Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

Forum. Forum. Forum. Forum. Forum. Forum.

1. The current forum software I use on my site is Broadboard, a VBScript ASP forum that has worked quite well. But it’s author stopped maintaining it several years ago, and it uses Microsoft Access as a database, which may limit it in the future. Also, it does not use CSS so would be difficult to adapt to the new site design
    
2. Then I thought about Simple Machines Forum, a full-featured free PHP-based forum. Lots of people like it and it has everything but the kitchen sink, but it felt bloaty to me.
    
3. I took a stab at Google Groups which didn’t look bad. But it wasn’t under my control and wouldn’t link into WordPress, and then I found out about
    
4. Vanilla - a plain vanilla standard-based standards-compliant Forum with plug-in capability
    
5. I started trying to integrate it with WordPress, but then it became obvious to try bbPress, the forum used at WordPress and developed with the same core code that WordPress uses. But bbPress appeared to be a bit too primitive. Then I found…
    
6. Simple Forum - an actual WordPress plugin. Just drop it in and it’s there. Full featured and 100% compatible and pre-integrated with WordPress. I don’t remember the last time I’ve been so impressed by a software package. The author’s site and his support and development of this package is a model for me to follow with Behold.

So hopefully this weekend, I’ll have the new Blog and new Forum all finished (and I will be transferring all my old blog entries and the forum posts over). Then I’ll make sure that my background scripts and integration with my Buy Now page works. If those have few problems, I may be able to get the new redesigned site up by end of next week. Then I’ll finally be able to get back to Behold development.

This new site has taken me 2 months since I announced it. I thought it would only take a few weeks, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. I’ve learned a lot about CSS and new web technologies and PHP scripting and MySQL databases, which will benefit me as I move Behold along.

With Photoshop Elements, I expected it would be able to create a photo gallery from the 300 pictures and 15 videos I took from my Nashville trip that I could put on my website to share with my relatives. It can, but only as a Flash-based gallery. I didn’t want that, but I wanted a gallery that my relatives could download the pictures and videos from via right-clicking. PE didn’t seem to provide that. I know there are online photo gallery sites, where you can put them up. But I really didn’t think it would be difficult to set up my own.

After a bit of searching, I thought I found a wonderful tool. JAlbum is a free program to create your own photo album written in Java that has “endless customization”. That sounded just like what I wanted, since I like to customize things and I’m quite particular.

The basic setup was quite easy, and it has lots of different “skins” you can choose from. I looked through many of them, finally settling on one of their most popular and most customizable called BluPlusPlus. But like the rest, I found it very bloated with too many features. I turned many off and was still left with a few things I wanted to get rid of, such as an unnecessary middle gallery layer, that couldn’t be removed by the options. The only way was to change the Java programs themselves.

Now JAlbum supplies the Java code. I’ve never worked with Java before. Looking at the code, I would have to say the language is uggggg-ly! Java compilers for Windows are free, but I had no desire to get into that just now.

So I did the next best thing. I built the gallery using what I had customized so far. Then I manually edited the HTML produced to get rid of that middle layer and make other changes that I couldn’t in the program. This worked out pretty well.

… until I discovered a few things that needed changing. I could no longer rebuild the files with JAlbum, or I would lose the manual edits I made. So now it became tedious. I wanted to remove 2 pages, which entailed manually changing the links on the previous and following pages, changing the count of pages in that section in the index, and changing every page in the section from “7 of 64″ to “6 of 63″, “8 of 64″ to “7 of 63″ … well, you get the idea.

Finally I was done, until I discovered to my horror that the dates and times for every picture were off by one hour. My camera was on daylight saving time. In Photoshop Elements, I can easily change the time stamps. If I could have then used JAlbum to regenerate the pages, it would have been easy. Fortunately, the dates were in the format “Fri 18 Jan 2008 10:32:39 AM” so I could change all “2008 1:” to “2008 0:”, “2008 2:” to “2008 1:” … up to “2008 12:” to “2008 11:” and then the “2008 0:” to “2008 12:”. Finally I’d check all the “2008 11:” to change the AM to PM and PM to AM and possibly change the date. Lot’s of fun - NOT!

So here it is, a week later, and I got the album up, and it looks great (sorry it has private photos, so I can’t link you to it). But it did zap a week out of me, after I thought a few hours would be all that would be needed. Another case of this programmer’s extreme optimism.

Oh well. Now I’d better finish the Behold site customization, get the new site up, and get an interim release of Behold out. Beta is pushed back maybe until March, unfortunately.

3 great days in Nashville. 2 lousy days in airports. But it was a great getaway.

After taking the listing I had of that side of the family, I realized a couple of things:

(1) The research I have done and questioning of older ancestors many years ago was quite comprehensive. There was not much our relatives were able to add to that. I guess that’s both good and bad.

(2) It is hard in the Behold listing to easily find siblings in the same generation when they are far from each other because of their descendants intervening. There is not much indentation for generation levels, and there’s nothing on the paper that can help you find the next sibling.

That latter point is something I have thought about for awhile. My original concept was to draw lines on the left margin to connect parents with their children. But implementing that was non-trivial, especially when I wanted it to appear the same when printed and when exported to HTML or RTF. But I think I will want to try to implement that before beta if I can.