So today’s big project was something that ended up taking a whole lot longer than I had expected, but at least I can say that I’m definitely happy with the results. Up until the latest one, I’ve been using Flickr to host the photos for the write-ups that I occasionally do for our Wednesday night LFR games, however I actually hit the photo cap for free accounts (200 photos) a while ago and in the meantime have just accepted the fact that as I added newer posts, the photo sets from the older ones were disappearing. I wasn’t crazy about the idea, and I almost considered just paying the $18 for a while to side-step the issue, but ultimately I knew that eventually one day I needed to suck it up and migrate all of the galleries back to my own server because a) it’s silly to pay Flickr when I already have a monthly hosting bill anyways, and b) hosting them myself allows me to do a lot of cool things that I simply can’t do via another service.
Anyways, several nights of uploading photos, updating posts, and tweaking code later, everything has been moved over and seems to be running smoothly. I’m using the NextGEN Gallery plugin for WordPress – the same one that I’m using for the other big project I’ve been randomly musing about – and all in all I think I’m really starting to like it as a photo gallery for WordPress sites. My one beef is that it doesn’t handle comments on a photo by photo basis, which is more of an issue for the other site than this one, but in the same vein I’ve already spent years struggling with Gallery2 and even though it’s technically a more robust gallery system, integration with other sites is just atrocious and I don’t think I’ve ever come across a site using it in a way other than the regular, blocky templates that come stock with it.
In fact, I’m currently running Gallery2 for the photos on scottandsara.info and I’ll probably end up moving those into NextGEN eventually too because it just seems too clunky for what it does these days…
That said, here’s the final product for the D&D site:
I’ll do a separate post here in a little bit about the technical hurdles that I faced with this one because there is some customization taking place under the NextGEN hood, but overall I really like how it allows me to highlight the photos from my LFR Adventure Logs because there are times when I think I enjoy going back and just flipping through the pictures more than reading the actual posts! Bottom line is, after over 300 photos across 24 separate games, it was time for something a little fancier than Flickr sets and I think NextGEN does the job nicely, if I do say so myself! 🙂