It’s good to accomplish things from time to time, and by god, does it ever feel like I finally accomplished something with this one!
Over the last couple of months, I’ve been working in between other writing projects to replace our wedding website with a new site to host photos and updates and whatnot for Sara and I as a couple. Whereas the wedding site was something simple that I’d thrown together in php, the new one was to be a little more complex – based on WordPress, integrating in Gallery for the photo side of things. Eventually I settled on a theme that I liked, and earlier this summer I’d thought the worst was finally behind us after I finally got Gallery to play nicely.
And then it came time to add video…
So this final rung – adding clips of our wedding video – has been on my to-do list for about a month solid, and not due to procrastination, believe it or not, but I swear, it’s just been one headache after another. Let’s see:
- find a program that LEGALLY supports ripping DVDs
- find a separate program to chop up said DVD rip into clips
- upgrade to latest Gallery2 point release because existing version was apparently missing files for the module that I needed to add
- get hosting company to fix permissions issue that prevented completing said upgrade
- figure out why web server randomly serves up 403 errors when attempting to execute Add Items From Local Server function (because videos were too big to upload via web interface or Gallery Remote)
- figure out why Add Items From Local Server doesn’t do anything when executed (another permissions issue)
- get hosting company to correct path issue for ffmpeg so that Gallery can generate thumbnails for new videos
- re-add videos one last time so that Gallery can not only generate thumbnails, but also create proper embedding instead of just offering users a link to download each video
All of this took place in bits and pieces over the last couple of weeks, with the last conundrum finally working itself out just a few hours ago. And it’s almost painfully amusing at this point because with all of my squables with WordPress and CSS and whatnot, I’m not sure if I’ve ever had a web development project that experienced that many issues subsequently! Just one or two would’ve been fine, but this time it seemed like literally as soon as we fixed one thing, the very next step in the process would proceed to fail as well. Whew…
But in all that, it’s finally done now, so if you care to check out anything from our wedding, or maybe you just want to see the source of my undying anxiety over the last three months, then hop on over to www.scottandsara.info and enjoy the website that truly was built on blood, sweat, and tears!