Building this site has been a lot like staring at a toilet in Beijing for the first time. It’s amazing how much time can be spent on what seems to be a fairly common practice. Blogs are about as common place as toilets so I figured it can’t be all that hard. Well about 100 hours later, I’m almost done with the basics.I started with wanting to create a basic image gallery so I went looking and found Gallery2. The install was pretty straight forward and some very nice (free) themes are readily available - bonus. So far so good. Uploading pictures is very easy, organization is a snap, and just enough flexibility to make it look fairly unique. After renaming a few items and writing some summaries and descriptions, I thought about looking for some examples of what other people have done with image galleries. Whoops!

The floodgates opened when I started reading about Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, etc. All of these and many more like them have some amazing capabilities. I loaded each one and kicked the tires to see which one would suit what I wanted to do. I finally decided that I liked WordPress the best.

The next major choice was picking a theme that I liked. I’m not much for flair and flash. I’m all about clean and simple. Eventually, I landed on pearsonified.com and I’m glad that I did. I found the Cutline theme for WordPress and I was all set. I made a few minor changes to the theme and managed to completely mess everything up so I scrapped it and started over, moving more cautiously. I made it a bit wider, added the random image header code, uploaded a logo of sorts, and added a border around the whole thing.

Now I basically have 2 sites - a photo gallery and a blog. Google comes through once again and leads me to wpg2. Now the fun really begins. Naturally, I have to go the hard way and pick a WP theme that has not been optimized for wpg2. After reading the optimization instructions and getting thoroughly confused, I proceeded to hack up the code until I made another big mess. Little by little I’m sorting out the issues with a bit of help from Luke at photojulia.com and the good people at the wpg2 forum.