Bryan’s Web (.net)

I’ve got a lot to talk about (like Moving to Orlando), but unfortunately I spent all of my time tonight writing this cool new photo thing, so this will be a quick update about that, and I’ll update more hopefully tomorrow.  Anyway, as you might guess from the little icon that I put next to the “Pictures” text on the sidebar, my pictures are now powered by Google Picasa.  Yes, my old thing was cool because it stored the images directly in the database, but my host’s mySQL server and their www server aren’t connected very fast, so I’ve been dealing with INCREDIBLY long load times for over a year now.  No doubt you’d notice, as the page would pause for a long time just to load the images on the side.  Well, say goodbye to all of that, because I’ve completely rewritten the pictures thing so they now load off of Google’s servers.  And, I think they have enough bandwidth ;-).  Also- I stopped putting up new images because it took forever to upload them as well.  No longer.  I don’t even have to go to my website to upload new pictures- I can do it right from Picasa, which will automatically resize them, organize them, and upload them en masse.  On any machine, I might add.  So, what makes this miracle of modern technology possible?  RSS.  Basically, I take the RSS feed so thoughtfully provided for my web album and parse it using a slightly modified version of lastRSS.  Then, I’ve got everything I need in PHP, and it’s simply a matter of outputting the right URIs to the browser.  Plus, using Google’s web interface to browse and view the photos should provide an overall better end-user experience than the one that I threw together over a year ago in one night.  So, enjoy!

PS… All of the photos you’ll see up there for a while are going to be old ones… I broke my camera in Hilton Head on the way down to Orlando when the backpack it was in got wet when the tide came up.  Now the only way to get it to focus on something is the manual way- walking towards or away from the object you want to photograph.  So, take note of the fact that digital cameras do not like playing in the sand and salt water nearly as much as I do.