reasons to still have something like this: Firstly, it'll hopefully bring a large proportion of the pics into one place, so it's quicker and easier to find and look through them. Second, it's accessible to everyone with an internet connection - you don't have to have an account on the relevant sites, and have sorted it out so you're tagged as a friend of all the right people. And I also think that those networking sites might be fairly shortlived - we've seen them grow up suddenly in the last couple of years, but there's no way to know whether they'll still be there in 5 years time. Unless something goes horribly wrong, this site will last, and still be here even in 50 years time if you write it in your yearbook and remember years from now.
What's new?
I've made a few changes to the site, compared with last time around. Some are underneath, so you wont notice, but it should mean I can add photos quicker when people send them. However, there are some things that should make a difference to you, too. The most obvious one is the new, cleaner, style, which I hope you like. If everyone hates it, I might be able to change back, but I hope you wont. I'm also adding the ability to comment on the photos, and to search the site. I should say that the search isn't be entirely perfect - short names can't be searched for, and it depends on the word you search for being used in the description I give to the pics - so just because the search doesn't produce many photos when you search for your friends, doesn't mean they're not there. Seem to produce enough useful results to be worth having, tho. The last change I've made is that images are shrunken when you're browsing through them, so that the whole thing fits on the screen (hopefully even on small monitors). This can make them look a bit pixelated on some displays, but if you click on an image you're taken to the file itself, so you can view it at it's full dimensions.
Privacy
One more thing that I ought to say: I said it was an advantage that anyone can access these photos, but some people might want to protect their privacy and stay more anonymous online. If anyone wants to avoid pictures of them being available to the world, just let me know, and I'll take all the pics of you down straight away.
Bootnote
That's all the technicalities covered, I think. I'll just end by saying that this can only be as good as the photos people send... Please do email me your pics. If you can use my gmail address that'd be good, cos the fsmail inbox will die if it gets big attachments (if you don't have my gmail address, buzz me and I'll get back to you as quick as a flash). If you give them descriptive filenames it'll make your gallery more personal and save me saying something stupid, but if you don't have time to do that then it's not a problem.If you can't manage to email them (some mail programs through a wobbly about big attachments) I am now on facebook, so you can point me to a gallery there and I'll get them - tho this means I wont be able to put up such high-quality photos.
Hope you had a good night :-D