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Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 | Baby News, Life, Tech Help

It has been a long time since I've been able to get myself together to post something of worth here. Life has been very busy, yet at the same time nothing much of note has happened, tech wise at least. The baby continues to grow inside mommy, the babies room has been finished and a major overhaul to the basement and driveway has taken place. So you can see why I have had little time for a tech blog.

On to something tech. I've installed a new photo gallery for the site. Unlike Gallery2, NextGEN Gallery is a Wordpress plug-in and as such is tightly integrated into the blog. Something I wasn't able to accomplish with the very powerful Gallery2. There are a few integration plug-ins for G2, but they a pain to install. I've also included a nifty javascript operation into the gallery so viewers can easily see a larger sized version of the thumbnail. It is quite nice and it seems to load the images faster than G2 does. Go take a look for yourself. I will keep my existing Gallery2 install up at least until I have move the photos I want over to NextGEN. I still need to upload a pileof photos and figure out how to exclude the NextGEN plug-in and widget from WP-Cache.

I have also been mulling over an application switch of the minor hockey site I administer. Currently I have them using PostNuke. I am seriously debating the switch to Wordpress. I am in the process of looking over the existing plug-ins Wordpress has to offer to make it into a viable CMS. So far the results are promising. There are 2 aims with this migration;

Update the theme using a platform I know quite well, HTML. The current theme is just a heavily modified existing theme that I was never happy with. I am sure I can come up with something better using Wordpress. The latest versions of PostNuke use a templating system that I've never gotten my head around.
Increase the security of the site. I have had a number of issues with hackers attacking the site and I trust Wordpress a lot more than PostNuke these days.

So those are my non-work related tech plans for the coming months, which are in addition to a new baby and list of honey-do's around the house to complete.

Tags: Baby Watch 07, HTML, Wordpress