For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been testing out a new way to post photographs on Dobson Central for several reasons. Mainly, I think that the “Next” link on the photo pages was being overlooked and a visitor would only visit the first photo in a series. Secondly, if this site is to grow, I couldn’t see myself hand coding all the additional photo pages. While it may be fun to do, it sure is time consuming.
Which brings me to the new way of posting photos. I had tried Gallery and more recently, Coppermine. Gallery is used on a lot of web sites but I just didn’t find that it fit my tastes. Upon trying Coppermine, I was hooked almost immediately. It had a really nice layout and more professional look to it than Gallery did. Both packages have their pluses and minuses, but Coppermine was right for me. I hope that everyone finds it easy to use and enjoys it better than my previous layout. Implementing it sort of created a chain reaction to get the rest of the site to blend together with the look of Coppermine, but for most part, I think everything is just about done, or should be done in a weeks time.
The only downside, and only time will tell, is that most of the pages generated by Coppermine will probably not show up in the search engines. Mainly because search engines normally don’t index dynamic pages very well. Most likely, visitors will find this site by word of mouth or links from other pages in the future. I hope I’m very wrong on this, but if anyone runs a web site, I’d appreciate any links you can point towards the main page. If you run a photography related site, I’d be more than happy to return the link. Maybe the photo content of this site will continue to survive the search engine spiders. (fingers crossed)
On another note, I’ve been working on a new two part article. Part 1 should be ready for publishing sometime this week.
Enjoy the new changes and as always, drop me a line if there are any problems.
Ken
P.S. During the process of putting all the photos into the new database, I found some photos I had forgotten to post. I also left out of this new database, some of the really bad photos I previously had on this site. If by chance I missed a photo that you liked, please let me know and I’ll put it back on the server.