Sunday, December 16, 2007

Home being renovated..





I wanted my website to be very simple and artistic. I did lots of search on available gallery softwares and tried a few like gallery2. While they are feature rich I did not like them for artistic reasons. Initially I chose Photoshop's gallery creation software and plugged into my web site. It served the purpose of being simple - but not as artisitic. This also gave me a rude surprise when I started looking at my web statistics. Web hits due to search engines were very low. This I realized is due to the fact that web gallery generation had no option to associate information with images. Due to this reason good collection of my images were not indexed by search engines. To solve this I started writing a simple gallery software (in C) to suit my taste - spent a few weekends so far on this. The new gallery design is again static but I can associate information with each image which hopefully search engines with index in future. One advantage of being static gallery is I can automatically generate sitemaps to cover **all** images at my web site easily - not very easy if I use php. I hope to extend my tailor made software to include sitemap creation etc in the near future - for this I will need a few more weekends and late night hours !!

So here goes my partly rennovated site. Slightly more artistic I guess (not satisfied fully though!). I have migrated two galleries (Creative Visions and Personal Favourites) to this scheme. Need to complete the rest. Added some information for a few of images in these two galleries. My gallery software takes an ascii file containing file name of the each file and some associated information. It then automatically creates all gallery structures, html pages etc. I have been entering information related to each of those images. It may take months before I can complete them - what a boring job - yet very important !!

- Ganesh H Shankar (Nature Lyrics)

4 comments:

Pramod Viswanath said...

WOW! The revamped version looks awesome Ganesh!! I just love the new interface. Hats off for oyur hard work!

Mahesh Devarajan said...

The overall feel is nice ganesh. Compared to the gray background which is their in the main page felt the black background was better. Some of the buttons are not working in Firefox. In IE everything works fine.

Ganesh H. Shankar said...

Thanks Mahesh. Some links not working in Firefox ? Will be greatful if you can let me know which ones.. Thanks!

Mahesh Devarajan said...

Hi Ganesh,
1. The java script which gives information about the image shows up correctly in IE and in Firefox pops up a scroll bar in the bottom.
2. If the Firefox browser is in full screen mode the information comes up though.